Angel B. Pérez: But I think that a lot of people who grow up in the admissions profession. It’s you’re gonna be the super admissions counselor.

That’s gonna be my job. What they don’t realize is they move into the role and they, it is a fundamentally different job, which is why you have to figure out if that’s something you would enjoy. All of a sudden you go from, my job was mainly to recruit high school students around the world. Do evaluations, do programming, meet with families.

Your job now is managing and reporting to a president. Managing and reporting to a board of trustees, helping the institution move forward on its priorities. Managing legal challenges, meeting with HR more than you could have ever imagined, especially in today’s environment. Really navigating legal issues.

Keith Edwards: Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Dr. Angel Perez’s. The hottest seat on campus is both a leadership manual and a call to action for higher education professionals navigating the volatile worlds of admissions and enrollment. He argues that leadership in college enrollment today demands not just technical skill, but emotional intelligence, cultural fluency, and deep commitment to personal authenticity.

I’m so glad to be joined by Dr. Perez today. 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 higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com.

This episode of Sponsored Body Evolve. Evolve is a series of leadership coaching journeys designed to bring clarity, capacity, and confidence, empowering courageous leadership to reimagine the future of higher education. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker, author, and coach, empowering, courageous, higher ed leadership for better tomorrows for us all through leadership, learning, and equity.

You can find out more about me@keithedwards.com and I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. Dr. Perez. Thank you for being here. Congratulations on the book. Love for you to just kick off by telling folks a little bit more about your journey and yourself as we get started here.

Angel B. Pérez: Sure. And thanks for having me on the podcast, Keith. I’m excited about this conversation. So I am a first generation college student. I actually grew up originally from Puerto Rico and then grew up, spent my teenage years in New York City, in the South Bronx. Grew up very low income and is someone who was so fortunate.

I went to a very large public high school in New York City. In that public high school. Somehow a high school counselor with over 600 kids in her caseload found me and tapped me on the shoulder and said, young man, have you ever thought about going to college? And that was a transformative experience for me.

And like many people who end up working in higher education I went to college, had this transformative experience and. Ended up working in this field because I wanted to give back and I wanted other people to have access to this kind of experience. So it’s been an incredible journey. But I will joke, a lot of admissions people get into this job and they say, oh, I’m gonna do this until I get a real job.

And so in 1998, I got a job in the admissions office at my alma mater and I said, I’m gonna do this for a year until I get a real job. Clearly I’m still looking for that real job. Yep. Because I’ve been in field since I never left. Yeah.

Keith Edwards: Good. And you’ve gone through admissions and enrollment work and leadership at many institutions and now leading a national association and now writing this book.

How did all of that kind of come to be?

Angel B. Pérez: So I so I spent my entire career in higher education. I also worked at a high school. Many people don’t know this for a couple of years while I was getting my master’s degree. But I spent my entire career in higher education and continued to move up the ranks and held two vice presidencies of enrollment and student success.

And it wasn’t until 2020 I was tapped on the shoulder too. Help lead this incredible organization of 28,000 professionals across the globe. Many people listening are probably NASPA members, so we’re like NASPA’s, good cousin. And I’m good friends with the naspa, CEO. And to me it’s been this incredible opportunity, one to just give back to a profession that I have loved.

And also a profession that has a very significant impact on the future of our society, right? What enrollment officers do every single day whether it’s recruiting students or whether it is evaluating students and figuring out who can attend their institutions, that has the direct correlation with how many people, move into the pipeline for jobs and workforce development in this nation.

So I’m excited that I get to do this work. And I also acknowledge that we are at a moment in our profession’s history and in American history really that couldn’t be more challenging. So the way the book came about is when I took this role in 2020, I started getting lots of phone calls from vice presidents and deans of admission across the country.

Just talking about how challenging the job had become, how they didn’t even recognize this job anymore. And one of the phrases that was common in every conversation that I had was, joy is not the word I would use for this job. And it made me incredibly sad because. I did the job several times, and while it certainly was challenging, and you’ll read about all of those challenges in the book I don’t sugarcoat the experiences.

I also found an incredible amount of joy and I thought, people need a manual. They need they need a roadmap for success in these roles because the way that we were trained as leaders really. The environment that we’re leading in now is so fundamentally different. And so I decided to write the book.

And as since you’ve read the book it also, it’s not just my experience, but the experience of very experienced deans across the country as well.

Keith Edwards: That seems like quite the challenge these days. As you say, not only is it really difficult and really challenging and people saying the joy is gone.

I imagine the challenges of tomorrow will also be different, right? Yes. So how do you write a roadmap for this thing that you know will be out of date as soon as it’s published? Yes. And I have read the book and so a lot of it is these. As I said in the intro, less about the technical skill and how to do admissions and enrollment in this day and age and more of those evergreen skills and capacities to help folks navigate through that.

I’m wondering what the response has been as you have written the book and shared the book. You mentioned it. It came about by talking with a lot of these people in these leadership roles about the lack of joy. I’m imagine I know you’ve talked with many of those folks since, and that reading the book and in, your journey at the association has been similar to our journey as a podcast and we just celebrated our fifth birthday as a podcast.

