How to Differentiate Your Institution in a Competitive Market

This episode of FYI dives into an upcoming book by Suzan Brinker titled Pass Fail: The Urgent Need for Strategic Leadership in Higher Education.

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Who is Suzan Brinker?

Suzan Brinker is the co-Founder and CEO of VIV Higher Education. She has a wealth of experience in higher education marketing and leadership.

In this Episode

Suzan Brinker, co-founder and CEO at VIV Higher Education, and author of an upcoming book titled Pass Fail: The Urgent Need for Strategic Leadership in Higher Education, joins FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about her journey from Germany to a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin, and how her diverse experiences have shaped her approach to education marketing, and her career trajectory. 

Suzan and Gil delve into the challenges facing higher education leadership, the importance of strategic marketing, and the balance between mission and revenue. This conversation is full of practical tips and real-world examples illustrate how marketing can break silos and drive institutional success. Breaking down silos within higher education is crucial for balancing student success and financial realities. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the strategic planning and sustainability of higher education institutions. Tune in for expert advice on persistence, active listening, and the importance of retaining top talent for long-term success.

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Episode Transcript

How to Differentiate Your Institution in a Competitive Market with Suzan Brinker, PhD

Publishing Date: July 2, 2024

[00:00:00] Gil: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution Podcast, presented by Mongoose. I’m your host, Gil Rogers. Today, I sit down with Suzan Brinker, co-founder and CEO at Viv Higher Education. Suzan is working on a book, and I got a sneak peek. We sit down and talk about challenges facing higher education leadership, as well as the role marketing can play in navigating today’s challenging times. Let’s listen in.

Hey, how are you?

[00:00:36] Suzan: Hello, I’m good. How are you?

[00:00:39] Gil: I’m doing all right. You know, it’s summertime in the northeast. We’re both up here enjoying the lovely weather and just getting to it. So, I would love to get you introduced to the audience, for those who don’t know you or know who you are. I’d love for you to just, kind of, give a little bit of a background, who you are, where you’re from, what you do, what are your passions, what drives you, all that fun stuff.

[00:01:00] Suzan: Sure. So, I’m Suzan Brinker. I’m originally from Germany. I grew up in Germany. My dad’s from Turkey. So, I always had that international itch to go elsewhere. I came to the U.S. to study at a small liberal arts college called St. Norbert College up in northeast Wisconsin, which is a Catholic small school.

I ended up there because I had a scholarship to teach German there for a year. It was supposed to be a yearlong thing, and then I was going to go back to my very large anonymous research university in Germany, but I really loved the campus there. And due to a series of unforeseen kinds of circumstances, me loving the campus so much, I stayed.

And I think that’s when I ultimately fell in love with higher education because that campus just was everything I didn’t know I needed. I had really great faculty members there. I really thrived as a person in ways that I hadn’t really felt like I was thriving before. And decided to stay in the U.S., stay in higher ed. So, then I got my master’s in communication from Marquette University and then a PhD in higher ed from Penn State. And at Penn State, I started my higher ed career, initially marketing online degrees, to international audiences. So, really focusing on audiences that I could identify with to some extent.

Learned how to do market research, learned how to do strategy, leveraged my interest in writing and storytelling. And then from there I went to Northeastern as director of marketing after about five and a half years at Penn State, focused on graduate and professional education offerings and then started my own company in 2019.

After moving to Boston, I felt like it’s the right time to start my own company. I’d had my two first little children. I have three now. So, I felt like I needed a little bit more freedom. And of course, I had no idea the pandemic was on its way. So, I was like, wouldn’t it be nice to work from home and have flexibility?

And then I started my own company. And before I had any clients, the pandemic hit. And I was like, “Shoot, what did I do? I could have just worked from home while drawing a paycheck the way I was before.” But I don’t regret it. It worked out. It’s been five years now, and we have about a team of 10. And we work with institutions across the Northeast, large and small, as well as nationally and internationally. So, it’s been a good ride.

I think, ultimately, what drives me is that passion that I discovered for higher education on that small campus in Wisconsin. But also, even beyond that now, just really, I’ve fallen in love with the challenge that we’re facing in terms of brand differentiation and making sure that our campus communities offer something that facilitates that belonging on the one hand and the intellectual education, but also is really aligned with the future and set students up for a life of not just meaning, but also prosperity.

