Page 9 - Delaware Lawyer - Winter 2021

Culture Matters
The most important thing to under- stand about organizational culture is that if you begin trying to develop or change yours in the middle of a crisis, you are too late. Organizations will inevitably succeed or fail based on the culture and people you have in place when the emergency hits.
From the beginning of the corona- virus pandemic, it was clear that col- leges and universities would experi- ence a significant negative financial im- pact. According to a recent letter from the American Council of Education (ACE) and dozens of other organiza- tions representing the nation’s two- and four-year colleges, that impact is estimated to exceed $120 billion. It’s undoubtedly a low estimate. Stagger- ing drops in revenue forced colleges and universities to make deep budget cuts and shut down substantial parts of
their campuses. For institutions whose revenue model depended heavily on students in residence, this represented a potentially existential challenge.
True to its HBCU heritage, Dela- ware State University has necessar- ily developed an underlying culture focused on consistently having to do more with less, and a student culture of considering the campus as their “second home” and “safe space to grow and learn.” Both of these ele- ments became critical in constructing a pandemic response strategy.
As the university’s brand new Chief Operations Officer, I witnessed the impact of the university’s culture when COVID-19 required us to evacuate 90% of our student body from cam- pus in mid-March 2020. Our leader- ship team understood that we had to have a comprehensive, broad-based pandemic response plan that hinged not only on universal mask-wearing, social distancing and hybrid courses, but also on intensive, community-wide testing on a biweekly basis. This left us with a major conundrum: how does a cash-strapped, residential university manage and implement an expensive testing regime?
The answer was twofold: our lead- ership culture teaches us that when we don’t possess the funding, we have to be creative in finding solutions. As a university, we tell our story and net- work relentlessly. In this case, our networking path led us to New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer and the nonprofit Testing for America (TFA). TFA CEO Jason Yeung greeted us with open arms and cited our university as exactly the type of institution his orga- nization wanted to help keep safe. In fact, Mr. Yeung’s organization helped us find the resources to make our test- ing program successful. I wholeheart- edly believe that we were able to build this partnership because our organiza- tional cultures were aligned.
Simultaneously, the university faced the challenge of implementing a test- ing program that made maximum use of our resources. Our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Michelle Fisher, RN, and the Chairperson of the Department of Public and Allied Health, Dr. Robert C. Mason, organized the testing pro- cess around a cadre of faculty, staff and student volunteers. This required dozens of people to devote hundreds of hours to keeping our campus safe, including the time to train to profes- sional standards and provide scheduled testing rain or shine.
This all worked because of that sec- ond element of campus culture: the value of “being here together.” This is because our students hail from low- resource families and see the campus as their second home, where they are freed from housing, food and tech- nological insecurities, as well as being able to access wraparound support- ive services like health care, counsel- ing and tutoring. From day one, our students stepped forward to make the COVID safety plan their own.
Neither of these outcomes would have been possible without a robust pre-existing culture.
Keep Your Vision Clear
Crisis and loss often have a way of clarifying your vision and values. President Tony Allen was clear from day one of his tenure: our goal is to become the most diverse, contempo- rary and unapologetic HBCU in the country. The key to our success was to avoid allowing the pandemic to sepa- rate us from that goal and to use this crisis to clarify what is essential.
Throughout the pandemic, univer- sity leadership maintained a deep sense of purpose and belief in the future. That belief in our future propelled us to consider the acquisition of Wesley College, a private liberal arts college in Dover, Delaware, even while we were
WINTER 2021 DELAWARE LAWYER 7
COURTESY OF DELAWARE STATE UNIVERSITY