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Team Builders and Budget Enhancers
By Peter A. Facione
It takes genuine leadership, courage, and generosity to make collaboration on budget building successful. Here are eleven proposals for consideration:
Demand good data and share them widely.Use the scholarly and disciplinary expertise available in the institution to collect, analyze, and interpret quality data.
Locate responsibility with authority.Give unit managers the tools to be successful. Allow them discretion to deploy their resources to the greatest tactical advantage. The role of the leader should be to educate and train colleagues, not to control and constrain subordinates.
Give incentives for productivity.Provide managers at every level with fiscal incentives to exceed projected enrollment or revenue targets. For example, a school that exceeds its enrollment target should receive both whatever money is needed to provide instructional support for the overenrollment, and a share of the additional revenue as a reward.
Reward efficiency.Provide managers with fiscal incentives to reduce costs. Unit managers who end the fiscal year in the black should carry surpluses forward into the next fiscal year as discretionary resources.
Encourage institutional collaboration. Provide managers with fiscal incentives to participate in activities that generate campus revenue. For academic departments, such activities might include work done in support of a summer program, continuing education, or campus centers of excellence.
Promote institutional service.Reward faculty when they are pulled from the classroom or from their research to serve in critical leadership roles. Supplemental pay, summer stipends, and course releases should be used to compensate faculty who put aside their teaching and scholarship, perhaps delaying promotions or risking merit pay increases, in order to take on complex and critically important duties as department chairs, associate deans, and directors of major centers and institutional programs.
Develop responsible creativity.Reward departments and schools for creativity in generating new resources. For example, an academic department could expand alumni donor bases by being given the opportunity to raise funds with first-time benefactors for its own projects, or a performing arts department could rent its facility to community programs when not needed for instruction, keeping the revenues.
Learn where budget flexibility really exists, and use it wisely.In any given fiscal year, several highly flexible unbudgeted surpluses or sources of additional income exist. The wise use of these resources can extend a budget by several percentage points and provide funding for all the incentives mentioned above and many other worthy purposes.
Lead with generosity, respect others, and seek ways to advance mutual interests. Approach the process of budgeting and negotiating by being generous, doing favors, putting the common good first, being informed, and striving to be fair and reasonable in every negotiation. Generous policies build loyalty and the willingness to do as much as possible to achieve shared goals. Stingy responses devalue people and breed resentment. Negotiating successfully is not about winning and losing; it is about creatively discovering solutions that advance each party's interests.
Put the common good ahead of personal gain. Putting the common good before the good of any individual unit or person should be explicitly and implicitly part of the program when groups sit down to answer the questions that can make a difference or when they dig into the tough work of budgeting for the next fiscal year.
Give people reasons to be part of something good.People respond best when they are engaged in meaningful effort for a worthy goal. A shared vision, with specific exemplars, of what the institution stands for and why its success is important, will help engender the level of motivation that will sustain long-term loyalty and active participation. Use stories about the successes of students and colleagues to give concrete meaning to the abstractions in strategic planning documents.
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