And as a marketer, we, kind of, get to put that puzzle together in different ways for different institutions, right, based on where they’re located, what they’ve always been good at, which types of students they draw. So, I find that really fun.

[00:03:59] Gil: Awesome. Yeah, one of the things I hear when I talk with career higher ed marketers is nobody goes to college to work in higher ed marketing, right? Or nobody goes to college to work in admissions. It’s one of those things you just, kind of, fall into because of that passion for what the higher ed as a “product” is, right?

And it’s more meaningful than being a widget salesman or more meaningful than selling cars, right? These are all… you have to come up with a story around the why for those sorts of things. But ultimately, higher ed institutions have this very similar why they exist, which is to empower and to support the advancement of students, right?

And I think that there’s a certain character of that for these smaller institutions, like you mentioned. I recently had Scott Novak, who’s the creator of the small college movement, joined the pod a few weeks ago. And, you know, he just spoke a lot about the charm and the character that these institutions sometimes undersell themselves in an environment where there’s a sea of sameness sometimes, or they’re being muted out because all the market share is going to the larger public institutions or the “more selective” or “highly rejective,” depending on what you want to call them, institutions.

So, tell me a little bit about, you mentioned that, you know, it was this smaller school in Wisconsin that, kind of, got you introduced to and being a part of the higher ed marketing community. Let’s focus on that origin story a little bit, like the superhero origin story, how you got there. What are some of the things that you, that, that really keep you in the higher ed sphere versus going elsewhere?

[00:05:40] Suzan: Yeah, what you said about nobody goes to school to become a higher ed administrator. I say that all the time to people. It’s like none of us planned to be here. I wanted to be a journalist. That’s what I always wanted to do. And I think coming to the U.S. just put some obstacles in my way. First of all, I graduated in 2009.

I graduated in Northeast Wisconsin. There weren’t any jobs. Plus, I didn’t have a green card. And so, I needed to figure out a different path. for that point. and digital marketing was growing in 2009. You could go and talk to people about social media and digital marketing and they’d be like, “Wow, you’re so smart.”

You know what? You’ve looked at the future and you can help us, kind of, grow our business in these new channels. So, I was doing a little bit of that, but I think, ultimately, I never felt really quite at home. in other industries because I am international and there is something about a U.S. campus when you’re an international student or you have an international origin where you feel more at home because, by nature, it’s just a place where you can interact with people from all different countries and all different backgrounds.

Now, I live in Boston now so I feel that way all the time, but living in a suburb of Green Bay the campus was really where I could be more myself. I felt like every time I stepped out of that, it was more homogenous. So, I think part of it was, like, “Okay, I’m going to do digital marketing now just because of the economic realities of this point in time.”

But also, I feel drawn back to higher education because I feel safer there. I think I can be myself. So, it was a lot of that. And I did try to then, after I went to grad school, Before I ended up at Penn State because my husband wanted to go to Penn State for his PhD and we moved there, which is also, kind of, a place that doesn’t have a lot of industry around it.

I did work for a year for a company called Woolridge that does, like, outerwear. A pair, like, they’re a really small, at this point, competitor of, like, LL Bean or, Eddie Bauer, they’re a really old company, very interesting. But I, again, felt that same way where I felt drawn back to higher ed and to a college campus where people, kind of, got me more and people were from all over the place.

So, it wasn’t even just that. I was, like, I want to tell the story about people who are, like, me or. I definitely felt like I would rather market higher education than a sweater, or then you were saying, like, packaged consumer goods, like, it’s much more meaningful, but it was also for me as a human being wanting to be on a college campus because I was surrounded by that rich environment and I felt good there.

And now chosen to work from home and I don’t really want to be on college campuses because I’m a mom and I don’t, I need that flexibility. I think, at this point, almost 12 years into my career in higher ed, I just, I think I, I really love the challenge, like, I said, we’re at this point in time in higher education where we’re facing such significant headwinds and I think marketing can have, should have a front row seat in determining how we’re going to address that challenge as an institution and also as an industry together.

So, now I’m just, kind of, hooked on that and I think it’s really complex. And,we need really smart strategists brand, strategists to help us figure that out.

[00:08:57] Gil: Yeah, yeah, and I know you, think and talk a lot about many of these challenges, so much that you’ve written a book on the topic, right? Would love for you to, kind of, share, I know when this podcast drops, the first time we drop it, the book will not quite yet be available, but it will be, later in the summer.

