Education Is Big Business, Where Does Business End And Evangelization Begin?

Collaborative effort
How to make everyone's input count
By Erik Cassano
Collaboration. To Fr. Michael Graham, S.J. , it’s more than just a business buzzword, it’s the key to developing and maintaining a culture of teamwork in any organization. Employees want and deserve to be kept in the loop with regard to what your business is trying to accomplish, says the president of Xavier University, and they need to see how their jobs fit in to the larger picture. Graham says the only way you can accomplish that is through building a culture that values collaboration and considers ideas from everyone. Smart Business spoke with Graham, who has been the president of the $152 million Jesuit Catholic school since 2001, about how leaders can involve everyone. Collaboration is key. I’m increasingly convinced that an older-style, command-and-control form of leadership does not work effectively. You get much more out of people if you capture their hearts and souls because then they’ll work for you as hard as they can because they are as passionate about the overall objectives as you are. Having people work across networks that are formed or reformed on the basis of the issue that needs to be addressed is absolutely key. Something I’ve also come to believe is leadership needs to be inspirational. That relates directly to big-picture-mission kinds of questions. One of the things I can provide is a sense of the direction, the hill we’re going to take, so to speak. Why we’re taking this hill and why your helping us take this hill will help you feel better about your life and make you a better person. In other words, connecting the individual’s sense of themselves with the larger corporate project is terribly important, and it’s something you have to do at regular intervals across your community. Find people who value teamwork.Make sure you attract people who believe in a collaborative approach, and that you reward collaboration and don’t encourage, for lack of a better term, ownership activity when it starts to pop up. Having said that, there are also times when someone has to make a decision and people need to feel empowered to make a decision. Otherwise, everything devolves into endless talk. As we look at people, and we’ve been doing a lot of key hires in the past several years, that is one of the things we check on, to see what a person’s reputation is for collaborative engagement. To some degree, it’s how you structure what the tasks are, who you have come together on a certain project so that people get used to working across boundaries. Our departmental boundaries have become blurred in recent years with regard to that. It’s still traditional in many ways, but there are many more dotted lines now because of the need for participation across the old silos and boundaries. Tasks to be solved, especially big-picture and really important ones that have the capacity to advance our frontiers, can’t be answered within any one silo. You need people from a variety of previously sectored-off sections of the organization. Our world is a much more complex place. We have an awakening sense in the private sector that the kinds of issues we face are only going to be addressed collaboratively. Our business students are a great case in point. There is no way we ourselves can educate our business students for the world they are going to enter when they graduate. We need the expertise of all hands on deck across the university. But we also need an engaged partnership with the business community so they can give us feedback on our curriculum, what they’re looking for in a business school graduate. That departs completely from the older mindset that we know the answer and the solutions, and we’re going to shape our students according to what we think is best. That’s just not the case anymore, nobody believes that. Collaboration sets an example for our students as to what they’re going to need in their professional careers.
Tap into people’s passions.

You need to harness people’s passions. When you harness their passions, they’ll do 100, 120, 160 percent, whatever the number. They’ll do it in a way that is much easier than if they don’t understand. It’s also the right thing to do. I come to work, I’m a priest, so I shouldn’t be doing this work if someone who isn’t a priest could be doing it just as well as me. So I can bring something to this, and it’s this sense that here are whole people with whole lives, they go home to a husband or wife or kids and they have struggles and so on. Everybody wants to have a sense of purpose in life, that somehow living your life becomes easier, better, more rewarding and meaningful if you have a sense of contributing to something that is bigger, broader and more lasting than yourself. The university can offer that because what we’re about is very big. People ought to have that sense of meaning and purpose. We’re owed that as human beings, and I’m in the happy position of being able to supply that because of my position of leadership.

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