A close friend of mine was an industrial manager. He moved regions twice at the behest of the company board (of which he was a member) to take on new roles. One day he went into work to be met by the Director of Human Resoucres, who had travelled across the country specifically in order to tell him that he was sacked as an executive manager and had until lunchtime to clear his desk and leave the premises.
This blog is about survival. It is now exactly two months since I stepped down as Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and I've been musing on the fact that I survived on an executive board for exactly eleven years. Universities are no different from industrial companies, and I have learned over the years that executives come and they go - the latter sometimes extremely quickly. In the examples that follow I am making NO use whatsoever of cases from my own university - Sheffield. Instead I have had the possibility, through membership of various national groups, to observe changes in other institutions, and it is those that I exclusively refer to here.
Sudden change can occur right at the top. Between successive meetings of a national committee I was on a high-profile vice-chancellor simply disappeared from his university - and with it from the national committee and its sub-committees where I had come to regard him as a very sound colleague. A Christmas card from a board-level friend at another university implored me not to ask what was happening to her vice-chancellor whose name was at the time all over the 'trade press'. At another institution the board of governors rejected the appointee selected to take over the vice-chancellor's role, thereby consigning their existing institution head to stay on longer than he had intended. (I suppose that's a case of unwanted survival.)
But PVCs come and go. One I knew retired gracefully from his post at the end of his allotted period of office, only to be thrust back into the same role two years later by the vice-chancellor who had summarily demoted his successor. I have also seen colleagues in other institutions shuffled between portfolios like a pack of cards - with apparently random outcomes putting senior colleagues into roles for which they did not seem fitted.
It is surprising that some of those who have left posts suddenly reappear elsewhere remarkably quickly. I know of one executive board member who parted comany with two vice-chancellors in successive institutions before taking on his current role - again as a Deputy Vice-Chancellor. And Vice-Chancellors can leave one institution and pop up later at another too.
I was first alerted to such elements of instability in senior roles very soon after I became a Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 2004. At the first national meeting I went to one colleague, who I had known for some years, was looking very glum. Over a few drinks some of us persuaded him to tell us why. That morning he had been to see his Vice-Chancellor, and had been asked to take an HR adviser with him. The HR adviser expressed surprise when my friend told her that he'd not seen the VC on a one-to-one basis for six months - indeed the HR adviser mis-heard and thought it had been six weeks: six months of no contact was even more surprising. And the reason the VC had called my friend along that day (together with the HR adviser)? To sack him as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor.
So I am retrospectively taking some pleasure in the thought that I survived.
This blog is about survival. It is now exactly two months since I stepped down as Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and I've been musing on the fact that I survived on an executive board for exactly eleven years. Universities are no different from industrial companies, and I have learned over the years that executives come and they go - the latter sometimes extremely quickly. In the examples that follow I am making NO use whatsoever of cases from my own university - Sheffield. Instead I have had the possibility, through membership of various national groups, to observe changes in other institutions, and it is those that I exclusively refer to here.
Sudden change can occur right at the top. Between successive meetings of a national committee I was on a high-profile vice-chancellor simply disappeared from his university - and with it from the national committee and its sub-committees where I had come to regard him as a very sound colleague. A Christmas card from a board-level friend at another university implored me not to ask what was happening to her vice-chancellor whose name was at the time all over the 'trade press'. At another institution the board of governors rejected the appointee selected to take over the vice-chancellor's role, thereby consigning their existing institution head to stay on longer than he had intended. (I suppose that's a case of unwanted survival.)
But PVCs come and go. One I knew retired gracefully from his post at the end of his allotted period of office, only to be thrust back into the same role two years later by the vice-chancellor who had summarily demoted his successor. I have also seen colleagues in other institutions shuffled between portfolios like a pack of cards - with apparently random outcomes putting senior colleagues into roles for which they did not seem fitted.
It is surprising that some of those who have left posts suddenly reappear elsewhere remarkably quickly. I know of one executive board member who parted comany with two vice-chancellors in successive institutions before taking on his current role - again as a Deputy Vice-Chancellor. And Vice-Chancellors can leave one institution and pop up later at another too.
I was first alerted to such elements of instability in senior roles very soon after I became a Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 2004. At the first national meeting I went to one colleague, who I had known for some years, was looking very glum. Over a few drinks some of us persuaded him to tell us why. That morning he had been to see his Vice-Chancellor, and had been asked to take an HR adviser with him. The HR adviser expressed surprise when my friend told her that he'd not seen the VC on a one-to-one basis for six months - indeed the HR adviser mis-heard and thought it had been six weeks: six months of no contact was even more surprising. And the reason the VC had called my friend along that day (together with the HR adviser)? To sack him as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor.
So I am retrospectively taking some pleasure in the thought that I survived.
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