Career Transitions: From the Boardroom to the Classroom – Do You Know What It Takes? A Teaching Case in Global Leadership

Status Report

When Helena got assigned to a new role as Program Director at Nantucket State (NS) she had 4 staff members who reported to her. One person from China, one from Spain and two from the USA. This department was created because the College had identified that a new skill development program was necessary to meet the requirements of the global business environment so that graduates would acquire new skills to succeed. This role also interacted with international clients interested in training and development. Because this was a new initiative it required someone with an entrepreneurial vision and who was able to lead a diverse group of smart, talented staff members.

NS was not different from many other universities, but the organizational environment was something Helena had to learn to navigate from the start. She very quickly discovered that tenured faculty had a lot of say in the decisions that were made, how the budget was distributed, who kept their tenure and who did not have a chance to be part of the “in” group. Helena also realized that power was distributed in a very unique way and that there were some faculty members whose opinions strongly influenced the strategy and direction of the program. And these individuals could help or hinder Helena’s career. During the first months in her role at NS Helena had already had a couple of arguments with two of her staff members. Helena could not understand why it was important for one of them not to have specific office hours but to allow for a “just in time” student mentoring. Helena thought it was important to have specific hours so that students could know in advance when professors were available. The second situation involved something she could still not figure out. Her staff member from China, Ying, had sent a message to the school faculty asking for their input into a new program and with a summary of new ideas for their consideration to be included in a new skill development course. These were ideas that had been discussed during their last faculty meeting. Helena noticed that the message had some grammatical errors. Helena was concerned about this message and sent a reply to her employee from China copying Lynn, the Dean of the College. In this message Helena instructed Ying not to send any more emails to faculty and if she had to do so Ying should first ask the communications department for a review of her messages. Helena did not hear back from Ying all that day. After this incident Helena sent a couple of unrelated messages to her team and had not received a message back from Ying in 2 days. She was concerned that something was going on. Ying was usually very responsive to online communications and has never taken more than a couple of hours to respond to Helena’s messages. She then receives a message from Ying requesting to have two days off.