Tough Times Mean Tough Choices: How Will You Handle Them?

Madison, Wis.—April 15, 2009 — When economic hard times come, they’re hard in lots of ways. For you as a community college administrator, one thing they’re going to mean is hard decisions. As money grows tighter, fewer positions and fewer programs can be funded. You may find yourself called upon to make some lonely and painful decisions. And you may face fierce resistance, even as you try to do what you believe is best for all. How can you be confident in your judgment in such situations?

On April 15, North Carolina State University’s W. Dallas Herring Professor of Community College Education Dr. Leila Gonzalez-Sullivan and Dr. Tim Hatcher, Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of Training Development and Adult Education at NC State, gave a 90-minute presentation that supplied practical tools and techniques for community college administrators who find themselves called upon to make tough decisions, and to deal humanely and ethically with the people they will affect.

Gonzalez-Sullivan and Hatcher illustrated concrete ways in which you can:
• Identify challenges facing your college and assess them through the filter of the current economic climate.
• Discover how factors like economic turmoil influence individual and organizational ethics and decision-making.
• Understand five types of conflict, and distinguish those that are destructive from those that are constructive.
• Develop a model for ethical decision-making.
• Examine how the model can be adapted to a broad range of circumstances and applied successfully on your campus.
• Learn successful strategies for resolving conflict and building consensus.

“Conflict is not always a bad thing,” Gonzalez-Sullivan reminded her listeners. “There are organizations that thrive on it because they know that in the middle of that conflict is where the creative solutions really do occur. It's like being in the middle of a whitewater raft – it can be energizing as well is fearful.”

Gonzalez-Sullivan and Hatcher stressed how important it is for the different stakeholders in a decision to make their values clear.

“If we can get clear expressions of those values out there,” Gonzalez-Sullivan said, “so that everybody understands where the individuals are coming from, that's very helpful – in many cases as you state those values, you find that there are real strong commonalities, ones that we can build on and use in some way then to address the conflict whatever it might be.”

Will your decisions be fair, as you face the choices that the coming days will bring? Will they be true to your institution’s mission? Will conflicts be handled constructively, or allowed to tear at the fabric of the college community? Find strategies for addressing these concerns on the CD recording of this presentation, which also includes valuable support materials.

If you missed the seminar and would like to purchase it for your institution, you can order the program in CD or print transcript format, both of which include the presenter's handouts.

Magna Publications is a leading publisher of newsletters and other information products in the higher education segment. Magna also manages onsite and online conferences on topics of interest to higher education.

For more information please contact David Burns, Publisher, Magna Publications, Inc., at 608-227-8109, or dburns@magnapubs.com.