Are you responsible for ensuring your institution provides a rigorous, relevant, high-quality academic experience for your students? Are you one of the people who provides that education?
Are you finding it increasingly difficult to build and maintain the transformative opportunities your institution promises? Does it feel like the culture of your organization is in danger of coming apart?
We can help. When departments fray, external factors erode confidence, hiring is curtailed, deans and provosts have to share tough news, faculties revolt, and conflict escalates, everyone is impacted. We aren’t going to make bad news go away. But often there are communication strategies and tools of conflict prevention, management, and resolution that can greatly reduce internal crisis. Sometimes it can start with a few tweaks in the wording of emails and strategic questions asked of key players. Other times long-term interventions are required to repair emotional harm and re-instill confidence in an institution’s aspirations.
Our approach is multi-partial: we don’t take sides or advocate for a particular view. We will never encourage a dean to kill a program or create a new position. Our work is focused on effective process to achieve the goals that the institution and its people identify as important. We support processes that ensure both the goals and the views that underlie them are included and heard.
Academic Settings
Our work is entirely confidential. Unless there’s illegal activity or concern about harm to self or others, we will never share anything with anyone unless we have explicit permission to do so. That applies to leadership, faculty, staff – everyone. Also, following the standards of practice of the International Ombuds Association, we serve in an informal and independent capacity. We are not deciders of anything, and we do not serve as an arm of the institution. We call people who come to us “visitors” because they necessarily come voluntarily.
See our “Services” page for a summary of the ways we can help. There are situations where we meet with a set of stakeholders, facilitate a group meeting, and then walk away. There are others where we are involved in a long-term process, mediating and facilitating interactions, providing coaching for chairs and administrators, and offering workshops and dedicated support for participants in difficult dynamics of multi-faceted operations. Our support is tailored to your needs, and if we can work ourselves out of a job, that hopefully means you’ve found or developed skills, tools, and the capacity to work productively without us - that’s our goal!
