Vicki Baker on Leadership and Professional Development in Higher Ed

On this episode, I welcome Dr. Vicki Baker to the show. Professor, leader, consultant, and coach. We talk about leadership, professional development, and doing things your way.

Transcript

Check out Vicki's books on mid-career faculty! 

Rebecca Pope-Ruark (RPR): Welcome to the Agile Academic, a podcast for women in and around higher education. In each episode, we tackle topics from career vitality to burnout and everything in between. Join me as I chat with inspiring women about their experiences, pursuing purpose, making change, and driving culture in the academy and beyond. I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope Ruark. 

Hey Vicki, welcome to the show. 

Vicki Baker (VB): Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. 

RPR: Yeah, so why don't you just introduce yourself to the audience? 

VB: Sure. So my name is Vicki Baker and I am a professor of Economics and Management at Albe College. I am in year 19. That has gone insanely fast and I also serve as the department chair of the Economics and Management Department. I am also an associate Dean of Strategic Partnerships and Innovation, and I also am the director of a program that I helped build called the Albion College Community Collaborative, otherwise known as AC3 because that is a mouthful, and essentially it's an experiential learning lab, student service management consultants. So with my background in management and consulting, I was charged with a previous administration to take a management consulting course that I taught, but to create kind of a consulting entity at the college that would engage students across all divisional areas. So I still direct that program as well. 

RPR: We're going to dig into all of the little details of the leadership piece in just a minute, but I always like to start with the first question. What defines your purpose in or around higher education? 

VB: That's such a good question, and probably if you were to chart that along my career, that purpose would probably be slightly different. I think if you can really distill it down to my purpose is really helping people advance in their career, helping people become who they were meant to become. As folks in the academy, we have a short window to be with these amazing individuals, and it's also a very pivotal window in somebody's life. And so helping them to think thoughtfully about the ways in which they see themselves, how they want to grow, really think thoughtfully about that contribution. That comes up in my books, it comes up in my mid-career coaching, what do you want your contribution to be? And so when I'm asking myself that of what do I want my contribution to be? As I think about what that looks like in action and service to others, it really does come down to this notion of helping people find whatever that thing is that brings them joy that they're passionate about, that puts them on the path to helping them become who they want to be. 

RPR: So how does that connect to the leadership work that you do? You've done a lot with mid-career faculty, you do a lot with chairs, and you are a campus leader yourself. So how does that kind of feed into the leadership work that you do? 

VB: When someone steps into a leadership role, and I'm very cognizant or cautious or careful about using the term leader, I think you and I have experienced many people in the academy who might have a title, but we would not call them a leader. And so if someone's truly invested in developing as a leader, that requires a different intentionality behind it. You have to also be ready for it, and you might not always be ready for it. Now might not be the time for a variety of personal or professional reasons. And so once someone decides to embark on becoming a leader, whether that's in a formal sense with a title that we see or that we equate that with, but also someone who wants to be a leader in the classroom or a leader in terms of scholarship and creative inquiry or a leader in terms of their community, that does require an intentional investment and someone really engaging in some critical self-assessment about who am I? What value add do I bring to the table? How will I develop as a result of engaging in this space? Is now the right time to be doing it? Maybe I could answer yes to those other two prompts, but the third one for a variety of reasons, it might be now's not the time. And so I really take seriously the helping people become who they were meant to be. And that happens in parallel with these other factors as folks decide is now the right time? Is this the right opportunity? Is this the right context? What ways do I need to invest in myself in order to be ready for this opportunity and to add a value to it? 

RPR: It's really important because when we think about leaders, especially when we think about department chairs, there a lot of work to be done, not a lot of training to prepare you, if any, for some folks, you just kind of get thrown in and it's that mentality that if you're a good scholar, you'll make a good manager or you'll make a good leader. And we know that's not always the case. So thinking about how do we make sure that we support people as so that they are prepared to make good decisions about moving into leadership or why they want to do that, how they're going to do that. 

