The Non-Hire
How we handled our last minute faculty shortage
It was a Wednesday, two days before we were set to close for the holiday break, when I received an unexpected email from a new faculty member who was set to join us at the beginning of January — an unexpected family circumstance meant that he wouldn’t be able to relocate and join our team after all. Shit.
Some background: I lead the Learning Team at the African Leadership University, a new higher education institution on the island of Mauritius. Our vision is to develop transformational African leaders from all across the continent. We welcomed our first class this year of 180 young men & women from over 30 countries, and we’ll increase about fivefold in the next 18 months. We use a peer-centered, project-based approach to learning, and we begin all students with a common first year that focuses on the 7 major skills a leader needs in order to be transformational (to wit: Leading Self, Engaging Others, Critical Thinking, Entrepreneurial Thinking, Communicating For Impact, Quantitative Reasoning, and Managing Complex Tasks). It’s an amazing place, and if you’re reading this you should come visit. (Or come work with us — we’re hiring.)
But… we had a super big problem. 120 new students were arriving in February expecting to take our 4 introductory courses. Three other new hires were set to start at the beginning of January to get ready to teach those 120 new students, but what were we going to do about that fourth course? It was not as if I could say to those students, “I know you were meant to take four classes, but instead — surprise — you only need to take 3!”
It was December 18th and our typical recruitment process takes at least 4 weeks when there isn’t a huge holiday during which most of the working world grinds to a halt. Shit.
We had one candidate in the pipeline who had progressed pretty far already. I mentioned him to the team lead who he would be working with, and her response was tepid at best. She had seen his recruitment assignment, and she didn’t think he actually had the skills to do the job well. I tried to convince her that any warm body was better than nobody. She was unmoved.* Shit.
I was faced with a choice:
- Try to manage a hasty recruitment process in the midst of my family vacation over the holidays from a nonexistent candidate pipeline, OR,
- Do nothing until I returned from vacation and then work closely with the team lead to come up with some novel idea to cover 2 sections of 30 students each by February 3rd, OR,
- Internalize a deep and unyielding panic and hope that it didn’t cause cardiac arrest.
I opted for a combination of options 2 & 3. For two weeks, I didn’t check my email or communicate with the team lead…but I did spend some time thinking, and one day in the shower it occurred to me that I could take that one missing role and break it up into its component parts. Instead of 1 full time faculty member, I was looking for 6 hours a week of classroom facilitation, 3 hours a week of office hours, 10 hours a week of grading and giving feedback, etc. Instead of looking for an entirely new team member, I was looking for bits of spare capacity (preferably aligned with existing expertise). I could find that from a combination of spare capacity within the team and a few people who could give a little bit extra in the short term.
And, let’s be clear, this was indeed a short term solution — it wouldn’t work forever, but it would buy us a few months at best…but that was enough time to fire up the recruiting pipeline again and get the right person for the role for the long term.
On my first day back from my vacation, I sat down with the course team lead to see what she thought of my plan, but before I could tell her my stroke of genius, she started up, “I can buy us a couple months if I distribute the role across a few people. I’ve identified 6 people already on our team and begun to approach them about taking on specific tasks for 5–6 hours per week. I’ve also drafted this email to send out to the whole team that they can send around their networks to recruit for the role.”
It’s March 21st, and over the last ten weeks, it hasn’t been all chocolate & roses; the course team lead has pulled extraordinarily long hours, but she completely owned the recruitment process and supported the four people who pulled together to cover the faculty role (one of whom has asked if she can keep teaching, even as our new hire comes onboard). We saw nearly a dozen candidates over that time, three of whom were excellent…so, we have one of them joining us in a week and the other two coming over the next several months as we prepare for another 180 students this coming September.
I learned two important things from all of this:
— first, crisis = opportunity. If everything was going swimmingly, I would never have approved the approach that we ended up taking. But now, we’ve had an opportunity to test out something different. I don’t know if we’d do it again, but as a team we leveled up in our creative problem solving skills, and we weathered a storm that has bolstered our confidence to face the next one.
— second, entrust responsibility to the people who will be the most affected by the outcome. I lucked into this one, because I was ready to own it myself. And I would have, if my wife and children wouldn’t have murdered me for working through our vacation together. Instead, I inadvertently created the space for someone else to rise to the occasion. And she did. Magnificently. I found I was able to support her better through it all when she was the one who was owning the ultimate outcome, and she was highly engaged in the process knowing that she had been the one who led the decision.
*So, of course, I halfheartedly contacted the guy to see how accurate her read was. It was, unfortunately, accurate.
