One time army recruit, Dave Hall finds his role as University of Leicester’s chief operating officer radically different to military life. But he says that university professionals can learn a lot from spending time on a different sort of frontline.
Before studying at university, you were in the army. Are there any skills and experiences that have proved useful in university administration?
It gave me experience of what it is like to be well-led and managed, if you can describe military discipline as management. Actually I think it is the contrast that stands out, in that in the army it is about clarity of action, everybody needing to know exactly what they need to do, about obedience, very little questioning and hard physical work in an environment that is fairly aggressive. That is a complete contrast to what it is like working in a university.
In the army I served with blokes who couldn’t read, who had come out of foster care – very different backgrounds to myself. That in itself is an eye-opening experience.
There are times working in universities where I have felt that a commitment to widening participation needs to be heartfelt and not just seen as a necessity as a means of meeting government targets. We have a moral and social responsibility to ensure that we are genuinely making education is available to as wide a range as possible and take action proactively further down the education chain to try and level the playing field.
You went to university in your twenties. Has that given you a different perspective of the student experience?
Work experience is a kind of wet term for three years the army, but I’d had experience of a life outside education and I think that I have always felt subsequently that students should have some sort of work experience. It might be difficult for some, but ideally I recommend when you get to 17 or 18 you should be thinking of work experience, or even travel.
I do worry that the system we now have is necessarily more consumer orientated and that is appropriate up to a point. But you have students coming straight out of school to university with a sense of entitlement. I think to get the full benefits of university you have to put in the effort academically and also use the opportunity to experiment, try new things whether it is in sports and clubs or meeting a wide range of people from across the world.
I think having spent some time working or outside education, gives you the potential to exploit the opportunity you get more effectively, rather than simply turning up in the anticipation of getting your credentials for employment. The challenge we have got at universities is being clear that we are not credential factories and there is much more to being a student than simply trying to get a 2:1.
More than ever it is important that institutions like mine make it clear all the potential opportunities that are open to students. Even students that come at an older age have an opportunity to mature intellectually with us, not just emotionally.
You have been registrar and chief operating office for ten years at Leicester. How has the role changed in that time?
What has dramatically changed my role is the digital revolution and the need to understand the potential of technology, not just in changing the way we administer and manage universities but in the education we provide, how we provide it and what’s being provided. We don’t know how digitisation is going to change our system.
People are speculating with MOOCs and with the ready access to free educational materials online whether the current model of the university will survive long into the future. We still don’t know whether it will transform the sector as it has transformed music, the taxi sector or hotels. I still think we are in the early stages of finding out what that means.
On a personal level, I obviously use technology far more than I used to, in fact I probably don’t use it enough in order to collaborate, to pass information around in order to share ideas. There is far more that we could do, spending some time each month working from home and being productive in doing that.
The risk is that I don’t spend enough time getting out of the office. I do not spend enough time seeing colleagues in other department when I would have done in the past, entirely because a lot of work comes through via email so you have a tendency of sitting at your desk and trying to sort through and talk to colleagues over email. That’s a discipline I need to instil in myself
Could you reflect on the importance of the efficiency agenda for COOs?
I think from the perspective of the administration of the university, the efficiency is tied to the continuous improvement service and I don’t think you can think about efficiency separately from effectiveness.
You’ve got to know what you are trying to achieve with a particular system. Some of that understanding is achieved by going out and talking to staff on the frontline, otherwise managers will become distant from that.
What we have been doing is getting senior staff to spend some time at the frontline talking to their staff and understanding the way they actually work. We don’t do enough of it. We are by no means a beacon of light in this and I need to be a role model by getting out and about more.
When we have done an analysis of processes and systems we find that what drives inefficiency is waste and redundancy within a process. This is normally associated with poor customer service as well.
Some of the typical problems we find is where processes are very functionalised. We have a structure chart for the university and this is perceived to be real when it’s just a management tool to give us some sense of who should meet with whom as opposed to how we deliver the service. There will be batching and hand-offs associated with that, which creates waste and inefficiency and is also associated with poor services.
Driving improvements in services, does drive improvements in efficiency. It is not the case that to have a better service you spend more money on it.
The other challenge is a more cultural one. We found that staff are doing their jobs correctly according to rules and regulations that are outdated and outmoded and should be changed. We need to be able to balance the contradiction between encouraging staff to take risks and being accountable, so that we don’t jump on people when they make mistakes, especially when what we are trying to do is improve customer service.
What are the biggest achievements relating to the efficiency agenda at Leicester?
We have established distance learning hubs that bring together a range of staff into one location and one team. That has had its controversies but I think on balance we’ve now got a better handle on the way we support distance learning students. When we’re supporting students there are different people who have different responsibilities for different elements of the support. They need to work together to understand people’s roles. Hence the idea of a hub, not centralising and using the kind of language that antagonises people.
We are also introducing more self services processes to allow students to do more of their administration and staff as well. There is more to come of that in 2017/18.
Can you describe the leadership challenges that COOs face in terms of encouraging cultural change within universities?
The biggest problem in a lot of organisations is the tensions between different groups of staff within the organisation. It is important to try to get a sense of a common goal of what the university is about. We have tried to address that in part through the development of the strategic plan and a cross-university conversation where we asked colleagues to think about what kind of university they want in the future.
There isn’t a hard and fast boundary between what is academic and what is administrative, certainly from the perspective of the student, or even from a funding agency. Actually the boundaries are more blurred than we perceive them to be. It’s when colleagues work together, regardless of the nature of their contract, that we are most effective.
We have had to make some challenging decisions as a result of this plan. We have got to tackle some areas where we are not performing in the way we would want to and it is expensive to stay in an area of research where we are generating very little income from it.
We are going through a process of consultation with each academic department and looking at where our strengths are, where we aren’t so strong and what we are going to do about it. We can’t keep investing in weak areas to make them strong. It’s not a sustainable strategy. We have to stop doing some things.
We are trying to be transparent about the process and why we need to do it. We are having meetings with heads of department and we’ve shared lots of management information about where we’re doing well and where we are not doing well.
It helps in this environment to be risk tolerant. We do want things to happen, initiatives and ideas to come out of the academic and administrative community independent of them being dragged out of them by senior management.
Finally, it’s also about creating a culture where it is legitimate for academic managers in particular to be clear about what is expected from staff. To support them, to help them in achieving those expectations and hold them to account if they are not met. That is very, very challenging because for some staff, the idea that you should manage an academic colleagues goes against the grain.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
At 1am on Saturday morning I got a phone call from security saying there was a fire so I rushed into work and found that we had a fire in a lab. I stayed on site until other colleagues arrived and we sorted all out. No one was hurt, but I didn’t expect it.
On the Sunday I had a phone call saying there was a flood – I am just waiting for the call about a plague of locusts! In this job you don’t know what is going to happen. Fortunately, sometimes the surprises are more pleasant.
I don’t enjoy this job in the same way as I enjoy pottering around the garden with the kids, but I suppose if I think back to my days in the army, the great thing about it is I have got a warm office and a soft chair.
Dave Hall is the chief operating officer at the University of Leicester
