Elliot Felix: Either, it’s either the master stroke or the Achilles heel of the book, although I’m not sure books have heels. But I don’t really, I don’t really define it in the book. Because I think there are, there is no one definition. Because I think there’s so many different facets of it.

You can think about student success in terms of belonging as Dan. Mentioned, and he has great insights on this. You can think of student success in terms of the metrics, right? Retention rate, graduation rate, career placement rate. You can think in terms of thriving and living a fulfilling and rewarding life.

Keith Edwards: Hello and welcome to Student Affairs now I’m your host, Keith Edwards Today. Elliot Felix’s new book, the Connected College, which focuses focused on breaking down silos and working across functions to center. Innovation and agility for student success is our focus. We’re also joined by Dr. Dan Maxwell, who is featured in the chapter on student affairs in the connected college.

I’m so looking forward to talking more about the principles, advocating the book, and so many hundreds of examples of putting this into practice. Throughout. Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of fire education and student affairs.

We release new episodes every week on Wednesday. Find details about this episode or browse the archives@studentaffairsnow.com and we have two sponsors. Evolve empowers higher education leaders to lead with and through perilous times by releasing fear, gaining courage, and taking action through an executive coaching program, including individual and group coaching, and an intentionally designed and curated curriculum to maximize impact.

And Huron’s educational research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology, and culture to foster innovation, financial health, and student success. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker, author, and coach helping higher ed leaders create transformation for better tomorrows for us, all through leadership, learning, and equity.

You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. And I’m recording this from my home and Elliot’s in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the intersections of the current and ancestral homeland of the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s get to the conversation. Dan and Elliot, thank you both for being here. Why don’t we just begin with some introductions, a little bit about you and a little bit about this project, and then we will, we’ll get off and running.

Elliot, let’s start with you.

Elliot Felix: Thanks Keith. Happy to be here and happy to in, also happy to be here with Dan Maxwell who you’ll hear from in a second. And you hear from in my book. And I’m an author, I’m a speaker and I’m a consultant to more than a hundred colleges and universities, helping them enable student success and create better connected colleges and universities where students can succeed.

And I’ve been lucky enough to do that. Helping them really understand and improve the spaces where students learn and live, the services that support them, the programs they engage in, the technology systems they use, and the strategy that drives all that. And really help more than a million students over the last 20 plus years.

And, the best thing about writing a book is you get to talk to a lot of people that are much smarter than you and know more in different things than you. And and I was delighted to talk to Dan many times not just for the book, but but before that and he brought some great insights and you’re about to hear those now.

Keith Edwards: Awesome. Thanks for writing the book and thanks for joining us, and thanks for bringing Dr. Dan Maxwell with you. Dan, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about you?

Daniel Maxwell: Greetings everybody. I’m hailing from Houston, Texas. I work as the vice President for Student Success and Student Life at the University of Houston downtown.

So we’re a regional comprehensive four year institution with a population of about 14,000 students. 70% identify as first gen, 60% Hispanic, 20% African American, about 16%. Caucasian. And so we, and we’re non-residential and so this is new for me. I’m starting my 37th year in higher education as a student affairs professional, and it’s the first time that I find myself working at a university that is not a residential community.

And so as I think about how we create community and what that needs to look like it, it gives me some pause. And as someone who’s, again, as I said, been doing this for a couple decades, it’s a really neat experience to kinda. Take all of what I’ve learned over time and come into this space and really talk about what does it mean to create a space where students feel like they’re connected, that they belong, that they know it matters, that they come to school come to the campus and get connected.

And really have enjoyed this opportunity to work with Elliot. Just to talk about how do you break these silos down to, to figure out how do we make a difference in students’ lives so that they can pursue the degree that they have made a conscious decision to, to go forward and do. Feel some level of obligation in this work.

And so over the course of my career, I’ve had opportunities to work in housing Greek life, student activities, student unions general administration and student affairs, where I’ve danced in a couple different areas of functionality and just sit in a place now where it’s, where it really means is how do you build partnerships across.

At your institution to get students where they need to go. So excited about the conversation today and look forward to engaging with you all.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Awesome. Great to have you both here. Elliot, the book is subtitled. It’s the connected college Leadership Strategies for student success. And you’ve been working on this it seems to me, as you mentioned, more than a hundred colleges, more than a million students.

Those are great numbers. I love it. It seems like this emerged from a lot of those consults and conversations and seeing what works and seeing what doesn’t work, but your focus really is leadership strategies for student success. So we see the outcome there of student success, the pathway, great leadership strategies.

Tell us all how this kind of book emerged. From all of that good work.

Elliot Felix: It’s funny, I was talking about working with people that know more than you, and one of them is certainly my editor and my publisher and I started thinking about this book that would be an evidence-based playbook for leaders to break down silos across functions.

