Find the common ground.
You
have to find what the common ground of the decision is.
You have to be very obvious.
What we all want is the health
and security of our students.
So starting from that, here is
the decision that I’ve made,
and I made this decision
because I think it promotes
the health and security of students the best. You can disagree, but at least there’s a
reason why it was made.
Consensus is the agreement to
disagree. Consensus is not a
group hug. You work at it by saying, ‘Where do we agree? What’s
our common denominator?’
When we’re sitting around
the senior staff table, we can
disagree all we like. But when
we walk out of the room and
we’ve made a decision, it’s like
America has now elected a
president; we agree to abide
by that.
You can come back to me privately and say, ‘I really think
you made the wrong decision,’
but you can’t go out publicly
and say that. If the administration doesn’t act with a single
voice, then everybody gets confused, and people begin to play
one person off against another.
But that doesn’t mean that
the next week that the staff is
together, somebody won’t say, ‘I really think we need to look
at this because it’s eating at
me.’ And we can back down
and talk about it again. So you
build in time for that.
The challenge is not so
much around the senior staff
table as when you’re working
one to 120, so you’re talking
to the entire faculty. You have
to step back and say, ‘Look, I
understand that you want X. I
want X, too, but you’ve got to
see the larger financial picture here. We just can’t go
there, or we can only go part-way there.’
You have to always start
with, ‘You and I are on the
same page at some point. We
have the same goal. What
we’re arguing is means.’
HOW TO REACH: Washington & Jefferson College, (724) 503-1001 or www.washjeff.edu