Tell us about it. What is the origin story of the book? What it’s all about.

[00:09:20] Suzan: Yeah, I mean in some ways writing a book was, kind of, a way to feel, like, I could be a journalist, which is what I wanted to be, and making content about higher ed and bringing different voices together. Together is fun for me. So, I wanted to write a book to really challenge myself to put a lot of these concepts and ideas in dialogue with each other.

The book is called Past Fail, The Urgent Need for Strategic Leadership in Higher Education, and it really presents the challenge of we are at this point in time where we do need to differentiate our institutions. We do need to be market aligned. We shouldn’t lose the essence of what’s always made our institution special and we should make sure that we’re also mission aligned in addition to market aligned.

But what’s really going to make that possible? Is it ideas or is it the leaders that are running these institutions? The VPs, the CMOs, the VPs of enrollment, the provosts. The VP of Advancement, all these different cabinet level positions, VP of Strategy, of course, along with the president, the faculty, and the board.

Those leaders are the ones who are going to be able to make that change sustainable and effective. And so, I wanted to specifically look at four areas within higher education. The first one being strategic planning, the second one being brand, the third one really being enrollment with a lens of how do we.

How do we develop new audiences for our institutions, if the audiences that we historically had are perhaps shrinking, which is the case in many institutions. And then the fourth area being culture, which I think is really important too, to look at because the people that we have working for us are, If we have them motivated and bought in and excited, we’re going to get a lot farther than if we have a culture where people feel really alienated from the mission.

So, I look at those four areas, and I did, I think, a total of 13 interviews with different VP level leaders, including some presidents. I was really excited to interview Leo Lambert, who was the president at Elon for 20 years and was really the leader, in my opinion, who helped them transform themselves entirely from, kind of, a small, no name institution to a leading institution, liberal arts institution in the country.

How did he do that, right? And he told me some of the stories and I really wrote the book as a series of case studies, but it was really important to me to also have my own voice and, sort of, my personal experiences that I’ve had across the multiple institutional contexts that I’ve been part of, front and center, because I think people want to read things with a personal, kind of, lens, right, rather than just, like, here’s a punch list of everything you should do every day to make your institution successful.

I don’t think that that’s really compelling or fun to read, so I tried to take a little bit more of a personal approach as well. And in some cases, I think it reads, like, a career memoir, and then in other places, it reads more, like, hey, I interviewed this person, they had really smart things to say.

And then in other places, I have these actionable insight bullet points, like, here’s what you should take away from this chapter before you move to the next.

[00:12:20] Gil: Yeah, so one of my favorite things to think about when it comes to the stack of books for our YouTube audience. The stack of books next to me are the amazing folks I had the pleasure of connecting with and reading their books over the past, six, nine months or so, for the podcast.

And, one of the biggest weaknesses I see in many of the, kind of, the mass market, kind of, self-help management books, leadership books, et cetera, and even honestly, like, on social media, when people are posting advice and tips. very, kind of, surface level and it’s very, you should do a better job of strategic planning, but that’s okay, ow, right?

Or you should do a better job with setting up your KPIs, ow, right? And so, there’s, people who are trying do their best, but don’t necessarily know the best tangible steps, there needs to be a little bit more of that. So, I, like, how you’ve structured this and, like, you said in some places it’s your expertise and others it’s bringing in others and others and it’s, kind of, the where the rubber hits the road, kind of, component that many of the non-higher ed thinkers don’t get into because they’re not in it deep enough, right?

And I think that by having your wealth of experience and expertise plus the people that you’ve interviewed, really comes through and makes it something that is Tangible for the audience to actually take something away from.

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[00:14:30] Gil: So, to that point, I love for you to, kind of, share a couple of we’ll focus in on the enrollment area, because that’s the majority of the folks that are listening to the podcast for this moment anyway, what are some of the common themes or challenges you’ve been thinking about and talking about?

And some of the story, case study or two and recommendations that people might get some value out of.

[00:14:51] Suzan: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for saying that too. I think it’s really important to surface what’s hard and why this is difficult, right, like, why, if it was as easy as just writing a bullet pointed list, then wouldn’t all institutions just be in great shape? And wouldn’t it? And I think that’s why I wanted to really lead with the leadership piece, because it does take leadership.

