Leadership
Doctor
Without
Borders
JITEN GANDHI
Q: Has your expertise as a gynaecologist helped you in your role as a university administrator? They are two very different jobs. A: Doctors make good administrators in any field. They have all the requisite managerial qualities ingrained in them. We are used to taking snap decisions as we deal with matters of life and death. We are trained to be sensitive to the needs of patients, and hence are naturally empathetic towards the needs of people, be they employees, faculty, staff, students, parents, or other stakeholders. Doctors are also capable of hard work, used to working long hours and often round the clock during emergencies. There is an inherent quality of entrepreneurship in every doctor, as most of us are geared towards building our own practice ultimately. Q: What is your approach to administrating a university? A: I believe in total autonomy for faculty and staff, but with accountability. After taking charge in 1997, one of the first things I did was slash the number of holidays and give a thrust to punctuality. Then I restructured our administrative set-up, creating departments of finance, human resources (HR), projects and purchase. Before this, the registrar was
COVER STORY
Dr Vidya Yeravdekar, Executive Director, Symbiosis International University, has brought surgical precision to university administration
responsible for most of these operations and several staff members too were multi-tasking. Imagine an organisation employing nearly a 1000 people functioning without an HR head! Another critical area that caught my attention was the piecemeal purchases being made under the many ongoing projects and institutes. To leverage economies of scale, I centralised purchase and put in a system which required each institute to fill in a requisition form for whatever they required well in advance, with no ad hoc purchases allowed. There was a lot of opposition to these streamlining activities. Some heads of institutes found it difficult to accept the change as they perceived it as a curb on their freedom. Q: How did you handle the staff’s resistance to change? A: The resistance died naturally, once people understood the benefits of the new system. It freed them from routine administrative work and gave them more time to concentrate on academics. In fact, now they perceive us as the backbone of support. We clearly demarcated roles - the vice chancellor takes care of the academic governance and I look after education administration - which I believe has no business to meddle with
academics. Under this system, the HR department takes care of staff welfare, recruitment and general training in areas like team building and motivation, while the specific academic training is left to the directors/professors of individual institutes. I do not intend to venture into teaching, as I believe that I can contribute much more to the governance of the university by keeping out of academics. It is also important to have faith in yourself and your decisions. Once I take a decision, I stick to it no matter what. However, I always communicate all plans to the faculty and staff well in advance and try to build a consensus. Q: Tell us about your administrative innovations. A: I launched the Symbiosis National Aptitude Test (SNAP), a common entrance exam for admission to all Symbiosis institutes, which has been a huge success. I am currently thinking of starting an incubation centre on our campuses. I also wish to set up a public relations department and hire a chief information officer, considering that we spend 10 crore annually on information technology, and are investing another 10 crore in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. June 2011  EDUTECH
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