And just noticing happy thank you, that it’s only been five years, but it’s been like five generations in higher education. Oh my gosh. Pre COVID, post

Angel B. Pérez: COVID. I feel like I’ve had four jobs. Yeah. And I’m in my year in the job. Yeah. So speak to that a little bit. Yeah. I’ll start with where you were going earlier, which is the evolution of the book.

And that is. I was very intentional that this was not a book about how to do enrollment management, right? There’s plenty of things you can read out there and organizations, including nacac, who can help you do that. I realized that from all the conversations that I had and my own experience and the interviews I did in the book, that so many of the reasons that.

People were not succeeding in the role, or they were crashing and burning, or they were not finding joy is because they weren’t learning some of the nuances of how to show up for this job. And I have a title on becoming an Astute Politician, the Power of Storytelling. So much of the book is actually about how do we learn to do the inner work and manage ourselves and make decisions around our own lives.

Before we show up for other people. So I hope that this book is picked up 10 years from now and it is just as relevant. The issues will be different. Yeah. I hope they’re different. But I think the, in terms of like how we manage ourselves and show up, that’s really what the roadmap of the book is for.

Keith Edwards: Yeah, it certainly reads that way. It certainly doesn’t read of the moment. It reads more evergreen and timely, as you pointed out. It is the hottest seat on campus, according to the book title. It, they even put a big hot

Angel B. Pérez: red sign on it. I know.

Keith Edwards: It’s very,

Angel B. Pérez: it is very

Keith Edwards: catchy. I thought the cover, they did a good job

Angel B. Pérez: at Harvard with

Keith Edwards: the cupboard.

They did a good job. Yeah. I love the cover. It’s great. And we’re talking about, I think this is, sometimes these are different levels. Sometimes these are different jobs. Sometimes it’s just institutional context, but director of admissions, dean of enrollment, vice president for enrollment and strategic student success, right?

Kind of the whole spectrum there of this is really for the admissions enrollment leader. Yes.

Angel B. Pérez: Yeah. And I’d love to add to that, Keith, because I’ve had several presidents who’ve read the book and wrote me and said, if you take away the title, Dean of Admission in the book, this is really a book about leadership.

Yeah. And so I think that’s the other thing that has been resonating. I’ve been surprised people have read it who are not deans of enrollment and said. This is really about how do you become a leader, particularly in higher education? I think because of the context, it will resonate with higher ed leaders, but I’ve had people in career development who read it and said, oh my gosh, the whole chapter on becoming a politician.

I needed to read that. And so I think it, I’m hoping that it will resonate with a wider audience than not just enrollment, but we did use. Dean of Admission is the title we use in the book, but there, as there’s so many different titles now in higher education. It’s basically anyone who’s leading in enrollment.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. And the chapters are, preparing for your deanship, which could be lots of different deanships, right? Yes. You’re talking about enrollment, transitioning in, building your team, storytelling, astute politician leading in crisis, self-management. As you say, as we think about lots of different roles, right?

We could just change out the details and the context and it applies is really helpful. So I would encourage folks. Who maybe aren’t in the Dean of admissions or dean of Enrollment who maybe wanna understand that world, but also I think you’ll find lots here to support you and your leadership and your growth and your role in that evergreen kind of way.

But back to the Dean of enrollment, why is it the hottest seat on campus?

Angel B. Pérez: The first thing I’ll say about that is. It is such a highly visible role. And one of the deans in the book says this, Satya Dara Gupta, who is the Chief Enrollment Officer at Northeastern 14 campuses, a very complex place.

My success in my failure is so public, right? The institution knows we have a goal, we have a number, we need this number of students, we need this much revenue, we need the class to look a certain way or have a certain demographic type to it. If you don’t make that number on May 1st, everybody knows. And if you don’t make the number, the consequences are very serious as we are seeing today.

If you, I was very cognizant that if I did not make my goal and I did work at tuition driven institutions, as the majority of institutions are in. People could lose their jobs. Budget cuts were coming. There were serious implications for the work that I did every day. And so many people at the institution rely on your success.

The coaches are hoping that you’re gonna reel in students to play on their teams. The student affairs team is looking at, wait, you brought in too many students, actually, and now I have too many and I don’t have enough residence halls or dining room seats. Or dining room seats, or the faculty are saying, wait, we, I don’t want this many students in my first year seminar.

This isn’t the way that it goes. And so there’s so many constituents to please in this role, but unlike other areas like academic affairs maybe, or student affairs where you’re so deeply in the student experience and caring for a particular population. There. This is a very metric driven part of the organization that is so public.

And so it’s an incredibly hot seat and it’s only getting hotter.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that public nature the class is under by 5% or the, or for folks who have the financial aid, the financial aid numbers, the discount rate is lower than we needed it to be or plotted it to be.

And so now maybe the class is bigger, but our tuition incoming is lower and and there’s so much beyond your control, right? You’re be your betting. There’s so much of it is of 17 year olds. And as someone who’s got a 15-year-old, I wouldn’t wanna do that. So many variables right?

