Nightstand Event
BC made solid wood nightstands. Pick your style, and change the size and colour.
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You were the first woman to head up a music conducting program in Canada and now you’re a successful college president in what has traditionally been a very maledominated field. As a leader, how do you inspire people and get them to buy in to your vision? It’s a huge challenge and it takes time. People have to get to know who you are. Leaders have to demonstrate integrity, demonstrate values, and they have to walk their talk. They have to take risks, engage people, and speak to them. They have to strike at the chord of what’s valuable to individuals in the organization because when people are inspired, they can move beyond wherever they thought they could go. To me, that’s the ultimate success of a great leader. What’s been your biggest business success at Camosun? At the institutional level, the greatest success so far in my role at Camosun has been getting $30 million from government for a new trades building. It’s going to forever change the way in which we deliver trades training in the province at a time when there’s so much focus on developing a skilled workforce. People are looking at areas such as trades and saying, “we need to make sure people have the right skills to fill the jobs we know are going to be out there.”
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On that note, where do you see opportunity in the economy now and five years from now? A lot of work is being done to identify where jobs are going to be needed. A couple examples we already know are in health care — nurses and healthcare workers. We know there will be a need in technology in general and a great need in trades training; if you look at what’s happening in the province, the premier is very focused on LNG development and oil and gas, so post-secondary institutions can play a key role in economic development. Right now, we’re on both the provincial and federal government’s radar, and that’s tremendously exciting because that’s not always the case. There’s a huge opportunity for us to impact the economy, and we would be wise to take advantage of those opportunities. Taking advantage of big opportunities often involves risk. How do you do that in a conservative college environment? We’re so connected to government that taking a huge financial risk is not an option for us. But I’ve taken what I call intelligent financial risks by finding small amounts of money at a time when colleges have had to make significant cuts because that’s been the environment we’ve been in. I’ve used that money to seed projects and to provide opportunity for innovation across the institution. Even in times of fiscal constraint, I don’t want people to think it’s hopeless. It’s really