And so, for example, since you’re asking about enrollment, I One of the tensions that I’m encountering, that I encountered just recently when I was fractional CMO at Assumption for a year, you know, front and center in all the cabinet meetings that I was part of, is the tension between mission and revenue.

And, concretely, that means maybe you’re a campus that has historically served a certain population, like, in Assumption’s case, for example, predominantly the children of white Catholic families. And the market is now changing and, you know, that you can’t really survive as an institution without changing your focus in terms of audiences.

And so, you know, you’re going to need to recruit. Potentially, we talked a lot about Hispanic students because they are so growing in Massachusetts and nationally and they’re Catholic often. So, is there potentially an alignment? But I worry that a lot of the institutions, and this isn’t about assumption, but I think on a national level, I worry that a lot of institutions are going to have to change.

Looking at these new audiences strictly through a revenue generation lens. This is the same thing happens when we’re looking at international audiences as, like, a cash cow, right? If we’re, like, oh, we can get full paying students from China, let’s do that. I think that’s a real disservice. to our institutions because in order for those students to have a positive experience and in order for our institution to continue to deliver on its mission we have to make sure that they can succeed on our campus.

And so, I think oftentimes what I’ve seen is leaders, kind of, go into their individual camps so you might have a set of leaders that’s really, like, nope we don’t want to change anything about our institution at the experience year. for whatever reason. And the other side goes into, yeah, but look at the research, look at the market, we have to change everything about ourselves.

And all of a sudden, they’re not talking to each other. And it’s just not a good situation. And this happens at the highest level of leadership. And I think we, as leader, if we’re true leaders, we have to find a bridge and a win-win between those two mindsets. And we have to be able to put data and dialogue with itself.

So, that would be one example that I think a lot of people will be able to relate to, where it’s really a matter of talk to each other, figure out how to mediate these different perspectives, and choose an audience that you can test and evolve with. Don’t feel like you have to chase every bright and shiny object, but rather choose one audience that you can test and learn from.

There is the, I think, chapter number. One, the initial chapter is about my time at Penn State World Campus, where we wanted to build out an international enrollment channel for the online programs. And I was very new to my career and I was international myself and initially the charge was what we really want to grow.

That’s to higher education globally. So, we were looking at countries, with very low GDP, and just very impoverished population thinking about, oh, how could we equip populations in these countries with technology that would allow them to improve their lives? And that really excited me.

And then over the next few years, it became very evident that more and more and more, we were really interested in revenue generation to the point where I was told, if something international doesn’t make money and people don’t have the ability to pay full price, then we’re not going to pursue it. and I think that’s a problem because There should be a way to do both, and I think too few higher ed leaders get into the same room and explicitly talk about these tensions that are at play in their work and figure out how to create those win-wins.

So, that’s something that I explore in the book, I think not just in the enrollment sphere, but also across the different, other topics that I’m looking at.

[00:18:55] Gil: Yeah, I think it’s a fabulous point about that push and pull of, well, we want to support, our mission of helping to prepare people for their career, give them advanced skills, provide, for academic curiosity, however, you want to package it at the campus is what you’re trying to do, but you also ultimately are a business, right?

And it’s a, you’re a nonprofit business for most institutions, but you’re still a business, right? And a lot of times these online divisions should be a profit generating component for the campus. Now with all that said, the incremental cost of adding students that is, it’s tricky, right?

Because it’s an online program, right? and people outside of the higher ed sphere don’t necessarily understand the cost of that. The revenue shares or the OPMs or whatever they are, right? And there’s that whole separate podcast we could have on all of those sorts of pieces. But at the end of the day, There is that challenge of an institution of driving enough net tuition revenue to support the operation of the campus, because without it, then there is no campus to deliver the program, whether it’s on the ground or online, right?

earlier you mentioned, you know, part of the, being the silos on campuses and I think this is a tale as old as time piece of the conversation, but there’s that need for institutions to break down those silos and communicate with each other better because at the end of the day, we all have the same, we should have the same goal, which is supporting student success, it’s, yeah. Key benchmark, right? So, what role does marketing play in helping to break down some of those silos so that people actually do talk to and work with each other? Um, bring the data to the table because very few institutions have data, teams that charge themselves. They might have, like, an institutional reporting, But those people typically are more charged with providing data for, you know, reporting out to government entities or for rankings or things like that, or just institutional success metrics.