VB: Absolutely. In some of my research, we found that that department chair position sometimes becomes the penultimate leadership aspiration. You're so turned off after you've occupied that role and it's reasonable, right? I also see articles where we talked about the great resignation and people walking away, my former minor advisor, Jim Detert from Penn State, who's now at UVA in Darden, he put a different spin on it, and it was not necessarily that people are resigning in droves, but isn't it a rational response whenever you're under supported, undervalued, under appreciated, and not resourced appropriately to be able to do your job? I mean, in some instances they make it seem like it's a negative behavior on the part of the employee. But in reality, if you take a step back and you look at human behavior and you think about the context in which that's happening, isn't that a reasonable rational response of why am I going to keep going above and beyond when I'm not trained? I'm not resourced, I don't have the support. 

Again, before we put the audio on, I have a whole lot of responsibility and very little to no authority to move the needle in positive or negative ways depending on what the situation calls for. So it's so important to have succession planning when it comes to these positions and organizations to be really thoughtful about starting to prepare somebody a year or two before they even step into the role. As simple as I'm going to attend meetings with the current department chair, I'm going to get CC'd on emails just to get a feel for the types of issues that come across somebody's desk with regularity. If we don't do those little things, then we are losing out, I think on really high potential leaders at other levels in the organization. And again, it's a rational response to opt out after that experience because it wasn't a good one. And what's to make you think that this other position would be any different in terms of the training and the resourcing and the support and the appreciation, right? It is what they say past behaviors are predictor or future behavior. And so if that's the type of investment we put at department chairs, probably pretty reasonable to assume that same level or lack thereof is going to be present at other levels in the organization. 

RPR: What is your researching or what are you thinking along the lines of what we can do to prepare those folks better? What kind of investments we need to make? 

VB: I was fortunate it'll be two years ago now. In September, I was an ACE fellow, and in that fellowship I spent a semester at Hope College in the office of the provost and the office of the president. And my project specifically was to develop a department chair and program director, succession management and mentoring program to really think about identifying individuals that are going to step into these roles at least a year before they step in and think about the necessary training. And I had written a piece in inside higher ed called the New Department Chair triumphant, and it talked about just what you said. It's no longer scholarship teaching and service that gets you your promotion. It's now really about management, leadership and personnel development. So I talk about management or the day-to-day tactical skills that somebody needs to have to be able to make the department run or the unit run day to day leadership is the vision setting, the culture establishment, the strategies. 

You've got to be trained in those things and be thinking at that level. And then lastly, personnel development. You need to be investing in the people that are on your team, finding their strengths, putting them in a position where those strengths can be enhanced and they can elevate the and behaviors of others. So we really need to be thinking about department chair positions, associate dean positions, maybe even associate provost positions in that way, right? It is now about effective management, effective leadership, and effective personnel development and investing. So during that semester, I spent time literally having meetings with all the units on campus, the finance office for budgets, sponsored research, and let's put together training materials and content from a management perspective, leadership, how do you set a vision? How do you identify your values, how do you communicate those? How do you support those? 

And then other training. And last year, hope College piloted that program for current department chairs and then soon to be, because we weren't in a position to capture them a year before, it was We're going to get you in real time and then even invite folks that were in the role one or two years because they certainly didn't get that level of training. It got a lot of very positive feedback, and as each meeting progressed, they got even more and more attendees coming because they recognized the importance of that. So I think just that intentionality and really just appreciating that it's a different skillset and you have to invest in people in different ways. You can't expect success if you're not going to help facilitate that success. 

RPR: And there's so many different hats that that person has to wear, right? There's the manager hat within those three things that you mentioned, right? There's the manager hat, there's a coach hat, there's the leader in the visioning hat. So those are skills that we don't always use just as faculty members and really teasing that differentiation out between how you are as a mentor and a coach or as a leader versus a manager. In those situations, we often just don't think about those kinds of things until we're in that role. 