About what other, what those. 17 year olds are deciding and their families and all the complex constraints

Angel B. Pérez: and consideration they have. And Keith, if I can add, it is an Evergreen book, but there’s a context we’re living through right now. Yeah. There is so much out of enrollment control.

Yeah. Think about the lack of control they now have around international students being able to get into the United States. The lack of control around what the federal government decides around Pell grants and federal aid that is flowing to institutions yet their goals. For enrollment haven’t changed right?

At the majority of institutions, and the pressure has just increased and the accountability, and so the pressure has just increased. Folks are really, I call them warriors, I call them heroes. When I opened the national conference this year I just said every single person sitting in this room is a warrior in a hero.

Like you are doing things that are gonna have serious implications for the nation and the world. Yet, they’re usually unsung heroes. People don’t usually look at a dean of admission and say, you’re doing incredible work. It’s a hot seat, but it’s also an incredibly rewarding one.

Keith Edwards: And then the dark side, which I think we should point to a little bit, is easy to blame.

Angel B. Pérez: Yes. Yes. Easy to, a lot of them fall. Another reason I was inspired to write this book is how many people called me and said, yeah, my president just brought me in and said, thank you for your service. Because they missed the class by 5% or whatever the case may be. And Eric Hoover from the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an article about the book actually recently.

And one of the things that was so powerful that he wrote in the book is, every trustee, every college president is turning to their dean of admission as the savior of the institution. Yeah. And Eric Hoover reminded them, these people are not your savior. The implications and the challenges are so far beyond what one individual who sits as a dean of admission can control.

And so yeah it, it certainly feels heavy and, but there are ways to be successful and that’s why I think it’s important to, to focus on that.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. I just a colleague reminded me when we were starting to see students who had spent their junior and senior year doing distance learning through COID.

Enrolling in college and the impact of that.

Angel B. Pérez: He reminded

Keith Edwards: me we’re gonna see the impacts of that for many years. ‘Cause yes, it’s gonna be, missing sixth and seventh grade is gonna have an impact on that student when they start college. Absolutely. The context, the academic preparation, the social development, the brain development, all of the things that go along with that.

So we’re navigating.

Angel B. Pérez: We’re seeing it in the workforce as well. Yeah. Folks who, you know, young people who went to college during the COVID area and the kinds of skills that are somewhat missing in, in the workforce today. We’re seeing that and we’re gonna feel that for a while. So it’s not just in educational institutions, it’s

Keith Edwards: also in the workforce.

So we’re navigating selling an institution which you have limited control over what it teaches and how it does and how it operates. We’re navigating decisions made at kitchen tables in very diverse, very complex homes all over the US and the world. We’re navigating the broader governmental context and the social context.

We’re navigating options around. Do I want to work at the grocery store where I can get paid? Or do I want to go pay? Do. We’re navigating COVID social romantic relationships. Am I gonna go to this school versus that competition?

Angel B. Pérez: And an anti higher education rhetoric right now. There is a pushback here that, there’s a lot of constituents now in the media.

Someone saying maybe you don’t need to go to college. And again, deans of admission don’t have control over that, but it impacts their numbers on a daily basis, the conversations

Keith Edwards: there. I think we have convinced people that this is a hot seat on campus. Okay. For sure. I think we’ve done that.

I’m imagining someone who maybe like you. Worked in admissions for a short time and never thought it would be a long-term thing, and maybe is now in year seven or eight thinking maybe or someone who has led in another part of the institution and been connected to enrollment and admissions work, who’s starting to think maybe I do wanna ascend to that dean, that senior level leadership for enrollment and admissions.

Maybe not. Now but soon, in the next year, maybe two, maybe here, maybe somewhere else. What recommendations would you have for someone who is interested in ascending? What would you want them to think about? Consider, be aware of.

Angel B. Pérez: Yeah, I would first say lean in. I mean it’s, despite the challenges that we just talked about, again, it’s an incredibly rewarding, exciting job where you can make a huge difference in the world.

I have a couple of pieces of advice. One is find a good mentor. If that person is not in your office or your immediate dean. Find one in the field. This is a field of networking and you tend to know a lot of people ’cause you travel together and you do programs around the world together.

Find a good mentor is incredibly important. I would say shadowing a dean is also incredibly important. We talk about internships, but I think spending time with someone who does the job. And really getting a sense of what does that look like on a day-to-day basis. So many people, what they, they see the public side of the job.

When deans are up there at the faculty meeting and talking or giving presentations, they don’t see what does the day-to-day look like, because the. The first chapter in the book is really about how do you select a deanship? And I think selecting a deanship means doing some inner work first and asking yourself some really tough questions like, where do I find my joy?

Where do I get my energy from? What are the sacrifices I’m willing to make in my life? And then of course, there’s finding the right institution and institutional fit, but I think shadowing folks. And also one of the things I’m really passionate about is get out of your. Higher ed sector and go see other kinds of institutions.

