“Faculty and staff are absolutely critical to everything we do at MSU”

MSU's Strategic Plan 2030 identifies goals within six key themes: student success, staff and faculty success, discovery, creativity, and innovation for excellence and global impact, sustainable health, stewardship and sustainability, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.On this edition of MSU Today, we'll be focusing on the staff and faculty success pillar of the plan with its executive sponsors: Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Teresa Woodruff, Executive Vice President for Administration and Chief Information Officer Melissa Woo, and Executive Vice President for Health Sciences Dr. Norman J.Beauchamp.Michigan State University President Samuel L. Stanley Jr., M.D. says MSU's staff and faculty are key assets of the university whose work determines the success of the university. And it's important to find ways to make MSU a place where people want to come to work and achieve their potential.“Faculty and staff are absolutely critical to everything we do at MSU,” Stanley says. “And if you look at what the assets are that we value at the university, we have an amazing physical plant and amazing facilities. We have incredible students. They're remarkable, but our outstanding faculty and staff are our core assets, and their work really determines the success of the university.“What we want to do in this part of the plan is really talk about how we help faculty and staff succeed in their important work. How can we enable them? They have the talent and the capabilities, but how do we do what we can to remove barriers and help them fully succeed in what they're trying to do? How do we find avenues for advancement for faculty and staff? How do we help them achieve? How do we help them reach the next goal? For assistant professors, how do you reach full professor or associate professor first with tenure? For staff, how do you get promoted? How do you move up the ladder? How do you take on more responsibilities?“Finding ways to help individuals do this is key to our success at MSU. Finding ways to help them accomplish their research by providing the right support for them is key at MSU. What we'll talk about in this session is some of the things we're thinking about in this area and some of the steps we need to take to make MSU a place where people want to come to work to fulfill their dreams and reach their full potential.”Provost Woodruff echoes President Stanley's sentiments that the plan is all about putting MSU people first.“The entire strategic plan is about the people of this institution,” says Woodruff. “There's no part of it that doesn't touch on what we are as individuals within this great institution. Faculty and staff represent the institution, and what we want to do in the strategic plan is really to provide opportunities for every individual to reach their full potential. And in as much as we support the individuals, the institution will rise.“In many ways, the strategic plan contemplates a series of steps that one can imagine are somewhat like leavening that they begin to help each part to contribute then to the overall elevation of the institution. And as long as we put people at the center of everything we do, including our strategic thinking, the better MSU will be in the end. Every part of this plan really is about the people.”Woo says the plan is about creating an environment where people can thrive.“We can't get things done without great people who understand that we have an environment where they're going to thrive, and we need to create conditions where they believe they can do truly meaningful work,” Woo says. “We can't achieve our goals without people. We can buy all this what I call stuff that we can, but ultimately we have to have people who are truly talented and really want to be here to achieve great things and go where we need to go.”“To be successful, it has to be about the people and the mission,” adds Beauchamp. “We need an environment that supports and empowers the goals of people who choose to make MSU the place where they work, learn, and practice.”Woo adds that inclusivity is key to the plan.“We are working very hard to create an inclusive environment, one that is truly inclusive of diverse voices,” Woo continues. “We are really starting to excel in this area, particularly with the onboarding of our first chief diversity officer as well as an awareness of the need for inclusivity and diversity. We can see this in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategic Plan. We can see it in all of the efforts across the entire university. It's all of us together working towards creating this inclusive environment. I think this is where we excel, and we are getting even better.”Beauchamp adds that accountability is also key to the plan.“We excel in having a community that cares,” Beauchamp says. “In those difficult moments, what I've been struck by is how the MSU community comes together to be intentional in solving those challenges. We're also excelling in having a culture of accountability. It's something that we have to do better, and the strategic plan gets at that, but we have to be accountable to all of those who come to us in search of help or goal attainment.”“We think of spirals of excellence in the specific areas of work,” Woodruff continues. “As we think about people, one of the things I have said and believe is Michigan State has a very high excellence to humility ratio. The humility of this place is just extraordinary. So, one of the things that we collectively have tried to do is really spotlight the excellence of individuals - faculty, academic staff, and staff. And we know of this excellence because of our rankings. We're a member of the great AAU, the Association for American Universities, because of our great people across this institution. The AAU is widely regarded as the most important metric for research intensive institutions across North America.“And there are a number of other rankings that represent this kind of spiral of excellence. So, what we want to do is really spotlight that excellence through the strategic plan, developing a portfolio for honorifics, both for individuals as well as for the institution. And we can hopefully then enable every one of the individuals within the organization to be able to not only achieve that which is good for them, but also to be able to let the world know what they're doing.“In the context of the strategic plan as well, each one of our offices is working to enable a new generation of work that continues to help to elevate each one of our folks. I think of the Office of Faculty and Academic Staff Development. We've started a new dean school to orient both our new and interim deans to some of the core aspects of what we're doing to build community, not just the administrative work or the disciplinary depths, but really thinking about effective team building, equitable budgeting, and evaluating faculty and staff in ways that help them to succeed.“These are really specific areas that we've been honing in on, creating and sustaining a respectful work environment series that we've been developing and that's across our offices of Human Resources and the Office for Institutional Equity and the RVSM team. So, again, we’re trying to think very holistically about how we build competencies to enable the i...