[00:21:00] Suzan: But I think the marketing team, which rarely has its separate market research arm unless it’s a really large institution, needs to bring industry data to the attention of leaders who are Decisions about strategy. So, it’s not enough to just bring marketing data and say, Oh, we got this many impressions and then this many clicks and this many leads, we spent this many dollars and what should we do differently about our marketing campaigns?

No, I’m talking about, like, data about student demand and labor market demand and what’s happening across our competitive set in terms of growth and shrinking and bringing that data, whether it’s iPads data, whether it’s, created a report, you spent some hours, kind of, reading industry publications and creating trend lines based on that, whether it’s you went to a conference and you’ve, kind of, taken your best insights that you’ve gotten and you’re presenting them at a lunch and learn, I think too few marketing leaders are not correct.

Too many marketing leaders are not proactive enough in bringing that data to their colleagues and using it to advocate for change. I think when they do that, often they get really frustrated because it’s not immediately going to change anybody’s behavior or perspective. So, it, again, leadership is about having that patience and that endurance and persistence in bringing those data points to the table.

On an ongoing basis, but also listening to the responses and what are you leaning from those responses in terms of what problems your colleagues in enrollment or in the provost’s office or wherever it is, what problems are they trying to solve? And what data can you find to help them frame the solutions better?

So, that’s 1 concrete thing. That I think marketing can do, but it’s certainly not just on marketing to act that way, right? We all need to act that way collectively in an institution to break those silos down more.

[00:22:52] Gil: Yeah, I think marketing can definitely play a very active role, but ultimately, it’s not marketing’s job to be the complete lead in these types of conversations, more of an enabler, but it’s also got to be a part of all of these conversations. I remember my first year, freshman year at the University of Hartford, Dr.

Charles Kennedy. He was an amazing professor. One of the first things he ever taught us was everything is marketing and marketing is everything. Accept accounting, right? That’s the one area you don’t necessarily want to over storytelling market because then maybe you get in trouble a little bit.

But at the end of the day, marketing touches all of these things because the decisions that are made in these leadership groups impacts Prospective students, parents, current students, alumni, community, and who is the one crafting the message or supposed to be crafting the message to all these different constituencies?

[00:23:44] Suzan: It’s got to be the marketing department, right? And so, at least it should be, people with the expertise to develop strategy and the campaign and the messaging, and you got to listen to them. Well, there’s a real, I think there’s a mentality shift that we have to achieve. One of my favorite interviews that I did was with Jamie Hunt, for the chapter on silos and change management. And she and I talked about not just the need for data, but also how marketing teams and higher education are still treated as order takers.

And I think that’s More often than not, instead of strategic partners. So, if you’re busy, she called it the Kinko shop, right? If you’re busy just taking orders for flyers and brochures and posters for the faculty members birthday party, and you’re not empowered to say no, Then you’re not going to be that strategic partner that is uncovering insights and bringing them to your stakeholders.

So, again, it takes those really strong leaders to come into those departments and into those institutions to say, no, our marketing team needs a seat at the table. They need to drive not just our brand, but our product decisions as well, to not entirely, but partially drive product decisions

[00:24:49] Gil: Oh, post this flyer on Instagram and make it go viral. That’s the job of the marketing department, right?

[00:24:55] Suzan: right. And so, there’s that education piece too. I think that frustrates me when I was recently fractional CMO and when I had my in-house roles is just, you know, the amount of work that we have to do as marketers to educate faculty and other stakeholders about what is marketing and what is not. I’m not the most patient person.

Maybe that’s why I have to be an entrepreneur, but it’s a hard thing to try to educate hundreds of people on a campus all the time about what your job is and why it shouldn’t be order taking.

[00:25:24] Gil: but that’s part posted on this on LinkedIn a month ago or two at this point, and it’s a similar, kind of, mindset that you have is part of the challenge of the marketing leadership is doing the marketing of your marketing internally, right. And communicating, and that’s, that was where a lot of marketing leaders fall short is they think, Oh, I have this great plan.

We’re going to execute this plan, but they haven’t sold the plan to the internal constituents. And so. Then the plan falls apart because people aren’t living into it, or worse, they get fired because people don’t believe in their plan. and they’re not patient enough to see it unfold.