So when I was considering. A deanship when it started to hit me like maybe I’ll be a dean. I don’t know. I started looking at big institutions and small institutions and going on their tours and what would this look like? Because it’s also, institutions are so diverse, right? The University of Minnesota is not McAllister College, and but if you’re in that area, go check both of those places out and see Yeah, they’re miles apart institution.

Yeah. They’re miles apart. And when you work there, it’s also such a different. Experience. And because one of the things that I feel very passionate about also, this is connected to my passion for having a mentor, is who you work for in these roles makes all the difference. It will determine your success and it will determine whether or not you find joy in the job.

So starting with a good mentor who’s also gonna lead you to a great boss is the key to success.

Keith Edwards: That’s a great example, how, this is not really just about enrollment and admissions, because that’s the evergreen thing. Finding a great boss who you find a great fit for, who you compliment, who supports you in the ways that you need who gives you the autonomy and the ways that you don’t.

And I think having that great leader who you’re reporting to. Is, that’s the kind of across the board kind of things that are in this book. I’m curious what if I were thinking about ascending to this role, you gimme some great recommendations about institutional type and mentoring and leadership.

What myths might you wanna dispel? What myths might I have about the role that you would want to make sure to dispel before I really got into it?

Angel B. Pérez: Oh my God, there’s 300. Do we have time? Because the role is I think really misunderstood by so many people. And it’s not just people in higher education.

I think the public misunderstands the role as well. This is why I think it’s really important to shadow, get good mentors and really have an understanding of the role, because I think the greatest. Myth. And I will admit that this is what I thought when I first took on the, I call myself the accidental dean.

I did not think this was what I was gonna do, but I think that’s super

Keith Edwards: common. Super common.

Angel B. Pérez: Yeah. So common in so many roles in higher ed, right? Like how did I become the dean of students? When did that happen? But I think that a lot of people who grow up in the admissions profession. It’s you’re gonna be the super admissions counselor.

That’s gonna be my job. What they don’t realize is they move into the role and they, it is a fundamentally different job, which is why you have to figure out if that’s something you would enjoy. All of a sudden you go from, my job was mainly to recruit high school students around the world. Do evaluations, do programming, meet with families.

Your job now is managing and reporting to a president. Managing and reporting to a board of trustees, helping the institution move forward on its priorities. Managing legal challenges, meeting with HR more than you could have ever imagined, especially in today’s environment. Really navigating legal issues.

A lot of the job is actually not about the day-to-day of college admission. And you have to get a sort of energy from that and you have to like complex problem solving and working in a little bit of an environment that’s somewhat chaotic. And anything can come at you any day. Not everyone will find joy in that, and so that’s one of the things you have to figure out.

But it’s a big myth. I think a lot of people get into it and they’re like, I’m gonna be like, the big admissions officer, and yes, you are. However, the job is fundamentally different than anything you’ve ever done before.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. And again, I think that applies across so many leadership roles. We think that we’re gonna, as we ascend, we just need to become a little bit smarter, work a little bit harder, and keep doing the same things, but more and bigger ways.

Maybe supervised a few more people. Yeah. Yeah. That’s all true. But, and that mentality leads to a lot of more, a lot of burnout, a lot of overwhelm, when really, as you’re pointing to, it’s a really different level. Of leadership, a different set of skills, a different set of capacities. One of the things I And a different

Angel B. Pérez: mindset.

A different mindset as well. You are now, your mindset is institutional. Yeah. I will never forget my president that hired me, the first president who hired me, when I came to the cabinet meeting, my first cabinet meeting with the president, she said in here. You take off your enrollment hat, you are helping me run the institution.

And that was a, like a wake up call for me. I was like, oh I thought I was here to represent admissions and financial aid. Yes, I’m here to do that, but I’m actually here to help run the institution. And I think oftentimes people don’t get that until they sit at that table.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. Patrick, Len talks about your leadership team being your first team, right?

So your cabinet your priority being there. So we don’t have these competing fiefdoms, but all these leaders working together to help the institution as a whole. And I think there’s some trouble with that and, who’s the president’s first team and so we can unpack that a little bit.

But I think that notion is, I think a good one to be aware of. And yeah, just the different leadership skills and I think so many people get promoted. Because they were successful doing that job and they think, oh, I’ll just continue doing that when it’s a really different thing. And it puts us in this situation where we have to let go of the successes, the wins, the affirmation, the 10 years of great performance appraisals, and move into this unknown where I’m brand new at helping lead an institution.

I’m brand new at. Working with trustees and you have to be willing to let go of the things you’re so good at, which is really hard.

Angel B. Pérez: Yes. And

Keith Edwards: embrace these things that you don’t know how to do and learn and develop new capacities and new growth as you go.

Angel B. Pérez: And if I could add to that, Keith, because what you’re saying is so powerful.

The other thing in the spirit of what’s a myth is a lot of people think, oh, I’ve done all this great work, so when I move into this role, everyone is going to like immediately respect me. Everyone is going to immediately know that I’m a rock star. And guess what? You’re starting from scratch all over again.