And so they said, so it’s a leadership book. And I, until that moment that hadn’t occurred to me like, oh, okay, like this is a, I’m writing because I was thinking like, okay, this is a higher ed book. But it’s actually, it’s like a leadership book and a higher ed book had a baby. Because it’s for leaders in higher ed who are maybe they’re established leaders and they’re trying to work across functions like, let’s say, on something like experiential learning, which I think is one of those things.

That’s everybody’s job, right? It’s not academic affairs. It’s not student affairs, it’s not the Center for Teaching and Learning. It’s not the alumni office. It’s it’s not just curriculum, it’s also corporate partnerships. And so if you want students working on real world projects for companies in their classes, it, that takes a village, right?

It takes everybody working together. And so I met so many leaders that were trying to make those connections, but encountering problems of strategy and structure and sometimes culture that I thought. It, I could really make a contribution if I help those folks, if I help those leaders make progress.

And so it was really a way of doing that and recognizing that people are in multiple stages of their leadership journey. Some folks are well established, like I was mentioning, but others might be emerging leaders that, as you move up, you have to look out right as you move up, you have to.

Take the expertise you have in your function and your discipline, and you have to connect it to the other ones. My mission in creating the connected college was to help people break down those silos, to do things like experiential learning or do things like leadership development. To get a shared picture of the student and to make those find common ground and make those connections.

Keith Edwards: Yeah I love this language. I, you’re using same language that I often use about breaking down silos and getting beyond the expertise of our discipline if we’re academics or our function if we’re in administrative roles.

And and seeing the bigger picture. I find that I’ve heard them referred

Elliot Felix: to as. As cylinders of excellence also okay.

Keith Edwards: And I think that’s a great point because I think sometimes we love our cylinders of excellence, right?

Elliot Felix: Yes.

Keith Edwards: ‘Cause we’re comfortable like to keep the cheese familiar in that

Elliot Felix: exact place.

Yeah. Yep.

Keith Edwards: But then sometimes we don’t like the silos, but we’re just so busy we can’t get out of ’em, even though we’d like to, or even if not, I’m worried you’re too busy. And so I don’t want to bother you. I don’t want to be an inconvenience to you. So there’s a, we love it, we wanna stay here ’cause we’re feeling uncomfortable.

But then there’s, I don’t love it. I don’t like it, but I’m busy or I think you are. And there’s a deferential staying in our silos.

Elliot Felix: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s, I think sometimes the trouble is the structure that you have these silos that you might have different folks across an institution doing.

Kind of similar things in isolation. But sometimes it’s also a strategy problem, so I opened the book talking about a university I worked with. We were creating a student success hub. I had folks around the table, library, it, math center, tutoring center, writing center, writing lab, and I was in the around the table.

What’s the difference between a writing center and a writing lab? There basically was no difference. It was they were in two different buildings. They reported to two different people, right? They used two different, sets of technology to book appointments and to track con consultations. And so those folks really didn’t have the opportunity to work together and bringing them in one space, using one set of tools, pooling the staff which were, grad students or third or fourth years, gave them a chance to work together.

So sometimes it’s the structure. But I think a lot of times it is the strategy. People wanna work together, but they don’t quite have the way to do that. And I think a big part of it is, especially since the pandemic folks are stuck in this, do more with less mindset. Yeah. And. I don’t blame them because I think a lot of that is because they don’t have a strategy that focuses them.

If you don’t have a strategic plan or a memo or direction that gives you clear priorities so that you can say no, you have to keep saying yes. And then all of a sudden you’re spread too thin and people are too busy. They are, they may wanna. Keith and Dan may wanna work together, but you’re each like spread too thin so you can’t carve out the time to make it happen.

So my wish for folks is that they actually have strategy that focuses them. So instead of doing more with less, you can actually do less with more. You can be more focused and put your resources where they count. Yeah.

Keith Edwards: Yeah, I’ve been talking about folks who have been getting that mantra of, we’ve had three years of budget cuts.

We’ve lost 17 staff members, and we’re being told to do more with less, which is just demoralizing, right? It’s just arguing with reality to then it’s impossible. Do less with less. Oh yeah. So now if we’re gonna do less with less, we have fewer staff, we have fewer resources, what is less Right? Sets the priorities to then the further extension of that is where you’re able to start doing less.

So you can be more. So what is, that’s super strategic and really aligning there. Elliot, the whole book is about student success. How do you define student success? That’s the outcome. You’re the whole book is the strategy and structure and organizing to get there. How do you define student success?

Elliot Felix: Either, it’s either the master stroke or the Achilles heel of the book, although I’m not sure books have heels. But I don’t really, I don’t really define it in the book. Because I think there are, there is no one definition. Because I think there’s so many different facets of it.

You can think about student success in terms of belonging as Dan. Mentioned, and he has great insights on this. You can think of student success in terms of the metrics, right? Retention rate, graduation rate, career placement rate. You can think in terms of thriving and living a fulfilling and rewarding life.

