Management – By's Musings

Many within higher ed think management theory is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, trying to sneak into the sheepfold and devour the sheep. Image courtesy of Dreamstime, ID 28175702 © Debspoons | Dreamstime.com

In this post, I return to looking at Key Performance Indicators in a higher ed setting. While this gentle approach may seem innocuous to most individuals outside of the insular world of higher education, it is sure to raise the hackles of many of my higher ed colleagues. They will accuse me of trying to sneak the wolf (management theory) dressed in sheep clothing into the sheepfold (the university) through a back door.

Welsh Corgi working as sheepdog with a flock of sheep. Image courtesy of Dreamstime and Natalia Yaumenenka. ID 104389610 © Natallia Yaumenenka | Dreamstime.com

I am going to be bold enough to take that next step and publicly declare that I do not see management theory as a wolf trying to devour the sheep. I believe it can be viewed more like a sheepdog, herding the sheep to safety through the one and only door of the sheepfold. The sheepdog then lies down at that entrance and guards the fold and the sheep against all predators.

Education is a process that can’t be measured in financial returns. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

Many of the most familiar performance indicators are business-oriented outcome measurements. How many widgets were produced? How much did it cost to produce each widget? How much income did the firm make from the sale of those widgets? Higher education for years has claimed that since education is a process, we shouldn’t focus on or speak of educational outcomes, especially financial ones.

As I noted in my post K PI Part III, A University Should Be Managed as If It Were a Business Milton Greenberg in his seminal essay “The University Is Not a Business (and Other Fantasies)” published in EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 2 (March/April 2004), argues forcefully and persuasively that a university should be managed as if it were a business.

Very early in his essay, Greenberg proclaims, “ Presumably, a ‘business’ involves the hierarchical and orderly management of people, property, productivity, and finance for profit.” The primary counterarguments of academicians to Greenberg’s position hinge on three concepts in this sentence.

We need to dig further into the idea of “Hierarchical Management” and the difference between governance and management. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In this post, I will begin to address the first of these counterarguments, the concept of “hierarchical management.” To understand the problems created by the use of the term hierarchical management we need to have some familiarity with the difference between the general concepts of governance and management. We also need to look at the typical governance structures of colleges and universities, and the usual management formats of colleges and universities. These two topics are too involved to address in depth in this one blog post. I will take each of them up in subsequent posts. This idea will require more in-depth excavation.

Governance refers to the relationships among people in an organization. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The origins of the two terms automatically set the stage for a huge battle in the academy over their applicability to higher education. The term governance historically came from the disciplines of social and political sciences. Without digging into the finer points of the definition, this ancestry would usually imply that it must primarily deal with relationships.

Governance has many definitions, but most center on two related ideas. The first idea concerns how decisions are made. What are the processes of decision making within the organization? Who has a voice in making decisions? The second changes the focus to how those decisions are implemented. How is power or control exercised within the organization? What is the locus of authority within the organization?

The typical view of the concept of management is to get employees to work harder to make more money for the company. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

On the other hand, the term management originated within the realm of the business world and was then fine-tuned within the disciplines of economics and business. This ancestry automatically makes it suspect to the academy, which believes that given its origin, it must naturally deal with productivity and finances. These concepts are antithetical to many citizens of the academy.

The four tasks of management. Image courtesy of the author, created by using ClickCharts.

Most modern definitions of management view it as a process of four interwoven tasks. The first of these tasks is Planning, the selection of appropriate organizational goals and the best array of actions to achieve those goals. The second task is Organizing, the establishment of assignments and an aura of authority that encourage and allow people to work together to achieve the organization’s goals.

The third task is Leading which involves motivating, coordinating, inspiring and energizing individuals and groups to work together to achieve the organization’s goals. The fourth task is Controlling which has two primary aspects. The first is assessing situations by establishing accurate systems of measuring and monitoring how well the organization has achieved its goals. The second is redirecting the course of operations when it is apparent that the organization is not achieving its goals.

Modern universities consist of four major groups of individuals. These groups are students, faculty, administration, and governing boards. In subsequent posts, we will examine the historical development of these groups, their relationships with each other, and their roles in governance and management.

From the definitions of governance and management, we see much common ground with one major difference. The major difference is their primary focus. Governance focuses on relationships, while management focuses on tasks. In subsequent posts, I will deal with the idea of shared governance and hierarchical management. I hope to convince you that the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.