Even if you were at the same institution. You have to prove yourself. It is a different role. So you’re gonna have different kinds of expectations and the community is watching you in a really different way. And so I had that rude awakening when I was at Pitzer as the VP of enrollment. I was a director.

My boss retired and I was made vice president. It happened very quickly and I was like, wait, but don’t these people know who I am? I’ve been in the community for, I think I was there for five years before I became the vp. I was like, no, these people now see me in a very different light and want to see me prove myself.

So that’s another thing to be prepared for.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s hard to give up all that positive affirmation, as you go. And as we mentioned earlier, then now comes with a different level of blame and different level of scrutiny and a different level of expectation a different level of press pressure.

Any other myths? You said 300, but was there maybe one more we want to touch on?

Angel B. Pérez: Actually, I’m gonna turn what some people are probably thinking on its head. I think the myth right now is that the job is joyless and that it’s just terrible. Yeah. I don’t agree with that. And the people who are featured in this book all said to me when I interviewed them I still love this job.

Yeah. And so I think that’s another myth. And one of the reasons and intentions for the book is to help people understand. If you can have a roadmap and if you could really do the inner work and, develop the skills, you can do this job well, which by the way has an extraordinary impact not just on the institution, but on people’s lives, so on and so forth.

And you can still love it and find joy in it. Yeah. So I am determined to get that word out.

Keith Edwards: I’d love to invite you to unpack that a little bit because we did spend a lot of time talking about the many different challenges, which are all true. And you have said. The lack of joy has brought you to this, and you’ve said multiple times how rewarding this could be.

Oh my gosh, yes. And it can be joyful. So unpack what, how is it rewarding? How is it joyful? What is the sense of purpose and contribution? You’ve pointed to this contribution to the institution, which I think we all get, right? Maybe just at the sort of metric financial, which we’ve talked about, but you also pointed to this is what helps society go.

Angel B. Pérez: Yeah, so I’ll start with somewhat at the institutional level, but something that I don’t think a lot of people think about, which is, so every institution where I served as a dean I worked on very significant policy changes and as a result of those policy shifts that I led, and as in higher education, you don’t make decisions for anything.

You have to bring people along and you have to get, faculty votes and trustee votes and all of that, but. As a result, institution as a result, institutions that I worked at became more diverse. More students were eligible for financial aid. We did a lot more fundraising for college access programs.

We created, we diversify the institution, and I don’t mean just in terms of students of color, but really to represent the globe and. There is nothing more satisfying than to see that come to life. And to see that there’s so many people on campus who, for example, are fully funded and have no idea that you were the one that led that effort.

That if it were not for you galvanizing the community around this cause they wouldn’t even be there right. With that opportunity. That is a high that I never got over. I think the other thing is. The ability to rally people around a cause. So at every institution I chose a cause. And an example, when I was at Pitzer, we didn’t have a lot of international students.

We weren’t giving aid to international students. I felt so passionate about, international student mobility, global student mobility, and so that was one of my big causes while I was there. If you walk on Pitzers campus today, is it entirely different? It’s a global place and so not that I had everything to do with that, but I planted those seeds and so you had something to do with it.

Yeah. And I was, I began the conversation and I began, I was the astute politician who worked my way to make that happen. And then at other institutions, like my last institution, Trinity College, I financial aid was my number one. And I was out there fundraising with the president to try to get more access to that kind of institution.

And that kind of policy change is so exciting and for you to see lives literally changed as a result, and for the institution to look and feel different as a result of your work. It’s exciting. And I think, and every dean of admission probably feels this way. I think this is something we have in common with student affairs too, which is that first day the first, the check-in day arrivals, like it was my favorite day of the year.

Besides commencement, I also love commencement. The first day when the new students are arriving and they are nervous. But you realize oh, I remember seeing that kid at his high school in Seattle and Oh, I was in Mumbai with that kid’s parents. And it is so exciting to see a year’s worth of work come together and it’s the physical manifestation of your work.

It is so cool.

Keith Edwards: Yeah I’ll join you in that. And I’ll admit that as much as I like graduation, I like the opening convocation even better, that everything is brand new and full of promise and possibility. And, they’re at the beginning of a journey. You don’t know where it’s gonna take them. I just find it the thing I miss most about being on campus is those opening convocations and those opening days and meeting the new students and the parents.

We’ve talked about some of the different aspects about, what to look for. We’ve talked about the politics to navigate. Tell us a little bit about storytelling as a capacity for these roles.

Angel B. Pérez: I think. The chief enrollment officer is really one of the chief storytellers right after the president of the institution.

And what’s interesting is that you’re not just the chief storyteller internally, you have a lot of external constituents because high school counselors are paying very close attention to what you’re doing at the institution, how you’re changing things when you arrive, because then that helps them advise young people and one of the tools that I have used in my career, not just on campuses, but especially here at nca, is the power of storytelling that you need to be able to tell people what is the problem that we are trying to solve? What are the issues that we are facing? What is the plan? How can you community help us to get there?

