Adjusting to New Leadership
Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Dr. Thomas Stafford reflects on how he adjusted to new leadership and what it was like for the university to transition to new chancellors.
Interview on 2012-05-03 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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One of the things that I tell people is that
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as you go through your career one of the things you need to learn to do and do well
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is to adjust to a different boss,
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and I've worked for six chancellors here
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and I've seen a total of eleven, including interims,
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but I didn't report directly to all of them back in those earlier years.
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The point is the same whether it's the chancellor or any other position
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and that is you're going to have a different boss, several different bosses over the course of your career,
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and not only that, those bosses are almost certainly going to be different.
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They're going to be different in their leadership style,
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they're going to be different in the way they operate, the way they like to operate with you, what they expect,
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and it's important for you to very quickly develop an understanding of how your boss likes to operate and what he or she expects.
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So of all the chancellors that I've worked with
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some have been very clear about that, others have not been quite as clear,
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but every single one has had a different style.
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So what I think I've been able to do very well is to understand that style
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and develop a relationship with those chancellors that have enabled us to work well together.
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I mean the way I worked with one chancellor wouldn't work with another chancellor.
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But they've all had their strengths and they've all had areas in which they were not quite as strong, and that's true of everybody,
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I will tell you one story about Chancellor Marye Anne Fox,
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who was one of the brightest and most intelligent persons I've ever known,
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chancellor or otherwise.
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I remember when I went into her office one day
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to give her some information about
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a program in which I wanted her to speak
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that was something to do with student affairs,
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and I took a sheet of paper in and the sheet was full of bullets of information that I wanted her to include in her presentation.
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I handed it to her and she looked at it and read it and handed it back to me,
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and I said, "Well don't you need to keep this?"
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She said, "Oh, no, I've got it."
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She read that page one time and everything that was on that page was in her mind.
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She was that bright. She was pretty extraordinary.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