You can think of success in terms of each individual student’s goals. And so I don’t offer one definitive. Definition, just to be circular. I don’t offer, I don’t offer one definition of student success, but I talk about all the different components of it and how they can go together in each institution’s own way, given their strategy, their structure their culture.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. That could really vary from a community or technical college to a massive public institution, to a very small liberal arts college or an arts school. Lots of different ways to define student success for those students, and it’s probably not one, but as you’re saying. Multiple definitions coming in.

The book is broken up into sort of this case, and then it’s broken up into the different functions. It’s through institutional research, enrollment management, academic programs. There’s 14 chapters. I won’t read them all but one of them is on student affairs. And that’s a big focus for our audience.

So Dan, you are featured, and then I’ll also say that the book is full of examples. Elliot has really packed the book with examples of different campuses, different leaders, different success stories, innovative approaches, and ways that this is going. But Dan, you’re featured in the chapter on student affairs.

How have you put this approach to work in your work?

Daniel Maxwell: Yeah, there’s a couple things that you all were talking about that I was trying to. Put some thought around. The first one I would say is that I think we all have to understand that students don’t really care about our structures. They don’t care who reports to who.

They doesn’t matter to them. They’re seeking a value added experience. Get that can be seamless. That they don’t wanna come to school to struggle. They wanna learn, they wanna be engaged, they wanna be part of it. But they also may be entering into this space that they’re not comfortable with, especially if they’re first generation students.

They may be balancing some form of imposter syndrome. They may be just trying to figure out how do I do all of this at the same time? Because it’s not high school, it’s not community college. In some cases, it’s not my workforce education, but I wanna get that four year degree. There’s a lot of we have a really strong RN to BSN program, so we have students who already have a career now they wanna get the bachelor’s degree to match what they’ve already been practicing. So I think at the end of the day when you open up the front doors, you have to say to folks, the goal here is to get you across the stage. The goal here is to get you a degree.

You’ve said yes to the invitation. So how do we respect the structure of our silos in a very positive way? Because there needs to be structured to, to deliver. But no, but not so tied to it that we don’t see where the partnership should exist from the very beginning. And so for me the conversation about where we are in student affairs today is a number of the things that you’ve already talked about.

Budget cuts, declining enrollments. How do you do more with less? And this may sound, kind of cliche for some people, but how do you know that what you’re doing actually is making the impact? That you think that it’s making? So I would say that probably more so in my 37 years of higher ed, I’ve become much more attuned to program evaluation and assessment and strategic use of resources.

So at the end of the day if your numbers go, if your enrollment starts going down, then your student, the amount of student fees that you collect, that sometimes really. Covers all of your expenses or expenditures in student affairs. Or if your numbers go down and you have auxiliary operations and people aren’t coming through the front door or if you depended on tuition dollars and there’s fewer students coming in the front door, your budget’s gonna shrink one way or another.

And at some point, instead of doing 20 programs, maybe you can only do 15. How are you gonna make the smart choice to do what’s needed for your students today? Not for your students from yesterday. And and I think also the whole concept of student success in some ways we have to take a breath and a step back and say, how do you make meaning of that?

If it’s everybody’s responsibility for student success, then I will say yes. The metrics matter. What’s your year to year retention? What’s your persistence? What’s your graduation rate? ’cause guess what? Those rates are gonna be tied to probably some form of formula funding in your state.

So how are you getting people across the stage? How do I make meaning of it? If what funds me is the student fee, and how do I look at how my student fees are reallocated into the space? But it should also mean to some of the points that Elliot made is how does the student feel about this experience as is it value added?

Does it feel like it matters that I come to this university every day when I go to the financial aid office? Are they gonna listen to me or are they gonna give me step one, two, and three? Who’s going to hear my story? Yeah, because my story is unique to me. Now, it may not be unique to somebody who’s been in higher ed for 30 plus years because I’ve heard a lot of stories.

But to that student at that time, it is unique to them. And they need to know someone’s gonna listen to them to figure out how to navigate moving forward. So I, I think what I approach with Elliot in, in my contributions to the conversation is how do you take these universities or colleges, whether it’s 2000 or 42,000, how do you make it small enough that the student knows that it matters, they’re in the classroom and it matters that they are engaged on campus and it matters that they show up.

Because all I, all some of our students need is one or two roadblocks, and they don’t have enough confidence or belief that it’s gonna be resolved, that they can step out, step away, and they may not come back.

I’m not saying that it should be, risk free or stress free because life is not those things.

But we should be conscious enough about the roadblocks that are either created because of. Policy and protocol at the federal or state level, but also the ones that we create maybe unconsciously at the college level, and how do we minimize those? Because the fewer roadblocks we have, the more opportunity our students are gonna stay with us and give us a chance when we misstep.

Yeah. Or don’t get it right.

Keith Edwards: You’re bringing up a couple things. I’m hearing the quantitative and qualitative, right? There’s the quantitative of persistence, retention at the mass scale. Those are really important things. But then also the qualitative. How do people feel? Do they feel like they belong?