VB: No, we don't. And let alone think about 'em, we're not training, we're not helping. And the reality is too, how many truly exemplar examples are we seeing in the academy? It's entirely possible to see somebody who's a really effective manager. I'm sure you've worked for that, but in terms of leadership and getting buy-in, not good. I've seen someone who is an amazing order and leader and can get somebody to knock a wall down for you, but navigating the day-to-day execution that actually needs to happen to achieve the vision seems to be faltering. And so that also speaks to the importance of surrounding yourself with thoughtful, bright people who have those skill sets. You look smart as a manager when you surround yourself by really smart people, but that's a skill. And in the academy it's so competitive and worried about not letting my idea out, so I'm the first one to have it. That also is a very counter behavior when you step in these other roles that will not serve you and your team well if you continue to have that approach to things. 

RPR: And that's socialized into us very early on too. You're almost very much like an independent contractor in so many ways. When you're faculty taking care of your own little business, your own little slice of the world, then moving into those leadership roles, you absolutely have to think and tap different sides of your personality, of your mental space, of all of that. So how did you end up in the chair space and now associate dean space? What was that journey like for you? 

VB: Given I'm a management professor, I tried to minimize the hurdles as much as I could on the front end. At Albion College, we don't have a succession management system. I asked specifically the provost at the time, if I could co-chair the department with the current chair who was going to be retiring. And so I wanted to be able to follow, and I said, look, I don't need the chair compensation. Let the chair get the course release. That is irrelevant to me at this moment. That's not the goal. The goal is to at least start getting some handle on what this role entails and to see what requests come from the provost office to sit in the department chairs and directors meetings run by the provost's office to see the types of emails that maybe come from the registrar's office. So I was able to make a convincing case, I'm sure, because I said, I don't need any compensation or course release. 

I'll just do it. And that was incredibly informative. And so that was really my own agency, and it was kind of that experience that then informed my thinking with the Hope College project that I did as an a CE fellow that we need to have some job shadowing. There needs to be some succession management. We need to start identifying at least a year before the current occupant is going to leave, who's going to be in that place and start doing some of these co-chair duties to at least not be jumping in blindly. So that mattered to me. And then the whole associate dean role came in because we got this big NSF grant for EPIC enabling partnerships to increase innovating capacity focused on smaller schools like ours to support onboarding and sustaining more college industry partnerships that those partnerships provide high impact experiential learning opportunities for students, provide professional development opportunities for faculty and staff to serve as subject matter experts mentoring those partnerships. 

So I was the co-PI on that, and one of the key things we had to do was to build infrastructure that would start supporting it. Well, given being a management professor, given I do consulting work anyway, given I built that consulting entity at Albion College and was already managing a portfolio of contracted clients, I got put into the associate dean position of strategic partnerships and innovation so that I could be in the room having conversations with other potential industry partners to help them think through, well, that sounds interesting, but how does it work here? Let me tell you how it works. Here's what we've done with black and Rossi or the Grand Rapid Symphony or these different companies, and here's how our process works. So ideally, I wouldn't have been both the department chair and an associate dean and bless my provost, she thought, well, we'll just have you step out of the department chair role. 

And in the first academic cabinet meeting where she announced I would be taking on this role, because I was in that meeting and it was my first time in that room, the registrar said, not to make it about me, Vicky, but I'm about to please tell me you're still going to be the department chair. We need you in that role. And at the time, there was only one other tenured person. All the others were pre-tenure, so I wasn't about to put a pre-tenure person in the department chair position. The other person didn't necessarily have an interest, and then they floated the idea of we'll bring an outside person in. And I was like, that's also not ideal, especially with pre-tenure colleagues who are going to need support. So I said, we'll just keep all those roles going and then when I'm eligible for my next sabbatical, you won't know if I'm alive or dead. You will not hear from me on that one. So that's the arrangement we made. 

RPR: It's interesting how some people do step into these roles and become really linchpins for other offices on campus. And really, I think about succession planning too. You mentioned several times that that can be fraught sometimes at higher ed, right? Because in some ways, does it go against, I don't know, academic freedom or does it go against governance in some way to think about long-term who can move into those roles and have not that be competitive? So how do we manage that when we think about succession planning? Well, there's some things I want to come back to and what you said as well, but I'm curious about the succession planning piece first. 