And for those of us in enrollment, when we’re on campuses, we’re living and breathing these issues every single day that are complex and we’re talking to high school counselors and we’re traveling. We need to bring those stories back to our campuses so that faculty and staff and administrators and trustees.

Understand the complexity of enrollment. One of the things that I do when I talk to new VPs of enrollment who maybe tell me, I’m feeling really challenged. The community doesn’t get it. I say in a loving way. Have you brought the community in to what the challenges are?

Have you really told this story? And help them understand all of the complexities that you are facing. And some of that storytelling, by the way, is not just storytelling by the Dean of admission. I write about this in the book where I say bring in external people who are going to validate your storytelling who are going to help.

People understand what the issues are. An example is, Nathan McGraw from Carleton College wrote a book years ago. He’s written two about the decline of demographics. I brought him to faculty meetings on my campuses so that, peer to peer, it’s not just Angel saying, we have a demographic decline in the country.

It’s really your peer here saying that. So storytelling is so important, and this is an just an enrollment thing. I think this is a leadership thing. If you are a leader, you need to be a powerful storyteller.

Keith Edwards: We recently had a podcast all about the skill of storytelling, so we’ll drop that in the show notes.

Ooh, nice. Along with book to that, along with Nick Heck. I also think that you want to bring the stories of the students and the families and the context and the world beyond the campus, to the campus, but also bringing the stories of the campus there. And I think one of my, yes, one of the best meetings I ever led when I was in a leadership role at McAllister is.

I had just had all of our staff in campus life, about 15 of us, I said, just bring a story of student transformation and we’re just gonna tell those stories and everybody gets two, three minutes. And it was a half hour in, we were all sobbing. It was such powerful. Yes. And we just thought, this is so great.

We gotta get these stories out. So then a month later we had the same meeting with all of the admission staff and we just told these stories of student transformation and they were just there consuming the stories and the. The director of admissions walked out saying, we’ve gotta change the pitch, we’ve gotta change the tour.

We’re telling outdated stories. We are we’re explaining a bygone era of student experience and now we have all of this material to work with. So I think it’s so helpful to bring the stories from the outside in and who are the students coming in and what’s their experience and how is it different from maybe our experience?

’cause I think so many of us. We go back to our frame of reference, even though it’s really dated or really different or really shifted. And I think getting an updated model of that, but then also sharing with those prospective students and families and trustees. And donors and fundraisers, what this experience is really and so storytelling can be really great. I wanna move us to our next one, which I have been so eager to get to since we started and I’ve done my best to hold off on it. Alright. But the last chapter other than the conclusion is about self-management and as we spoke about my favorite chapter favorite.

Okay. All right. We’re on the same page. We’re on the same page. One of the things that I think about and write about and talk about a lot with senior leaders is the power of inner work, about getting out of our own way, about leading from the inside out. I know you had a special guest star at a recent, at your recent conference, and maybe you can, did tie inner work, self-management and your special guest star in

Angel B. Pérez: here.

Yeah, so the special guest star was at the NACA conference this year, which took place in Columbus, Ohio. I was able to interview Brene Brown on our main stage and. Talk about the right time, to have someone like Brene Brown. People in higher education are feeling really defeated right now, and she does work around resilience and courage and vulnerability.

But what a lot of people don’t know, and she talked about it actually on the stage, was that she is shifting her focus now to work primarily with leaders. And the reason she has decided to do this is because. One, there is so much workplace toxicity. And what she’s realizing is that here’s the example I will use and part of, I’m gonna connect this to my self-management chapter.

In our society, we would never. Put an athlete on the field who has not trained right. We would not put those high stakes, whether you’re a university athlete or whether you’re, in the NFL, this kind of high stakes game. We would not put you in there without really giving you the tools and the training, however.

Most of us in leadership, and this definitely includes higher education are just thrown into the ring with no preparation, no coaching, no skills building. And that to me is really negligence, I think. And I think that, this is why I love the work you’re doing, Keith. Around helping leaders do the inner work and my self-management chapter addresses that.

And really is just like a taste test that I want people to start thinking about before you take on a leadership role. You really need to start. Doing, and I’d love to hear your definition, Keith, actually, of inner work. But really doing some serious introspection about yourself, your life, your journey.

Yeah. But also learning how to self-manage. How do you detach from the role? How do you not take things personally? How do learn to regulate yourself in an environment that is really chaotic. There. This is actually a muscle to be built and a skill that people can gain. Because what I’m realizing, and this is what Brene Brown talked about as well, is the reason we have so many people that.

Hate going to work or just feeling, so defeated at work is they don’t have good leaders. But the issue is, I don’t think good leaders aren’t good leaders because they don’t want to be, it’s because they haven’t been given the tools to do and so that’s what the self-management chapter is about.

And I’m happy to go into some of the examples, but this is the work and I’m so excited. ’cause I think this is the future and it’s what you’re doing, Keith. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn’t agree more on it working with.

Keith Edwards: I’ve got Brene’s book right here, so we’ll give her a shot. Strong ground. Yeah, strong ground.