Do they feel listened to? They feel like they mattered? What is the quality of their experience? Do they feel like they’re getting an excellent experience in the classroom to the student organization? So the quantitative and qualitative balancing. It’s really great. And then you’re also, but the policy reminded me Derek Sives is a great thinker who I love, and he tells a story about this diner where someone once paid by check and it bounced.

So there’s a huge sign that says they don’t allow checks anymore. And one time someone came in without shoes, so there’s a huge sign that says. You have to wear shoes and one si time someone came in and just drank coffee and ordered nothing else. So there’s a huge sign that says you can’t just order coffee, you have to order.

And there’s 247 different signs around the diner about all the things you can’t do because one time someone did that. And it’s a miserable place to be. It doesn’t feel welcoming. It’s just because one time, one thing happened and some I don’t think we do that on college campuses, but I think we’ve got some legacy things because one time there was this problem with this student or maybe with this staff member, maybe with this faculty member.

And so we may, we didn’t want to talk with that person, right? I didn’t want to talk with Dan about this uncomfortable thing and have this moment of conflict. So he made a big grand rule. And now 23 years later, we’re like, why do we have this rule? It’s always been there, so we gotta keep it right.

And so how do we rethink those policies and procedures? Some, I love that you’re pointing out, some are imposed on us and some of them we’ve created, right? And so how do we really look at those in ways that help make sure that we’re not getting in students’ way or our own?

Daniel Maxwell: Yeah, I had a, yeah, and I think, oh, go ahead.

Sorry.

Elliot Felix: I was just gonna quote Dan because there’s so many great insights from you in the, that I tried to infuse in the chapter and a few of my favorites. We, the big, one of the big ideas is bridging student affairs and academic affairs. And I feel like some of these things, like you’re saying, are policy and some are every day.

Actions, and some are explicit and some are implicit, but so many great suggestions that are just, I think second nature to Dan that I think are great lessons for others like data as a way to. Create common ground across academic affairs and student affairs. So you’re getting that shared picture of the student.

I think you, your quote was, gut plus data is really good. I like, I make decisions, I make some decisions with my gut, but gut plus data is even better. Yeah. And then the other, just simple things like when it’s time for a student to get engaged, to get involved, to join a student organization.

Try and, find a club that connects to a course. Just so you’re knitting those worlds together. ‘Cause I think that is, that’s maybe the, that might be the biggest silo on most campuses is the Academic affairs, student affairs. And, NASPA even used to define itself as quote unquote outta the classroom.

And thank goodness that’s been stricken from the definition because we all have a more holistic. Picture of students and how they succeed. But but I think, yeah, there there’s just so many lessons there, whether they’re about the policy or the daily practices.

Daniel Maxwell: And people want to belong to something that’s bigger than themselves, right? They want to be in community. They may not always have the words or the language to say why this is important to them, but people want that sense of connection. They want to feel like they belong to something they want it in the classroom, right?

I think at the end of the day, people want a really engaging academic experience. They want their faculty member. To challenge them. Maybe not all the time, they wanna feel like they’re learning something. And that’s, that’s the pressure on our colleagues in the classroom, right?

It’s it’s hard to be on two or three times a day when you’re walking into a new set of students and you hope they’ve read the book, you hope they’ve done their homework right, so that you can have an engaging conversation because that’s, that engagement is going to really put the fire underneath the learning because the wheels are turning and people are processing what they’re taking into it.

And so how do we help, how can we help our faculty friends, and how can we hold ourselves accountable for you just can’t say, I’ve got 90 clubs on campus and hope people show up to the 90 club meetings.

Elliot Felix: Yeah. That’s a great, that’s a great point because I think there’s a real risk that student success stays.

Or is seen as the purview or domain only of student affairs, but it’s really everybody’s job. And in the same way that every faculty member might have taken a class to the library at some point to introduce them to those resources. The idea that faculty could be the link to take you to the Student Success Center, tutoring, writing, take you to the Career Development Center, bring in someone from the Career development center.

To speak. I think there’s a lot of like low hanging fruit. Sometimes I love this idea, forget where I heard it originally, but just one career center years ago went on this sort of charm, offensive or campaign, and they told faculty, Hey, if you have a conference and you’re not feeling well, don’t cancel your class.

We will show up and do a career development activity. Just things like that, I think can make such a difference in making student success, everybody’s business and knitting together faculty and staff and students and alumni and corporate partners. I think there’s, I talk about the problems, but I also see so many solutions out there, so many people doing amazing things.

Keith Edwards: What a great segue, Elliot. Let’s move to that. We’ve talked about why, what student success is, and this defined without a definition, this broad definition that, that allows it to be for different students, for different institutions, right? And then we’ve talked about these leadership strategies, making sure we’re changing the structure and the strategy to, to eliminate silos or these, I forget your very positive term for it, Elliot.

