A Report : Facilitating Esteemed Employ Leadership (FEEL) 2014: Three Es Programme—Empower, Enable, Excel

Enrichment programme for non-teaching staff was conducted on November 22, 2014, a day prior to the canonization of our founder Saint Kuriakose Elias Chavara, seeking his special blessings. Dr A Senthil Kumaran, Principal Counsellor, Education Excellence, CII Institute of Quality, Bangalore was the resource person.

 

 

Dr Senthil, who had been a faculty at Christ College, spoke about his experience at Christ College and the drastic changes that the institution is undergoing in every aspect. He stressed the role of academic administrators from the admission process of a student till the student leaves the institution. He emphasized the fact that leadership qualities should be built in each individual.

Excellence is a never ending journey
What Excellence means for any institution?
Two defining characteristics of Excellence are
•    an institution understands its imperfections
•    it dedicatedly strives for effective continuous improvement

“I have been always learning great lessons from that one principle, and it appears to me that all the secret of success is there: to pay as much attention to the means as to the end”.          - Swami Vivekananda

The Vision and mission statement of Christ University was referred and examples of attainment were discussed.

Where are we ?
With this background an activity was done titled: where are we here?
•    List 1 initiative in your campus that gives pride to you as academic administration team
•    List 1 practice that if improved, your university will become world class

Post-it slips were used to collect inputs; they were pasted on either side of the stage. Analysis was done by the 30 participants, and top three inputs for each question were identified.

Feeling pride about: Work Culture, Systems, Clean green campus
Want to see improvement: Interdepartmental communication, Training, Self-improvement

The session concluded with the situation which the participants may face while doing the change in their respective work area.

Correlation between Practices and Performance was shared.

PERFORMANCE = Process + People. When either of these components fail, Performance suffers.

Assessment and Audit: The assessment should in the form of dip stick. First we should check our own positives and negatives and through a process we should find to get a good result through a development plan.

Important steps
Plan action, Review periodically, Note the action points, Close the loops (when loops lie open, people lose faith in you)

Aspirations of people matter a lot for any organization. If you find any long-term non-alignment of people and their roles, there is a need to rearrange roles or re-energize aspirations.

Some quick tips suggested:
Prepare a job description of the things you do. Even when you move out of the role, the function carries forward smoothly.