VB: Yeah, you always run the risk of, well, that didn't follow the faculty governance structure, And so-and-so just got put in that position and they didn't even apply for it or it didn't seem to follow the appropriate process. So it is a delicate balance. One way I think you can attempt to counter that is an industry, they talk a lot about building your bench strength that at any given moment, especially when I do consulting with senior leaders, I always ask the question, if you were to go tomorrow or so-and-so left tomorrow unexpectedly, who's going to step in? And that usually elicits a and I go, okay, now you have that person, but once they step out of their role to step in this role, how are you back filling that? Right? So there needs to be this intentional identification of in business we call 'em high posts, the high potentials, because even if there isn't a leadership opportunity within the next year, let's say, there is something to be said for showing somebody you see them, you value them, you appreciate their talents, you're willing to invest in their professional development and some training and maybe some job shadowing and some rotational work, so that if and when you need to call upon them and potentially sooner than you thought you might need to, they aren't going in completely unready. 

I don't think that you can ever be completely ready. It's like parenting. You're never going to be fully ready. You have to jump into it, but you can still be intentional about it. So for me, it's one way to balance that. The process concerns that might come up from just simply appointing somebody into a role is identifying those high potentials, and maybe it's even a cohort of high potentials on a campus. You've recognized, you're talented, we want to keep you here, you're talented. Now let's figure out what your strengths are. Let's maybe do some rotations across units where you spend an afternoon a week for the next month in this department and you spend an afternoon, a week, a month in this department kind of getting some of what I call the bird's eye view of the bigger picture and how this operation works. I think those are the things, and if someone is going through that and seeing that those opportunities are open to others, you might have less of an issue of we've got to slide somebody in here, but you're doing your institution no favors and you're doing individuals no favors by not identifying those high posts, by not having some kind of intentional training that really does develop that bench strength. 

And that's really foundational to any succession management effort that somebody would pursue regardless of level of the organization. You think about it at the VP president CFO level, why not do it for department chairs? Why not do it at associate? I mean, there's some very clear, pivotal roles on campuses that I don't understand why we're not applying those same kind of principles to them. I think we would just be better off as individuals and institutions if we did it. 

RPR: And there, and like you mentioned, there are some things you can do that are not resource intensive, the shadowing pieces of that. I think a lot of institutions that I'm familiar with will often kind of fight back. We don't have the resources to develop a new leadership program or to take them out of their spaces to do this leadership space program, but there's often people on campus who can do that work if they're charged with it and would enjoy that work, developing some leadership development for those groups. 

VB: Absolutely, because being given an opportunity to do something that you like, that's a value add that allows you to contribute in ways you're hoping to, right? 

RPR: Right. 

VB: So it's a win-win. And you've seen this too. It's so hard to be a profit in your own land, and I get that in some ways. You could be in a meeting, you say this comment and then an outsider speaker comes in and says the same thing and all of a sudden it's brilliant, and you had just said that two weeks earlier. So I think there's a little bit of that going on there too. But if we're really focused on resource constraints, I always tell folks as a management professor, when I say resources, I mean financial resources, human resources, intellectual resources and physical resources. We know financial resources are challenged right now, but we can tap into the human resources, the intellectual capital that we have on our campuses to show people We're investing in them in ways that are hopefully letting them know we see you, we see your talents. We're seeking to invest in you to ensure that your talents are elevated and with the hope that they'll be an opportunity maybe sooner rather than later for others to see those talents and for their performances and their teams to be elevated as a result. 

RPR: I think they're also thinking about the pipeline and the pathway. There's, I think a lot of places do have leadership programs that are competitive to get into, but we can also do things that aren't competitive, that are more open, like I'm running a certificate in leadership exploration, just different leadership topics that people can come and participate in and just learn a little bit more about what it means to be a leader in this different sense. And that's just part of what my office does, and that's interesting for me and fun for me to do. So it doesn't always have to be some competitive kind of process or group. It can be, there's different levels that we can be functioning at to support that kind of work. 