Elliot Felix: Oh, cylinders of excellence. Cylinders of excellence. I heard that on a campus once, so I can’t take credit for that. Only just being a good listener.

Keith Edwards: Yeah, that’s that’s a good skill and keeping

Elliot Felix: a straight face.

Keith Edwards: Yeah,

Elliot Felix: I’ll give myself some credit for that too.

Yeah.

Keith Edwards: So our cylinders of excellence are silos. I, this is student affairs now, and so our focus on student affairs, but I’d love to hear from both of you. What thoughts do you have that student affairs can help create a connected college? Beyond student affairs with faculty colleagues, with advancement with other folks.

And then what can we do within student affairs? So what can student affairs leaders do to connect with others? And then what can we do within our kind of realms to help do that. Elliot, maybe we’ll start with you and we can just banter this back and forth.

Elliot Felix: I think it’s the things are big and small.

Some of them are s small things like, bring your, connect your class, connect your course to other resources on campus. But I think some of the, like the career center, like the writing center, like the tutoring center, like the student veterans office, whatever, whatever it might be.

Because I think faculty have such amazing power to recommend different resources and advise students. And I think that mentoring side of things is so critical. We know from things like the Gallup Purdue Index that. Students who had an encouraging mentor, which could be a faculty member, it could be their boss at their student employment opportunity.

At the library, at the career center, in the student success center as a peer coach, whatever it might be. They’re twice as likely to be engaged after graduation. To be enthusiastic and involved in. And energetic about their work. They’re twice as likely to think their education was worth the cost.

So I think those small linkages can have a huge impact, but I think there’s also bigger things that you can do programmatically. I think leadership is a great opportunity. Every campus is interested in leadership development, and I don’t know any leader that wants to be developed as a narrow.

One sided, person. I think every leadership development program at its core has some kind of holistic approach which is the perfect opportunity for student affairs and academic affairs to get together. So I’m bullish on leadership as a great collaboration opportunity.

Daniel Maxwell: Yeah I would expand on that a couple ways. One, I think for, from a staff perspective. I’ve heard this, I heard this term recently. I was doing some work with Vijay Pedicure on his new book the Alchemy of Talent. So plugging somebody else while We’re also plugging your book, Alex, that’s great’s really good, but there’s room for everybody I know.

But Vijay brought in this great conversation with my leadership team about do you wanna be a team of leaders or do you wanna be a leadership team? And he talked about if people are coming into the rooms, if you think about. Leaders from across the institution or just within the division of student affairs, or in my case, student success and student life.

Do you come in vertically where you’re thinking about what I’m responsible for? Or do you come into this space and then tilt yourself horizontally and ask yourself, how do we collectively work together? So I think when you’re talking about connecting academic affairs and student affairs, yeah.

Universities are gonna have a couple different structures. Sometimes people rely on just making everybody report to one person ’cause therefore they’ll have to work together. To be honest with you, I think it’s okay to have some things separate. The question is, how do our leaders work together? So do our leaders come together vertically or horizontally?

And if I’m coming into space just worrying about my stuff and I’m not thinking about how my stuff really connects with the other parts of the campus, how are we ever gonna either take down the silos or at least make them more transparent? Versus being solid.

Elliot Felix: Yeah.

Daniel Maxwell: So I think in some cases here at the University of Houston downtown in the model of the division that I have both curricular and co-curricular.

High tide touchpoint opportunities. So I have the academic support center, so supplemental instruction, tutoring, reading and writing lab. The testing center. I have a program called the Gator Success Institute, where every incoming FTIC gets a success coach.

And those success coaches partner with the academic advisors.

And so those are two additional touch points that first year students have people who are thinking with them, working alongside them, challenge ’em to think about taking advantage of resources, know their names know their names, right? And they, a and a student may feel more comfortable with her academic advisor, but the academic advisor knows, let me volley you over here to my colleague.

So Dan calls Elliot and says Elliot. I just met with Keith, and he’s on point with his classes, but he, it feels like he’s disconnected. He’s not making a connection with the university. How can you reach out to him as his success coach and have a conversation with and so those kinds of partnerships.

I think help to break down the silos, but they also help to take universities or colleges and make them feel a little bit smaller. A little bit more attainable. So those connections are really important. And I do think that there are, based on historical experiences that may be faculty and staff have had at their universities, sometimes we have to reset relationships.

Sometimes we have to say, you know what? Prior to me. I understand these things used to happen going forward though, this is how I wanna interface with you, that if you’re having a disruption in the classroom, I don’t want you to worry about how do I hold this student accountable? How do I address it?

I want you to pick up the phone, you call the dean of office. ’cause this is not now about. What you’re teaching in the classroom, it’s about how students are behaving in the classroom and you have a partner to figure out how to make this more successful. Because at the end of the day, we really don’t want the student to leave, but we want them to know what their responsibility is to be in being a good citizen and a good student at our institution.

Elliot Felix: Yeah.