And that’s self-advocacy. I had a, a conversation with a CEO one one time, a year and a half, two years ago where the conversation was. we’re not going to ever see eye to eye on how to grow this business. And it was, like, but I’m executing this amazing marketing plan.

I’m just doing a crappy job of articulating how good it is and why it’s a good plan. And that’s where it all failed. And I think that’s an important component from a marketing leadership perspective is self not self-preservation, but in a way self-preservation, but self-advocacy for the goodness of the plan.

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[00:27:19] Suzan: One of my case studies is about Babson College. They have an amazing CMO. I have so much respect for her, Carrie Zalerno, and she’s been there for almost six years, proprietor that she was at Northeastern, which we also cover in the book, a Northeastern case study, because CMO. Their story talk about transformation.

and Carrie has done an amazing job, at transforming the marketing team at Babson into more of that strategic partner to the different institutional stakeholders through storytelling, through creating, kind of, a brand journalism engine. and she recently was talking to me about, she used the term.

Socialization plan, I believe. They had done some market research and she said we put together a socialization plan and we’re going to execute that plan over the summer. And I said, that’s brilliant. Are you saying you’re taking, kind of, your market research on a roadshow with all different stakeholders?

And she was, like, exactly, that’s what we’re doing. And it reminded me of when I was at Penn State, when we had done some really extensive market research as well about international opportunities, because everybody at the university thought they knew what was best in terms of what country we should focus on and how we should do it.

We did all this research, and we had to spend, I believe, 18 months, kind of, going from administrative body to administrative body, presenting this over and over again. And then finally, I realized everybody’s finally on the same page. I mean, this is a huge campus, Penn State, right, like, they have 40, 000 undergrads.

I was, like, this is an amazing accomplishment that finally everybody is saying the same things about the international market. But it took years to get there. So, again, patience is important. And just, I think the reason that I wanted to have that culture chapter too, is because really easy to burn yourself out.

As a higher ed leader who is charged with something, like, transforming how your team is seen by the institution and who is charged with something as important as brand and word of mouth and how people see you and then, oh, on top of that, your job is also crisis communication and PR and internal communication and team management and all these things.

I think we need cultures, especially on the small campus, campuses that are often under-resourced and people really are doing two or three jobs, where it’s encouraged and appreciated when people take care of themselves. Because if we take care of our own mental health, then we can be more strategic leaders and we don’t ultimately blow a fuse, you know, because it’s just all too much.

I think that’s really an important part of the equation of higher ed leadership is that self-care and boundary setting.

[00:29:41] Gil: yeah, I’m reminded of years ago, it was Kim Reed at EdgeVentures published the maturity model for enrollment management has this spectrum of how involved or where enrollments seat at the table is, you know, at the early in the infancy stage, it’s not there yet. The VP of enrollment is essentially the director of admissions and is just responsible for the number that they’re given from the CFO.

You need to get this many students. And then as you go through the progression of the model, it’s, you know, they have a seat at the table to make the decisions on discount rate and they have a seat at the table for what new programs get developed. And then ultimately at the far end of the spectrum, it’s, they are in the president’s cabinet and they’re the ones driving those decisions, right?

And I feel, like, Marketing needs or has a similar trajectory where at the infancy stage where you haven’t developed that trust and there’s not a lot of perceived value on the role marketing can play, it’s post a flyer at Instagram and make it go viral. Or on the other end of the spectrum is marketing’s got a seat at the leadership table crafting, Institutional decision making right and being a part of those conversations and voicing what the impacts are on these different constituencies.

[00:30:51] Suzan: I love that. Yeah, Jamie Hunt gave a presentation at AMA last year about marketing maturity models she’s implemented at her institutions. And that’s also covered in the book and my interview with her because exactly she, kind of, maps out how to do that. You’re not going to change all of this in a day, so manage your own expectations.

Don’t burn yourself out. This goes across stages. You can plan this. You can measure your progress against this. and I loved it so much, I thought, oh, why does it have to be just a marketing maturity model? Couldn’t we do this for all of the different divisions, you know, under the various VPs? Because that maturity is also going to take some time to achieve.

[00:31:25] Gil: Now, last thing I’d like to talk about is this is all well and good, except we also have this challenge of so much leadership exodus at institutions, whether presidents or marketing leaders, et cetera. And so, now we’ve got this added layer of that challenge of lack of continuity or no one in that role at all.

