Collaborative Alignment

Earlier this week Carrie and I were in Greenville, SC for the Southern Business Deans Summer Workshop. SBAA is one of my favorite groups, and I always walk away inspired – I think Carrie would agree.

Greenville is a neat city (very different from the NC version) and we learned a lot. We learned about the collaboration between USC-Upstate and regional partners, Cadet development at The Citadel, the power of storytelling, ways to enhance our advancement efforts, AI, and so much more. We had great conversations with 75+ other deans across the South, including Mike Weeks of The Citadel and David Palmer of Charleston Southern. We all walked away seeing tremendous opportunities for collaboration and an alignment with regional partners.

This was also reinforced in my meeting with Hunter. The Hospitality industry is focused on keeping the Charleston region on top of its game, and there is collaboration among organizations that could see themselves as competitors. HTMT aligns well and is partnering in ways that will improve and enhance our already excellent program. If you think about it, we can see this in every department of our School. And we have similar opportunities with partners across campus.

This idea of collaborative alignment is something we will be talking a lot about as we build our shared future. If we each do our own thing in teaching, research, service, leadership, etc., we are doing it alone and, in a sense, swimming upstream. But things flow much better if we work together and look for ways to align with what’s happening around us. We create synergy.

So, as we start thinking about the next academic year and beyond, let’s look for ways to structure what we do around collaborative alignment. This will lighten our load, increase our impact, and create a space to bring our best.

YOU make a difference!

Ponder this with me…