Daniel Maxwell: So reinvesting in those relationships. Take time and energy and quite honestly, people are thinking, I got so much on my plate now. You want me to do dot.dot? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s the.dot dots. I think that your book is speaking to Elliot. It’s the, it’s those.dot dots, which are the connections, which are the relationships which are challenging us to get out of our vertical and go to our horizontal style of leadership and part.

Keith Edwards: I love what you said there about if you’re having trouble with a student in the classroom, call the dean of students’ office and partner, you’ve got a partner, which is different than dumping off a problem on the Dean of students’ office and washing your hands of it, but really partnering, which is another way of being connected.

And I love what you were talking about, VA Jade’s book and this. Vertical versus horizontal. Patrick Lencioni, who wrote The Five Dysfunctions of A Team and now is doing a lot on Working Genius, which is another great book, he talks about the senior leadership team needing to be your first team.

Elliot Felix: Yeah.

Keith Edwards: If your first team is the people who report to you, then you can be very siloed. But if your first team is the senior leadership team, then you’re paying attention to the intersections, the connections, the broad patterns, and that’s really what senior leadership teams need to be doing. So same idea, just a another book, another name, drop to reference.

Elliot, what has this got you thinking?

Elliot Felix: I think what Dan said and what you’ve just remarked on made me think of a couple things that I think could also help folks in student affairs. Now, pun intended. And please, we love it. I think one, one is, we were talking about leadership as a opportunity area because by definition you want a holistic approach.

I think the other thing, which is a really powerful forcing function for collaboration. Is a lack of time scarcity. And Dan, I know you’re, you’re working at a predominantly non-residential campus and on that kind of campus and many others. The old model that students are gonna do co-curriculars in, in spare time that they don’t have

Keith Edwards: 9 39, it’s just totally

Elliot Felix: outdated, like going to the career center.

Going to the tutoring center. So that makes me think of two things. One is students aren’t gonna do these extra things in spare time. They don’t have, you have to integrate them. So you have to for instance, there’s only 24% of students take a career exploration and development course for credit.

Which is just crazy pants. Like you should integrate those or. You think about only 40% of students do an internship and only, I think 25% of first gen students do an internship. ’cause it’s a, it’s a big chunk of time. It might be hard to get, it might be relying on social capital that you don’t have.

So the idea of like work integrated learning, real world projects for companies, leveraging these new marketplaces that are arising where it’s really easy to connect companies with. Faculty to work on projects in their courses. I think these are all the new model of integration as opposed to extra because we know like extra isn’t gonna work and in the meantime, the other I think amazing insight the amazing opportunity or unity, in student affairs we ha is mental health.

We have. A third of students with an anxiety diagnosis, a quarter of students with depression. I diagnosis according to the American College Health Assessment. And one of the great folks I talked to who runs student health at UVA he was saying time management is the kind of secret sauce to a more holistic approach to mental health because.

Mental health. People hear mental health and they think more counseling, which, yes, but also like more exercise, more time outdoors, more time with friends, more time listening to music. But that was a lot of mores, right? And so how are students gonna create that time? Maybe it’s a faculty member.

Maybe it’s the Dean of Students, maybe it’s their RA telling them about, Hey, like at the Academic Success Center, you can take a workshop on managing your time. You can take a workshop on study skills, and if you unlock. Half an hour a day, or you can, you can get digital, digital hygiene, right?

Like a half an hour less on Instagram. Could be the time outdoors or whatever it might be. So I think

Keith Edwards: stop criticizing my morning. Stop criticizing my morning.

Elliot Felix: We all need to doom scroll. Yeah. Every once in a while, or I don’t know what the opposite of hope Scroll.

Yeah. Yeah. But but I think there’s, there’s some really interesting things happening about how do you shift your model from extra and, from the spare time, outdated paradigm, and then how do you help students create more time since that’s maybe the most limiting factor for many of them.

Yeah.

Keith Edwards: I love this. I love your distinction between integrated approaches versus extra approaches. And when people are pressed for time capacity, maybe they have other jobs that they have to do to help pay, but they’ve got other commitments childcare, elder care, long commutes. There’s so many reasons why they don’t have that.

And so I love that distinction between extra to integration. And I think the step further I think we can take it is rather than recommending they go to a workshop. Which is another thing they’ve gotta do. How do we take. How do we take the best wisdom we have about time management and deliver it to them in two, three minute videos or little things that they see while in the hallway or bulletin boards or digital displays outside the coffee shop, right?

How do we deliver this so it doesn’t have to be a 60 minute commitment to be in a room, right? Even better at 7:00 PM for this thing, so you’re talking about integrating this in, how do we integrate it into the things they’re already doing? So it’s value added as we go.

Daniel Maxwell: And I think the other part of it is and I know some schools do this really well, you think about a first year experience and a second year or sophomore, second year experience.

