Excuse Donna E. Shalala if she isn’t overwhelmed by her $2 billion budget as president of the University of Miami. It’s not that Shalala doesn’t appreciate the weight of her leadership role at an educational institution, but after working under two different U.S. presidents, including eight years as President Bill Clinton’s secretary of health and human services, Shalala has overseen budgets of more than $600 billion. With that kind of experience comes the ability to see that making extensive changes requires a certain patience and the daily enthusiasm to start with smaller changes. Shalala uses that as her driving force as she pushes her 10,000 employees forward.
Smart Business spoke with Shalala about building momentum and keeping that presidential focus.
Push small changes to build momentum. I have always believed you should have two strategies when you’re looking toward the future — you should have the long-term strategy, which requires a lot of discipline, but in the short term, you have to give everyone the sense that there are changes going on right now.
And while the short-term strategy may not fit as well into the long-term strategy — it’s not on your list of what you would want to do first if you’re implementing your long-term strategy — the short-term strategy, the things that you do early on, creates the momentum and the patience needed for the long-term strategy.
So in the case of the university, you might do what I did when I arrived, and that is build patios with lots of places for students to sit. Or work to improve the communication between the students and the faculty.
You want to do things that people notice; you may extend library hours, for example. Now, that would not be first on anyone’s list of important goals, but we did some things at the beginning that created some momentum and good feelings and affected large numbers of people.
The most important thing is to be more responsive to the people you are trying to reach, and that’s a short-term strategy.
