David Armstrong Jr. is
constantly facing two
challenges: huge growth and
budget cuts.
It may seem like those two
things don’t go together, but at
Broward Community College,
where Armstrong is president,
cutbacks and growth are a daily
part of life. Even though more
and more students are enrolling
at the community college, the
state of Florida has cut BCC’s
funding because revenue is
down.
To deal with that challenge,
Armstrong stretches his $200
million budget as far as he can.
To avoid taking a debilitating
wrong step, he has to find the
time to find the right hires and
keep in touch with his student
body as well as with his nearly
1,200 full-time and 1,700 part-time employees.
Smart Business spoke with
Armstrong about why you need
to make the extra effort when
hiring an important leader and
why you should treat hard
times like you’re managing an
orange grove.
Focus resources on healthy
segments of your business.You have to stay focused on the
most important issues in the
organization. I had a board
member many years ago who
told me the story of how,
growing up on his citrus farm,
10 to 15 percent of the orange
groves always had some problems, disease or they just
weren’t yielding much product. He would try to put all of
his resources on that 15 percent to improve it, and it didn’t
help a lot. Finally, an older,
much wiser citrus grower convinced him that if he would
take that same amount of
resources and put it on that 80
to 85 percent that was doing
well that the yield would be a
lot more.
The moral of that story is
that you usually have a lot of
good things going on in any
organization … and if you’ll
stay focused on those good
parts of your mission and
your core competency and
invest in those things, that is
more important than trying
to fix every little problem
because those are unlimited.
There’s only so much that an
organization can effectively
accomplish successfully, and
it takes a lot of discipline for
leaders and managers to not
get distracted by the hundreds, if not thousands, of
issues you could deal with
on any given day.
You focus on the strengths of
the organization, you continue
to talk about the accomplishments, good work, commitment and the passion that faculty members have. You talk
about that, and you show
appropriate appreciation to
them for continuing to help
students and focus on the
accomplishments.
Take time to read through and
react to feedback. I don’t know
any CEO who doesn’t have
information and feedback
overload, if for no other reason than because of technology.
We’re a pretty massive
organization, with … 55,000-plus students, and they all
know my e-mail address and
you do, too. One of the
things I learned from working with Jeb Bush, when I
was in Tallahassee and he
was governor, was he
worked extremely hard at
trying to be responsive to the
people who e-mailed him.
That can be overwhelming
sometimes, but it’s important
to pay attention to feedback,
no matter what it is.
You have to collect as
much information as you can
before you make decisions
about where you’re going.
It’s good to get information
from multiple sources. It’s
important for me and other
CEOs to make sure that
we’re listening to a variety of
different thoughts and opinions.
Sometimes, there is more
than one right answer. Sometimes, there are multiple
approaches to get to something, and so it’s important to
listen to a variety of different
areas of input before you
make a decision.