But I don’t think we can underestimate some kind of. Program for credit, right? That talks about how to be successful at school. So however you feel comfortable naming it. And I don’t care if you’re coming from an institution where you’ve already been doing AP classes since you were in eighth grade, or you’re coming from a school that was under resourced, or you’re coming from a workforce program.

What does it mean to be successful here? And how do I help you understand what the resources are for you here? And so some kind of freshman seminar I think is really important and I think honestly having them connected to your home college. So you begin to also meet faculty who you’re gonna probably have in your junior and senior year.

Thinking about maybe even having those. Seminars, connecting to industry type jobs that you might be excited about, and then how do you balance that with some kind of a capstone experience? Because I’ve been overseeing career services for about 14, 15 years, and I think every career center will tell you the most heartbreaking statement to hear.

From somebody is when they’re graduating and said, I didn’t know you existed.

And you have academic programs who want folks to be doing internships. You’re having people looking for jobs on campus and off campus. And so how do we help people know what that is when they’re walking into our institution as a new student or a transfer student, and how do we make sure that they’re somehow taking advantage of those near the end of the chapter that they are with us.

So the some way that we integrate this kind of living, learning transformative trans transferable skills that make sure you understand what you’re, they’re needed and that you’re then using them. So I think those things are really important to really just at least acknowledge if you want to think about this merger or the blurring of the lines.

I think it’s okay to have conversations that talk about. How to be successful and have it connected to your academics, how to be successful in accounting, how to be successful in marketing communications. And then we have so many folks who I think value more of a liberal arts or humanities kind of degree.

And I think those are great, but sometimes we have to help think, help students think about what is that gonna mean for my career? How do I take this area of academic passion and turn that into my next career choice? And so again. Helping people think through this, doing it through an academic conversation.

I, I think honestly it can be very successful or could be very successful.

Keith Edwards: And you began by talking about, we’ve gotta get out of our own way of our structures, our silos, and I think one of the things I’m often encouraging folks to do is notice how often we are training students to navigate our administrative structure. Oh, I’m not the right office. You actually need to go over here.

This is not the right person to call. You need to go here. Instead of teaching students how to navigate our administrative structure, what if we got our administrator structure organized around students and how they navigate through this experience? That would be a much better way of doing it.

We are running out of time. This is fabulous. I think we might have had our first crazy pants reference on student affairs now, so thank you for that, Elliot. I don’t think anyone had that one on the bingo card, but that’s great. Okay. Good. Yeah. But the podcast is called Student Affairs. Now, we always like to end by asking what are you thinking troubling or pondering?

Now, might be related to this conversation, might just be what’s with you and occupying you. And then also if if folks want to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to do that? Dan, let’s begin with you. What are you, what’s with you now?

Daniel Maxwell: Yeah. I think the the challenge that we have is there’s a lot going on at the federal and state levels that we may not feel like we have any sense of control over.

And what I’ve been challenged to do myself is to remind myself what is it that I do control? Where is it that I do have influence? And if I can remember at the end of the day how do I ensure that the students who are choosing to come to school. To the school that I work in the state that I live in, that it still is a value added experience for them.

And so I may agree or not agree with some of the things that are influencing how I can do my work, but it doesn’t mean that I stop doing my work. And sometimes that means we have to do the hard things and we can still push back, have our voices heard. Figure out if this is still a good fit for me.

But at the end of the day, our students are still wanting to come into this space that we’ve created and we partner with to create a value added experience. And so how can we continue to deliver an experience that’s gonna make them feel good about themselves, where they’re gonna learn something and know that they can go change the world when they graduate from our spaces.

I think it’s, it’s just been one of those times in higher education where. Just trying to remind people that it is a value added experience. There is value in getting a degree. It doesn’t all have to look the same and but finding ways to invest in yourself are really important.

And for those of us who do this work in student affairs, is, we’re probably needed more now than ever to help people feel that they still belong. That they have a place in these spaces that we’re working in. And we’re just in a space and time where that heavy lifting is a part of our day to day.

So we do have to take care of ourselves. We have to take care of each other, but we also have to remember this is, we’re doing this because of the students, right? We’re here for the students and for the experience that we can create for them. So as you can tell, I love talking about all this, and so if people wanna continue the conversation I’m happy to, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Or I’ve tried, I’m on blue sky trying to explore what that looks like as a space and also on Instagram or they can just hit me up at the University of Houston downtown.

Keith Edwards: Awesome. I really appreciate your framing of that was really beautiful. And I think it’s so helpful for folks who are feeling the external pressure, whether it’s from federal government or state legislatures or boards or media or other places.

And I think it, it is easy to be discouraged for all sorts of really legitimate and real reasons. And I love your framing of these are the constraints. They are different. They are shifting. But they’re just constraints. And so how do I do that work within them and not pretending they don’t exist or they’re not real or is I’m not there, but how do I do the good work?

And I think that’s so helpful to so many folks that I talk to who are really committed to doing the best work they can in really difficult situations. So thank you for that. Elliot, what do you think trouble and ponder now?

