Thomas V. Chema had plenty of leadership experience even before he became president of Hiram College — he has been a partner
in a Cleveland law firm, executive director of the Ohio Lottery Commission, chairman of the Ohio Public Utilities Commission, and in
1990, he was appointed executive director of the Gateway Economic Development Corp., where he was responsible for overseeing
the financing and construction of Jacobs Field and Gund [now Quicken Loans] Arena. Now, Chema is applying the business lessons
he has learned to a new challenge: running Hiram College’s $25 million budget and increasing enrollment from its current level of
1,205 undergraduates. Smart Business spoke with Chema about why you should never shoot the messenger.
Take a chance. You have to be willing to
take some risks, which is contrary to the
whole academic enterprise. Colleges and
universities are some of the most risk-averse places on the face of the earth. It’s
understandable — for some of the faculty, nothing has changed in their disciplines for a thousand years. Talk about
change, forget it. Talk about taking a risk,
that’s not even in the vocabulary.
To answer that question, we have to be
open to change. We have to be open to
taking some risks. You never really
know. You try to evaluate the data to
make your decision, but you ultimately
are taking a risk. The mistakes you make
by action are usually much less significant than the ones you make by inaction.
You have to be open to the fact that you
may not succeed with a given course.
You may have to eat a little crow and
reverse yourself. That’s happened to me
on occasion. I’ve come up with ideas for
this or that, and it didn’t work. I had to
say, ‘Well, we’re going to go back to the
old way, or maybe we’re not going back
to the old way, but the methodology
we’re using isn’t cutting it.’
You’ve got to accept that risk that it
isn’t going to work and not be so stubborn that you just keep pushing something the wrong way.
Take care of personnel issues immediately. We
have a tendency to want to be nice and
to have everybody like you. So you tend
to put off personnel issues — the tough
ones, that is. The nice ones, when you’re
promoting somebody or giving a raise,
those are easy.
But the tough ones, when you’re not
promoting or giving a raise, when you
are actually asking someone to find
employment elsewhere, those are the
tough ones. They have to be dealt with,
and they have to be dealt with directly.
You need to avoid procrastination that
is so easy to fall into in personnel
actions.
Know your business. An awful lot of managers, as opposed to leaders, don’t
understand their own business. You may think you do. The old Harvard Business
School mantra of the ’50s and early ’60s
that a manager is a manager is a manager; well, that only works if you learn your
business.
Before you start, you’ve got to do your
homework. You’ve got to know about
the problems, you have to know what
the real funding and financial issues are.
It’s easy to overlook the fundamentals,
but it’s a pitfall from which you can
rarely recover.
Avoid groupthink. You can get yourself to
the position where you’re only talking to
your close associates, and they’re only
talking to each other. Especially when
things are going well, you can get into a
mindset where you know how to do this,
you’ve got to be right, and you’re not
going to countenance any criticisms or
opposite points of view. Eventually, that
leads to people not telling you bad news
and not coming up with alternative solutions. That is a very important pitfall to
avoid.
It’s important for the leader in the
organization to invite input, concern and
criticism. You have to articulate it. You
can’t just assume people are going to tell
you bad news.
And, you have to make sure you never
punish the messenger. If there’s something going wrong, you need to deal with
it, but do not kill the messenger. That’s a
disaster.
Treat employees differently but equally. We
have this group of tenure-track faculty,
who are among the smartest people you
are going to meet, their knowledge is miles
deep, and they also know they’re smart.
We have another group of people who
are service employees, people who work
in our food service, dining halls, people
who work in the custodial side or maintenance. Their backgrounds are very different.
A college campus is like a little city.
You have all the diversity of income level
and job responsibly. We have people
who work from 9 to 5 and 24-7.
It’s a challenge, and the first piece in
dealing with that challenge is to recognize that not everybody is the same. Too
often, we misinterpret ‘all men created
equal.’ That is true philosophically, but if
you tried to treat every employee the
same, you are gearing up for failure. You,
in fact, have to meet the needs of different groups, and those needs are very
diverse.
Second, do not to try to treat everybody the same. That’s different from not
treating them equally as a philosophical
matter, but you have to deal differently
with people.
Third thing, and I see this in virtually
every area I’ve been involved with in my
career, you want to make sure the people who are your managers are treating
the people who appear to be below them
on the totem pole the same way they
treat people who are above them on the
totem pole.
I don’t know why it is that human
beings tend to be nice guys and gals up
the line but don’t feel the same compunction down the line. That’s a huge
mistake, and in a diverse work force, if
people treat folks who are reporting to
them differently than they treat folks to
whom they report, you’ve got a recipe
for disaster.
HOW TO REACH: Hiram College, (330) 569-3211 or
www.hiram.edu