Your Money or Your Mission? (Challenge #69)

This is a weird topic for me, as I try to keep things pretty evergreen on this show. Whether you download a Kind Leadership Challenge episode in 2023 or 2033, I want it to provide relevant information and support that you can implement in your work and even share with a colleague with a similar challenge. However, a recent university closure hit a little close to home for me, and got me thinking about the precarious balance of mission and sustainability in all the institutions we lead, whether we’re in higher ed, libraries, K-12, or something else. So since I don’t think this challenge is going away anytime soon, let’s talk about it. 

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Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, the podcast that empowers leaders to heal their organizations in ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to coach educational leaders to sustainably build a better world. 

Kind Leaders aren’t perfect, which is actually as it should be. In our unique ways, We make tough decisions without becoming jerks. We create impactful and burnout-proof systems for our organizations. And we know that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, even the most ambitious vision can become effortless. Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around as I teach you how to create a resilient, thriving legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone.

In May 2023, as this episode drops, folks who follow the Higher Education world just heard about the impending closure of Medaille College, a small private institution in Buffalo, New York. The board had been trying to save Medaille via a merger with a nearby school, Trocaire College. Unfortunately, the deal fell through for unknown reasons, and a few days later Medaille’s board announced the college would close at the end of August. 

As fate had it, only last month I was in Buffalo as part of an accreditation review team at another local university. During our site visit there was a fair bit of chitchat between sessions around the then-pending merger of Trocaire and Medaille as well as the backstory of both schools and their financial situations, so this closure hits home. Ultimately, the story of Medaille is a familiar one. Years of too many expenses, too few students, and more debt than endowment sealed the college’s fate. Essentially, an institutional equivalent of Mr. Micawber’s observation in David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”

Of course, like Mr Micawber, many institutions of higher education know that basic truth of fiscal responsibility but struggle to practice it, with the predictable results we’re seeing in struggling colleges across America. However, most universities are not and do not want to be a business—they want to educate students so they are prepared for a good life after graduation. In my opinion, that is as it should be. In a battle between the mission and the balance sheet, the mission must win, or what’s the point?  And yet—if you can’t afford to keep your doors open, the mission is lost, at least in its current form. 

So, how do we as educators keep our mission sustainable when times are tight? Well, the longer I’m in education, the more I see the importance of being among the best in your area at something. For instance, I work in Philadelphia, which probably has more institutions of higher education per capita than any city in the country except maybe Boston. And most every school in town has its niche. Penn? That’s the Ivy, where you go if you want to be a business mogul or world renowned scholar. Temple? The big urban campus with the scale to do a bit of everything and do it pretty well. Drexel? STEM, STEM, STEM. It’s sort of the MIT of the Delaware river valley. Villanova? There’s your fancy Liberal Arts college. You get the idea. 

When you know what you can do well, align it to what your community needs, and communicate your value in a way folks will resonate with, you’re in a pretty good spot mission-wise. That focus also allows you to scale up and down as times indicate. Let’s say one of your flagship programs is nursing. When enrollment is booming and the endowment’s in good shape, you can expand into adjacent health sciences disciplines, and experiment with new programs that are related to talents your faculty have but are a little outside the box. Maybe even renovate a residence hall or spruce up the library. And when times are tough, you retrench before you have to and go back to the basics. The mission remains, but the scope of the mission can be scaled up and down based on what is sustainable, and what actually serves the community you are serving.

So if the basic formula of a healthy organization is to live your mission within your means, then how do we translate that formula down to the middle management level where the deans and department heads and principals and library directors who listen to this show actually work and build their budgets? Ultimately it comes down to three steps: Awareness of what is going on in yourself, your institution and the community you serve, maintaining as much flexibility in your budget as possible, and nurturing advocates within and beyond your institution that will help you fulfill your mission and assist you in getting the resources you’ll need to do so. 

Each of those three steps is a key part of a leader’s role, and in fact each flows from practicing one of the three skills of kind leadership—growing humanely keeps you aware of what’s going on, managing effectively allows you to flexibly deploy your finite resources, and creating collaboratively will help you recruit the advocates you’ll need to grow your resources and fulfill your organization’s mission for the long haul.

So here’s your challenge for this week. I’d like you to take a step back and think about the larger organization your institution serves. In higher ed, you probably lead a department or school within the college or university as a whole. If you’re a K12 leader, you probably are part of a school district or report to a governing board of some sort. And library leaders usually report to a city, county, or regional district, and probably some sort of board as well. Think about those larger organizations, and consider whether they see budget as secondary to mission, or the other way around. Then think about whether or not that matches your priorities for your team. And if you disagree with the balance point as you understand it, are there ways you could influence a change?

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Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge. Before you go, here’s a quick way you can spread the word of kind leadership. I’d like you to take a moment to think of one friend or colleague who could most benefit from this week’s challenge. Got their name in your head? Good. Open your app or head over to kindleadershipchallenge.com/69 and share this episode with them. Add a friendly note as well. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.