Planting Seeds or Putting out Fires: Lessons Learned from Managing Front-Line Staff

Presented by Ryan Taughrin, EdM, University at Buffalo

Reported by Katie Olivo, MA, MS, Shenandoah University

Graduate enrollment leaders are worn down, burnt out, and as a profession, we’re losing qualified staff. In addition, higher education does not appropriately acknowledge the effort that leadership and supervision take. Ryan Taughrin, assistant dean for enrollment management at the University at Buffalo, addressed this grim reality and provided advice for how to advocate for yourself and your vision.

Tips for Supervisors:

1. Invest in yourself and take care of yourself first.

2. Build your library - read outside of higher education and include content on culture studies, courageous leadership, caregiving, parenting, etc.

3. Plan practical leadership time into your week. Block time on your calendar to read, brainstorm at your desk, and prep for meetings.

4. Assess management skills. Academic programs don’t prepare you for managing people so take the time to determine skills you believe translate into management roles.

5. Find a tool to manage projects to give you more time to focus on people. Email is not a project management tool!

6. Recognize unspoken job responsibilities. As a middle manager, you often have to provide cover for your team to individuals who don’t understand our work or day-to-day realities.

7. Identify the different support styles for your team members. Everyone needs different support and small wins go further than you realize.

8. Learning how to not take everything seriously (the fires) is hard and takes time, but it’s important (so you have more time to plant seeds).

Pro Tip: If you are in an office that is short-staffed or needs additional resources, start listing your tasks and time spent in an Excel spreadsheet to demonstrate the effort you are dedicating to those items as a starting point to advocate for more.

Taughrin also provided some practical details that he has found to be successful as a manager. He recommends a 15-15-15 one-on-one staff meeting approach: 15 minutes for them, 15 minutes for you (that you’ve prepped beforehand), and 15 minutes on the future. Set the example by providing meeting follow-up and action items, and also recognize when a meeting should really be an email (and vice versa).

Some examples of management choices that Taughrin’s team appreciated include:

• two or three handwritten thank-you notes each year

• potlucks or lunches based around small wins

• acknowledgement of work anniversaries and birthdays

Taughrin also provided advice for professional staff looking to expand into leadership or find leadership roles. Sometimes GEM roles that include supervision are difficult to understand at the job application level. You may see jobs posted that are assistant dean level but have no supervision or assistant directors that have multiple student workers and recruiters reporting to them.

Pro Tip: Review the GEMCAT survey to do salary compari-sons and CUPA-HR white papers on admissions roles when exploring new opportunities.

Finally, Taughrin recommended each manager identifies a community that works for you to engage in/with, ideally one where you are sharing ideas equitably and consuming content to continue to expand your leadership skills and knowledge. n