To get to the point of being able to discuss these topics, my next post will be this Friday, March 29. It will be a short history of the development of the modern university and the four major groups of individuals that comprise the university.

If all of us are to begin on the same page, we need to start with the definition of Key Performance Indicators. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

To understand why Higher Education needs a new Key Performance Indicator (KPI), we must first agree on at least four items. The first two are the definitions of Performance Indicators (PIs) and KPIs. The next two are that we can and should use PIs and KPIs within the enterprise of higher education.

KPIs measure how well we are meeting our most critical goals. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

To take care of our first two necessary items we turn to a Dictionary of Business Terms: A Performance Indicator (PI) is a quantifiable measure an enterprise uses to determine its progress toward an intended result. In other words, it is an indication of how well the enterprise is meeting it’s operational and strategic goals. Since there are many goals colleges and universities set for themselves, there could be hundreds of PIs.

Constantly checking on hundreds of goals and indicators can set one’s head spinning. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

The thought of checking hundreds of goals and indicators constantly set my head spinning. This would be a huge task which would soon become tedious and most likely be an enormous waste of time. A more productive approach would appear to be to select a small number of critical goals to continually monitor, and then choose a few indicators that measure how well the organization is doing in meeting these goals. These select few are our Key Performance Indicators. The above definitions have been adapted from the KPI.org webpage KPI Basics.

The idea that KPIs are quantitative measurements immediately brought two well-known sentiments to my mind. The first idea was widely circulated in higher education assessment circles in the 80s and 90s in some form of the following statement: “What you value, you measure; what you don’t measure, you don’t value.”

Slide 50 of 60 from the Professional and Graduate Studies Faculty Development Day, January 9, 2004. Slide courtesy of Cornerstone University and the author and presenter, Dr. By Baylis, who at the time of the presentation was Provost of Cornerstone University.

I don’t know who originated this idea. I remember hearing it in numerous plenary and breakout sessions at accrediting agencies’ annual meetings, as well as assessment conferences. I also know that I used it in a number of lectures and addresses to campus groups, plus several conference presentations that I made, as illustrated by the slide at left. It is from a faculty orientation program at Cornerstone University, explaining the ins and outs of our faculty evaluation and development processes.

I believe the beauty and usefulness of this statement are wrapped up in the obviousness of its meaning. You should concentrate your efforts on those goals and objectives that are most important to your organization. Organizational values form the foundation and heart of your organization. The most important things in your organization should determine the priorities of your organization. By concentrating efforts on measuring if you are meeting the goals set around your priorities, your organization will be able to see if it is succeeding in becoming the organization you want it to be.

The second idea is embodied in the meme: “What gets measured gets managed.” It is often attributed to Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005), who is known as the founder of modern management. While it seems reasonable that Drucker could have made this or a similar statement, I can’t find a reliable source to verify such an attribution. Whether he made such a statement or not, it fits very well with his theoretical approach to management.

An important Enrollment KPI is Student Full-Time Equivalents. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

The idea of measuring performance or the achievement of goals is the foundation of the concept of management by objective (MBO), which was introduced and popularized by Drucker in his 1954 book, The Practice of Management. The heart and soul of MBO is the measurement and comparison of actual performance against a set of predetermined standards.

I can hear some of my former higher education colleagues screaming, “What does management have to do with education?” From the very first day of my career as a college administrator, I made it perfectly clear that I believed that higher education was a business enterprise and managing it well was an absolute necessity.

The Duck Test: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, flies like a duck, smells like a duck, and waddles like a duck, then most likely it is a duck. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

In the early days (August 31, 2010) of By’s Musings, I published a post According to the duck test, higher education is a business, in which I clearly stated that higher education is a business enterprise.

Six years later (May 2016), in the post The business model of all of higher education is broken – Part II, I more fully outlined my reasons for believing that higher education is a business enterprise and must be managed well.

There was a Part I introducing a series on the business model of higher education. Unfortunately, that post was completely lost in the problems of this past September when By’s Musings went down for several months with missing postings and links not working. Instead of trying to recreate the Part I post, I have decided to let the successive posts stand on their own.

In reviewing those posts on the broken business model of higher education I discovered that I never finished the series. I had a lot more to say, some of which I will interweave into this series on Key Performance Indicators. I will take up the remainder of my comments on the broken business after I finish this current series.

My next post continues the theme A University Should be Managed as If It Were a Business. I hope to publish it next Tuesday, March 4, 2019.

KPI – Part VI: Difference Between Governance and Management

Key Performance Indicators – Part II: Definition