I’m a big fan of all of her work and I find it so useful. And I do think that the shift she’s making when you hear her talk about it, I wasn’t able to hear the conversation there, but when I hear another place she’s making this shift with a sense of urgency. Yes. A real sense of urgency about we have to do this not just for the leaders, not just for these companies, not for these institutions, but for all of us.

And what, when I think about inner work, I think about I think about it in two ways. How am I in my own way? ’cause I, I think if we’re really honest. Most of us are the big op biggest obstacles. Yeah. Our stuff, our trauma, our hurts, our pains all of those things. And I think being able to, we carry it

Angel B. Pérez: with us into the workplace.

Absolutely. And when you become a leader, it becomes dangerous because you’re now basically giving that to your team. It’s invisible. They don’t know that, they don’t know the history of carry with you, but you bring that trauma and you put it onto them.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. And as you pointed to, as Brene pointed to, that’s why athletes have coaches ’cause they have bad habits. Don’t throw like this, don’t do this, and, stop doing this, start doing this, these bad habits that we come along, which is just a human experience, right? Anyone who’s been to relationship counseling will know that, that illuminates all of your bad habits and your bad habit.

Patterns and the stories you tell yourself and how they’re getting in the way, and the fact that we don’t do that with leaders so that they can recognize and see and unlearn their bad habits and find out how they’re getting in the way. And I think the other part too then is how do we self-manage, right?

How do we manage recognize and manage our emotions? I think a lot of leaders get the message, just don’t have them.

Angel B. Pérez: Emotional self-regulation. I think that’s the future of what we have to train. And in the chapter I talk about my own practices of meditation and stillness and solitude that have become very powerful.

And by the way, science has proven that does actually lead to stronger leadership. Again, these are tools that actually people can use. But again, most of us feel as leaders that we’re so busy, we don’t have time for stuff like that. And I have turned that model on its head so much and it took a long time for me to get here.

I was one of those always running. And you read a lot about it in the book. But I have realized that me taking care of myself doing that inner work. A co a couple of weeks ago, Keith, after the national conference, I have had a really tough year, to be honest. This has been a rough year.

I’ve had to cancel a lot of vacations and all that, but. I shut it down and I said to my staff, I am taking a week off. And I went hiking by myself for a week. I was in the woods in solitude just to recenter. ’cause it’s one of the things that I have had to figure out, if I’m going to continue to do this work and I’m gonna show up and be a really thoughtful, insightful, present leader, what are the things that I need to do in order to fuel up and put my own mask on first as flight attendants tell you?

And so many leaders. They’re sacrificing so much of their life because they feel like doing stuff like that is a luxury. I have now reframed this and I learned it from Jay Shetty, who was also one of our speakers at the NEC Conference a few years ago who said, what if you thought about. Things like self care and vacations and solitude as part of your strategy for leadership success.

And I was like, woo, all right, let’s go. He’s, and he’s been so right that if I don’t do those things, I do not show up at work very well here. I think at the same time, we gotta do human work.

Keith Edwards: We have these stories that tending to myself is self-indulgent and a luxury, and I’ll do that when I have free time ’cause I’m so busy and go.

At the same time, those same people who are saying that to themselves are annoyed by a leader on their campus who clearly hasn’t done their own inner work. And it is creating a big problem for them and for others. And if they could just get their stuff together, oh my goodness. And they’re not doing that and.

I’m not gonna do so when we see someone who hasn’t done their inner work, we see the implications of that. Yes. Yes. And yet we get so many messages from our culture that it’s an indulgence, it’s a luxury when you have free time rather than an essential strategy to being an effective leader. And actually a poor use of the institutionals resource, which is you, your time, your capacity so you can be fully present.

So you can be engaged with others so you can see your thoughts as not something that is true, but something to question and challenge and have Perspective managing emotions. Also just managing our physicality, sleep activity, nutrition. Yeah. Hiking, nature, solitude. And also being in community, right?

You talk about the power of solitude, but also talking about the power of having a coach, the power of being community with others all of that, mentoring, shadowing, all of this is so important.

Angel B. Pérez: And also for. Decision making. That’s another area that I’ve really, I just had this moment.

Yesterday. And I won’t say what it is, but I was dealing with a very difficult staffing issue and I just couldn’t come up with the answer and I stepped away from it. I wasn’t addressing it immediately, but I stepped back. So this was actually two days ago. I stepped back, I meditated, but then I sat on it.

I sat in silence for a while, and literally the day I was coming into the office to address the issue. The answer just came to me. Yeah, and it, I dealt with it so differently. We’ve had a beautiful ending as a result. It doesn’t always end that way, but I thought, gosh, if I didn’t sit in stillness, if I didn’t really emotionally self-regulate when that person came to me with this challenge and I just barked back, right?

It’s no, let me think about that. But I’ve learned to regulate myself in ways that sometimes I don’t even recognize myself because I tend to be a pretty hyper person. But what I realize is. That is the best thing for the organization. If I’m gonna show up as a strong leader.

