Where Are We Headed?
I came on board in September with a firm belief that institutions like Heald serve a critical role in educating a huge underserved segment of society. I also maintain an abiding and passionate belief that by serving this segment exceptionally well, Heald will positively transform the health and welfare of our communities and thrive in the decades ahead.
It’s also clear that our industry has arrived at an important inflection point – one where the same day-to-day behaviors and outcomes that worked in decades past are likely insufficient to secure our future. On the one hand, heightened regulatory scrutiny, negative publicity, and weakened and more exacting consumer demand have resulted in restrictions on the ability to grow and pressure on cost structures. On the other hand, innovative instructional and support models, often powered by new technology, seek to radically change the cost and power of the classroom.
In light of these pressures, a number of companies in our space, both for-profit and not-for-profit, have announced cutbacks. Today, CCi announced a company-wide reduction in force (see attached). Unfortunately, as part of this reduction, Heald eliminated a number of positions, primarily in our enrollment teams, to better reflect the current volume of student enrollments.
Eliminating positions in an organization is very difficult. These decisions affect real human beings that live in the very communities we strive to serve. Please know that the Heald senior management team and the Campus Presidents worked very hard and with deep emotional attention to the human consequences of our actions to make the best possible decisions within a fairly strong set of constraints.
Indeed, the whole organization, at all levels, deserves immense credit for preserving the heart and soul of Heald over these last few years of industry turbulence and ownership change. You’ve managed the business with conscientious dedication to our students and with a high level of accountability to both financial stability and strong outcomes. We should all feel very proud. I understand that these cutbacks are particularly hard to swallow in light of this effort.
Yet strong organizations, particularly ones like Heald – who have survived major earthquakes, the Great Depression, and two world wars over the course of 150 years – use adversity to their advantage. They treat these situations as calls to action, and they sharpen their focus.
In our case, now is the time to commit to a bold vision, link arms, and focus with grit and zest on those things that we control.
Simply put, we need to change, and we need to start now. Not only do industry conditions demand it, but we have a moral obligation to our students and our communities to find and implement the best ideas. Given our strong foundation and heritage, we have a unique window of opportunity to assume an inspiring and sustainable position of leadership in our industry, but that window won’t stay open for long. If we do it right, here’s what we'll look like in five years.
Our Journey Together: What We Will Look Like in Five Years
Within the next five years, you will be able to step into any classroom, in any program, on any campus at Heald, at any time, and witness something magical – faculty that have been given the resources and professional development training to master their craft and students that are at the edge of their seats, actively engaged in learning. We will graduate students that are truly distinctive, where an employer will be able to spot a Heald graduate from a mile away. I’m not speaking about someone who is simply well trained and prepared – that will be the bare minimum requirement going forward. I’m talking about graduates in whom behaviors are so deeply ingrained through their experience at Heald, that a prospective employer will have no choice but to hire them. They simply ooze grit, zest, gratitude, curiosity, and professionalism. And we will be able to bring visitors to Heald who won’t be able to step one foot into our campuses without concluding that they have arrived somewhere special and truly different.
The byproducts of this transformation will be an undeniably compelling value proposition for our students and taxpayers – unheard of graduation rates and placement rates nearing 100% at salary levels that allow our students to support their families and our communities to prosper. And, yes, we will earn profits by doing this – profits that will allow us to continue investing in the business, pay taxes and earn handsome returns for our shareholders who have risked their capital. And we will be incredibly proud.
Is this idealistic or naïve? Is this asking too much of any organization? I’m firmly convinced the answer is no. I have been spending almost every week in our classrooms. I have visited innovative charter high schools that serve our same students (albeit at a younger age) and that are achieving outcomes that most people at first thought were impossible. One example is a charter high school, Summit Public Schools, based in the San Francisco bay area, that is dedicated to the idea that every single student have a high-performing teacher every single period of every day. Summit’s first cohort achieved a 98% acceptance rate into four-year colleges. A student at Summit is 800% more likely to graduate and go to college than students of similar socio-economic characteristics across America. And, yet, no one in the post-secondary environment – for profit or otherwise – has employed similar practices or operates with the same unrelenting passion for instructional excellence. Why shouldn’t we have the same action-based, relentless zeal for our team, faculty, and students? Finally, beginning this January term, I decided to teach at our Heald San Francisco campus so I could walk in the shoes of our faculty (if only for a limited time) to understand our students more intimately and to get a much need injection of reality to temper my idealism. I remain not only convinced but further resolved – this can and must be done.
So How Do We Get There?
About a month ago, the broader Heald leadership team – Campus Presidents, regional and divisional leaders, and senior management team – spent two full days at our Roseville campus debating, discussing and thinking deeply about a series of basic but critical questions:
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Why do we exist?
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How do we behave?
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How do we succeed?
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What do we focus on right now?
The conversations that we had were thoughtful, professional and healthy. They produced a starting framework for organizational clarity that I’d like to share with you now and plan to expand upon in a series of weekly virtual conversations and through in-person discussions over the next several weeks at our campuses. Your Campus Presidents will be similarly providing forums for dialogue on these questions.
The goal is that over the course of the next few months, by asking the right questions and engaging in real conversations, we will not only collectively shape and finalize the answers to these questions, but we will all understand and internalize them. There will be no daylight between us and no confusion. So let’s start.
Why Do We Exist?
Why an organization exists is the most basic but important question an organization can ask itself. Yet, organizations rarely ask or answer it well, and there is typically little real consensus. Without a clear answer to that question, it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to know how an organization should behave, what it should prioritize, where it is heading, and how it is going to get there. When you ask yourself why Heald exists, what is your answer? After hours of thoughtful, open discussion, here’s how your broader leadership team answered the question:
We exist to educate and empower students to achieve their highest human potential and thereby help transform the communities we serve.
This is our core purpose, why we get up each and every day to do what we do. Notice the words educate, empower and transform and the constituencies of students and communities. These are deliberate and intentional.
How Will We Succeed?
We spent an equal amount of time asking ourselves how we succeed in delivering on this core purpose and achieving the vision described above. And we forced ourselves to limit the answer to three strategic anchors (as a laundry list of a dozen or more things doesn’t create clarity).
Here’s what we decided are the most critical:
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Spellbinding Classrooms: Classrooms marked by exceptional, empowered faculty, innovative curricula, and unsurpassed student engagement and learning.
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“Mile Away” Behaviors and Skills: An enveloping campus culture focused on professional skills and character development that forges truly dist