Elliot Felix: Dan, you went big and strategic, which was lovely, and I’ll try and compliment that with something immediate and tactical.

And I think riffing off what you were saying, Keith, about, we’re teaching students to navigate our structures instead of structuring ourselves around them. In the consulting work I do at Bureau Happel where I lead the. Higher ed advisory practice. One of the simple things we do to help fo and you folks can do this on their own or that they need help, that’s fine too.

But when we’re creating a service model or a staffing model, but just a very simple like program or service audit can be amazingly insightful. Where you just, each thing you do, you write on a post-it, right? And then you cluster them and. I have, I’ve probably done this a hundred times with different folks.

And two things happen every time you put those post-its on a whiteboard. One is the leader will step back and say. Oh crap. This is a lot of stuff. It’s too much. This is too much stuff. Yeah. And that will force a conversation about sunset or prioritization or phasing or some kind of better allocation of resources so that people aren’t spread so thin.

And then the other thing that happens is people will realize that the categories of. Programs and services rarely match the groups of people delivering them. So you’re actually like pulling yourself apart because you’ve got this legacy structure which made sense 20 years ago or a hundred years ago, but doesn’t actually met match people’s day-to-day activities and work.

And you often find committees are the workaround for this, right? So as soon as you start, as soon as you see a lot like the committees outnumber the departments. That means basically people have to start a committee to get their work done instead of just doing their work. And so I think as people wanna be more focused, be less stretched than wanna structure themselves around the students, that’s simple.

Program service audit only take some post-its and some sharpies can be really useful to get your arms around. Your service model, and then you can take it a step further and start thinking about your staffing model and say, okay, for each of these, for each of these post-its, this is one FTE, this is a quarter, this is half, this is three and a half.

And you can start to balance it out and say, can we really, can we really put three and a half people toward X, Y, Z? Or is that gonna have to shift? Or can we do more peer to peer? Or what can we automate? We made it 50 some minutes without saying ai. I think so we have to say it at least for SEO purposes, we need to say, I think everybody had that on their

Keith Edwards: bingo cards.

So good.

Elliot Felix: So I’ve, I’m proud of us for waiting that long, but but I do think, thinking about peer-to-peer models, thinking about the role the technology can play, thinking about a program service audit and aligning your people with the programs. I think is the way forward because even in areas that are growing demographically the resources are not unlimited.

And we can’t just default to expansion. We can’t just keep adding more people, more programs, more technology. We have to be, we have to be more focused.

Keith Edwards: Yeah.

Elliot Felix: Awesome. For everybody’s sake.

Keith Edwards: And Elliot, where can people who want to connect with you?

Elliot Felix: I think the best starting point is elliot felix.com.

That’s where you can find out more about the book. There’s also lots of resources, tools you can download there. There’s cheat sheets on the big ideas on the case studies. A book club guide. I can also be a resource if folks are looking for a speaker or a facilitator or a book, everything from a book club to a leadership retreat.

And yeah, I just appreciate the opportunity to help. Yeah. Student success is my mission and I know it is for your listeners. And I’m grateful for the for the chance to appear here and now.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. And thank you Dan for being here and for your contributions in the chapter on Student Affairs and student success and to Elliot for the book.

And if you go to elliotfelix.com, you can find the connect to college book with a link to where you can buy it on Amazon, or if you’d rather not do that, you can buy it on a task of books. All of that is there. The book is out now. You can get it. I really appreciate you both for being here and your authorship, your leadership, your work in this space.

It’s been really terrific. I also want to thank our sponsors of today’s episode, evolve and Huron. Higher education leaders are facing unprecedented challenges, uncertainty, and feeling under attack. Many are understandably feeling overwhelmed and near burnout, yet yearning to make a powerful difference for students, their organizations, and all of us.

Evolve is a program that I lead along with my colleagues, Dr. Brian Rao and Don Lee. It’s an executive coaching program to empower leaders like you to release fear, gain courage, and take transformative action to unleash your leadership potential for social change. It’s a three month coaching program, offering individual and group coaching, as well as intentional and curated curriculum to maximize impact for the busiest senior leaders.

Visit us to learn more about our next cohort, or consider evolve for your senior leadership team and hereon. Hereon, collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies, optimize operations, and accelerate digital transformation. Brian. By embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas, and challenging the status quo.

Huron promotes institutional resilience in higher education. For more information, please visit them at go.hcg.com/now. As always, thanks to our producer Natalie Ambrosey, who makes us all look and sound good behind the scenes. We love the support of these conversations from you, our audience, and our community.

You can really help us out by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube or to our newsletter. You’ll get a new newsletter each Wednesday morning with our latest episode. If you’re so inclined, you can also leave us a five star review. I am Keith Edwards. Thanks again to our two fabulous guests today, and to everyone who is watching and listening, make it a great week.

The Connected College: Leadership Strategies for Student Success