Keith Edwards: And I think one, one of the other awarenesses I have moving from my campus-based role, where I felt like my dedication and commitment was about time on task, how many hours in the office, how many hours doing the email, how many, how much time was on task.

And in this role, my success is really about quality of output, quality of decision making, quality of insights, quality of thinking, and that’s a very different thing. Like you, when I’m stuck on a challeng or a problem. More time on task. Rarely is helpful.

Angel B. Pérez: Oh, it makes it worse.

Keith Edwards: It’s when I get up and go for a run or when I get up and switch the laundry, I’m like, oh, you know what?

Clearly what I should do is blah, blah, blah, blah, or meditation or being in nature or just taking a breath. So many people listening to this are so busy. They’re listening to a podcast conversation about the hottest seat on campus and Dr. Angel Perez, while also folding laundry and strategizing the thing they’re gonna do tomorrow in that tough meeting while also.

And that’s a human thing. That’s part of the context of the world. And how do you make that an exception rather than the rule, right? So you have time to think and recenter and be on strong ground. Amazing. Amazing.

Angel B. Pérez: Beautifully said.

Keith Edwards: As you can tell, I got all excited about that. So I’m glad that we held off to the end, but we are running out of time.

This podcast is called Student Affairs. Now we always like to end with asking our guests, what are you thinking? What are you troubling? What are you pondering now? And also, if folks wanna connect with you, where can they do that? So what are you thinking troubling or pondering now?

Angel B. Pérez: Oh my gosh. I’m thinking about so much.

I’m trying to stay away from the news because it’s not healthy. That’s part of my own emotional self

Keith Edwards: regulation. Yeah. Your consumption.

Angel B. Pérez: Yeah. The way I consume, I, I try to do diets from time to time and digital detox. What’s really top of mind for me today? ’cause I think it.

It impacts everything else is actually what we just talked about now, which is how do we cultivate strategically the next generation of leaders who are going to do the work that you and I both love, right? In higher education institutions and educational institutions in general. So that we can have a cohort of healthy whole leaders who are making good decisions, to be honest.

And I’m not being political here. I think that if the people who are in charge right now had done the inner work, we wouldn’t be in those situations. Yeah. Yeah. That we are in right now. So I have just been fired up about this even before Brene Brown came in. And spoke at nacac, but she lit another fire under me.

Around, a big part of the role that you and I can play given our distinct roles is to help train the next generation of leaders. And that is what’s top of mind for me today and the biggest difference I feel like I can make.

Keith Edwards: And I think that’s so true, and this goes back to a point you made earlier, but I think so much in higher education, we, it’s funny we’re institutions of learning and growth and development, yet we treat leadership like we need to.

Find it somewhere and bring it over there. Here, it’s over there.

Angel B. Pérez: Yeah.

Keith Edwards: And we don’t invest in it. We don’t develop it. We don’t coach it, we don’t do that kind of thing. And I think there’s a lot of leadership potential. Now that is leaving higher education because it hasn’t been cultivated. It hasn’t been supported, it hasn’t been curated.

And how do we stop trying to find the perfect dean for enrollment out there somewhere who will solve all our problems and instead cultivate the person you have. Yes. Cultivate it here. Cultivate it here. If folks wanna connect with you, where can they do that?

Angel B. Pérez: I’m on LinkedIn, so just look up my name.

Angel b Perez. I also have a website, angel b Perez. Angel b perez.com. I almost gave people my address. Angel b perez.com.

Keith Edwards: Okay, great. And they can also find you at NAC and the hottest seat on campus is from Harvard Educational Publisher, Harvard Ed Press, but you can get it on Amazon as well.

Harvard Ed Press, and wherever you get your books, we’ll put a link to that in the chat. Thank you, Dr. Perez. This has been terrific and I really appreciate your leadership in this space and getting me all fired up this afternoon as we have this conversation. Thanks for having me so much. I also wanna thank our sponsors of today’s episode evolve.

As we talked about, higher education is facing unprecedented challenges, and we need courageous leadership now more than ever, and poor leadership has never been more costly. At Evolve Institute, we’re empowering a new generation of leaders with the capacity to turn these challenges into possibilities and lead with and through them.

At Evolve, we help leaders develop the capacity to lead with clarity, confidence, and courage. We offer leadership coaching journeys. For leadership teams and individual leaders focused on executive leaders, emerging executive, emerging leaders. And those leading for equity. I feel like I could have written that based on this conversation.

It was actually written before I didn’t steal it. Also, a huge shout out to our producer, Nat Ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes work to make both of us look and sound good. We love your support for these conversations. You can really help us reach a broader audience by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube and to our newsletter where you get the new information about our latest episode every Wednesday morning.

If you’re so inclined, you can leave us. Five star review. It helps these reach even more folks. My name’s Keith Edwards to our fabulous guest today, Dr. Angel Perez. Thank you so much and to all of you watching and listening, make it a great week.

https://www.nacacnet.org/

https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9798895570210/the-hottest-seat-on-campus

https://www.angelbperez.com/