Changing Presidents

By Patrick H. Sanaghan and Larry Goldstein

A presidential transition can be a fragile and stressful time for any campus. We all know how important it is for an institution to select a good interim leader and an effective transition team. Less understood, however, is the critical role of the transition manager.

In fact, the most important decision made by a departing president is the selection of that manager.

Since the potential for missteps is high, the transition manager has to be someone who is well respected throughout the campus, someone who deeply understands the university's culture and complexity, and someone who is trusted by many. The manager needs to be a "cultural traveler" who has access to the rumor mill, is privy to many highly confidential conversations, and is able to deal effectively with campus politics and power.

Effective transition managers come in different shapes and sizes. As consultants for higher education, we have worked with several such managers, who, in their primary jobs, were a provost, a vice president of operations, a chief of staff, a former provost, and a chief financial officer.

If you are chosen as transition manager, your primary responsibility will be to create high-quality and efficient communications throughout the transition process. You should be the key communicator about presidential schedules, campus events, search-committee updates, and board communication. The last thing a campus needs is several voices speaking for the university and offering competing views and inconsistent information.

Among your other responsibilities:

• Create a plan for people on the campus to pay their respects (e.g., presidential events to say good-bye and "meet and greets" for the incoming president).

• Manage the new president's orientation (e.g., prepare briefing books, culture surveys, transition reports).

• Oversee the schedule of events and meetings the new president will need to attend during the first six months to a year in office.

• Keep the lines of communication open between the search committee and the board, and keep the trustees fully informed so they feel meaningfully involved in the transition and believe that it is well planned and moving forward.

• Ensure that any ground rules that have been agreed upon are protected and enforced (e.g., rules concerning the incoming president's requests for information or visits to the campus).

• Communicate regularly with various constituencies on the campus to remind people about the university's past accomplishments and build anticipation for the future.

Clearly, the job of transition manager will involve major responsibility and require a considerable amount of time and energy. We strongly suggest that anyone who accepts the assignment be relieved of a significant amount of regular day-to-day responsibilities.

As soon as possible after you have been appointed transition manager, you should meet with the departing president and the cabinet to identify the president's important relationships that enable the university to pursue its mission. We call that "relationship mapping," and it relates to several of the transition manager's key responsibilities.

Many of the president's relationships -- formal and informal, with organizations and institutions as well as with individuals -- are essential to the college's success in the future and need to be maintained during the transition. At the meeting, the president should provide participants with a little history and context for each primary relationship and describe its value to the institution. All of that information needs to be written down and shared with the incoming president.

Once the initial list has been created -- it can easily run to 40 or 50 key relationships -- along with a rationale for each one, the president needs to prioritize them. That can be done at a subsequent meeting, but it is an essential part of the process. Once prioritized, each relationship should be assigned to a member of the senior management team or to a senior faculty member who will be responsible for maintaining it during the transition. It is important to choose the right person for each assignment so that the external relationships are attended to and respected.

As the transition manager, your role will be to review the relationships map once a month with the senior team to make sure that connections are intact. A typical relationship map might look like this:

• Departing president: maintain ties with trustees and former trustees, as well as major donors.

• Provost: state department of education officials and local school superintendents.

• Chief business officer: community-development district members and chamber-of-commerce leaders.

• Vice president for advancement: mayor and state representatives.

• Vice president for student affairs: other local and regional campus presidents and neighborhood organization representatives.

Two things should be apparent from the above list. First, an actual map would be much longer, with more administrators listed and more relationships. Second, the administrators we identify here would already, as part of their regular duties, be maintaining relationships with many of the constituents listed. For instance, the chief business officer already would know the chamber of commerce leaders, and would have attended past chamber meetings when the agenda included some matter that affected the institution. However, during the transition, the chief business officer would attend all of the chamber's meetings as the institutional representative.

What's different here is that the interactions become more formalized and intentional. The goal is to ensure that people who normally have a relationship with the president, too, feel that they are being well taken care of in the interim and that they are "in the know" about the transition.

Attending to relationship mapping is but one of the important responsibilities that must be undertaken by the transition manager. Yet it is one that can pay huge dividends if it is properly managed. Ensuring that the transition manager has the time needed to oversee the relationship-mapping process, and the many other activities attendant to a presidential transition, should help the institution through this stressful period.