Right. And so, what are some of your thoughts around how in this unfortunate, kind of, landscape that we’re experiencing right now? for institutions to, be able to, kind of, fill those voids.

[00:31:54] Suzan: Well, and I think it’s no coincidence that Leo Lambert, was president at Elon for 20 years and that Elon became as successful as it is because there was just that focus and that, really long-term leadership in place and many institutions just aren’t that lucky. Their presidents stay for maybe five years or less and there’s constant change in the VP roles as well.

So, I think you’re absolutely right. The reason that I have such a robust culture chapter is because I’m basically saying if we don’t treat the people that we have on our campus well, if we don’t empower them to lead strategically and to also take care of themselves, we are going to have just a revolving door.

Because by the time you have made it to the level of VP or whatever, you have options, right? expect those people to just, kind of, take it day after day, do multiple jobs, not get paid that well, have all this stress on their shoulders, just persevere through it all. They have options, and they’re going to take those options when they hit 30.

the point where they just can’t do it anymore. And I think that’s a reality. Burnout is a reality. Administrative mental health is a reality that we have to address. And so, in the book, I go through some concrete things based on interviews with not just higher ed leaders, but also. business school faculty members who’ve done research on this topic, what we can do, to improve those conditions, not just for our VPs, but for all of our staff members and how we can implement things, like, strength-based management, psychological safety, management philosophy that really values people more so that people have more endurance in those roles because it is going to impact them.

Thank you. hurt your institution to lose a VP every year or two. It’s going to waste a lot of money, waste a lot of time. It’s going to have implications on morale. Things that were just starting to work are going to be stalled. So, I think that’s absolutely a real issue that needs to be addressed. And again, it comes down to leadership.

[00:33:49] Gil: Well, and like you said, curve of that individual, but then also the timeline of socializing their plan around it. You have to redo that cycle over and over again.

[00:33:58] Suzan: And people just start tuning you out, right, like, any leader, because they’re, like, I’ve heard this all before. I’ve been here for 15 years. I’ve seen seven of you come through here. Nothing ever changes. And I think that’s a really difficult mindset to have to fight as a new leader. but yeah, I think most of us

are in these jobs because we really love higher education. Our why is really strong, but too often we feel, like, we’re ultimately, sort of, in a sausage factory where we don’t really get to be plugged into that why on a day-to-day basis, and there’s just so much pressure and in many cases, dysfunction and siloed, disconnected decision-making processes.

If we can connect those decision-making processes and be more strategic about how we execute our strategies. By that, I mean, oftentimes, institutions create strategic plans and then don’t think a second about, how are we going to actually implement this?

How are we going to keep momentum, like, we’re going to put it on the shelf and pat ourselves on the back and say, hey, we have a new strategic plan. Those are really, I think, the things that we have to figure out as an industry. I think a lot of other industries are really much farther ahead when it comes to how to treat their people and how to make decision making processes more seamless.

I think we’re very outdated in how we do that.

[00:35:13] Gil: Well, our audience a lot to think about and talk about. I would love for you to share, I know your book’s coming out in August or so, how can people stay in touch with you and how can they get the book when it drops?

[00:35:34] Suzan: U, Z as in Zebra, A, N as in Nancy, B, R, I, N, K, E, R. And, I’m also still on X.

But not really, so you can find me there if you want to, and you can email me at Suzan Brinker at vivhired.com, V I V H I E D. com. Also, if you want to get added to my email list, and stay in touch via email. Send people very hopefully valuable, non-frequent updates on content that I create and things, like, that.

But I’ll definitely be talking about the book there as well. And the book will be on Amazon when it comes out and it will be an audio book version. So, really excited about that and hope it adds value to people’s lives and daily job responsibilities as well.

[00:36:22] Gil: Awesome, awesome, I appreciate it and for our podcast listeners we’ll put links to all of those methods in our episode. of notes so they can get in touch with you as well. Suzan, thank you so much again for the time and for the work on behalf of our profession. putting in the effort to write a book is a big undertaking and I’m looking forward to getting the firm physical copy when it does come out.

So, thank you so much again for the time today and we will see you all next time on FYI. Bye-bye.

[00:36:48] Suzan: Thank you.

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