Telling a Story to Help Leadership Understand the Sight Lines to the Core Drivers of Your Institution

Rebeka Mazzone - FuturED Finance
Gary Hawkins - Hampshire College

At this time when so many institutions are struggling with enrollment declines, we are facing continued pressure to cut costs and consider new revenue sources. As finance professionals, we have spent years providing relevant financial data which reflects the need to make changes to ensure we are a financially sustainable institution. After all of this effort, so many of us feel that our institutions are still unable to make the necessary changes.

Hear from one institution who has learned that how you convey the information to help leadership make decisions is critical. But how do we help leadership understand the sight lines to the core drivers of our institutions? This requires telling a story using units of measure your audience can understand.

Hampshire College vice president of academic affairs and dean of faculty, Gary Hawkins, will take us through his journey of understanding how academic delivery impacts the financial sustainability of the institution. He will help us to learn what critical understanding he needed to be able to know what actions would move the needle and how to help faculty and the campus community understand why change was necessary. He will share stories of the challenges and successes along the way and give insight into how his leadership peers are developing a deeper understanding of the connection between what we do every day and whether it is helping us move toward a more sustainable financial future.

Learning Objectives

  1. Demonstrate ways to use data when partnering with your leadership for making decisions.
  2. Define key elements to provide context for data and how it fits into the system as a whole.
  3. Describe triggers that often cause the inability to move forward with discussions about data.

CPE Available

  • 1 Credit: Finance