VB: Well, I always say when I kick off a workshop, a webinar, a coaching, aren't you worth the next hour? Aren't you worth two hours? When you think about it in the grand scheme of our lives and our workday, aren't you worth two hours of time to invest in your own growth, to have a little time space in place to reflect and answer the question, what is it that you want? Where do you see yourself? What are some sticking points right now? Just to almost, and it seems ridiculous, and it's especially with women, I'm sure you've seen this too, giving permission to somebody to say that it is okay to be in this space and to think about you and only you again, that sounds so ridiculous, but I tell folks, if you need me to give you permission, I'm giving you the permission right now for the next two hours to focus on you. Again, they say, put your oxygen mask on first before you put it on others. You are no good if you are burnt out and depleted and just not feeling like you're invested in any meaningful way. 

RPR: I want to turn that back on you a little bit too. As a chair, as an associate dean, how are you taking care of yourself or what skills have you had to develop to make sure that you don't burn out and that you don't experience that kind of exhaustion in your leadership roles? 

VB: It ebbs and flows, and so what I really do intentionally, at the end of the day, my most important priority is my family and my kids. So I've got a 12-year-old and a soon to be 11-year-old this month in I think 19 days, and they're my two favorite humans on the planet. I always shook. My husband's a close second and he's totally fine with being the close second behind the two kids, and I don't want to miss the things that matter to them. I'm happy to be at volleyball games and soccer games and all the things. I also feel really fulfilled and enjoy my job most days. There's some things I could probably take or leave, but most of the time I enjoy it because I feel very grateful that I have opportunities to do the work that I find most meaningful for me. But I am very, very specific about blocking off my calendar. 

The mornings I have to do school drop off, I'm very clear about blocking off my calendar the day I take turns with school pickup, I am very clear blocking off the calendar. If we have a volleyball game at five and I'm going to leave work by X, you'll get your hours from me because I wake up at five in the morning on the weekends when everybody's still sleeping. I have quiet writing time and can think I have a, you probably saw it in my email, but there's a little note at the bottom that says something to the effect of, these are my working hours now, but I don't expect them to be your working hours. Now, you don't need to action this until you are working to also send a message that, yeah, you might see an email from me on Saturday at 5:00 AM or Sunday at 5:00 AM. 

That's just because I'm absolutely taking advantage of everybody else in my house still sleeping, and I have a moment to have some quiet and to think and really be thoughtful about a response that I might need to provide. I still take Friday as my scholarship day, which is how we're speaking together today. Before I used to just block it off, but then people would put meetings on my calendar and I would buckle. Now it's literally set as out of office. So if somebody puts a meeting on my calendar, it's automatically declined unless I go in and change it. The schedule that is outside of my office door shows Friday as a scholarship day. My syllabus says Friday is a scholarship day. I do not take meetings on those days unless it's an absolute emergency. I will still check email so that if a department chair related issue comes through, I will still take care of it if an associate dean issue comes through, but I'm not piling my Friday up with meetings, and that's necessary for me to still have these types of conversations that are really matter to me to have time to do writing. 

That really matters to me to, if I'm hosting a webinar, I will try to schedule them for Fridays because that's the day I can focus. I'm on campus Monday through Thursday. I'm focused on chair role, associate dean role teaching students advising everything. But Friday I say, you're worth 20%. 20% of your week is a very valid number to be able to take, to do the thinking, to do the writing, to do the focus on wellbeing, to take the dog for a walk in the morning before you hop on your computer. So those are some of the strategies that have come with time, and I own being a privileged white female full professor certainly helps me to create some boundaries, whereas I know my staff peers don't have that same luxury, but those are the things that I do. 

RPR: We talked before, we got on a little bit too, about the importance of prioritization and thinking, and you're prioritizing yourself in that and the research in with that arrangement. What are some of the other ways you prioritize to get what you need to get done, done? 

VB: I am very good at time management in general, and I always have been, but I think once I became a mother, that became one of my superpowers. There's a great article I have my students read in my HR class of if you want to get work done and get work done really well, you ask a working mother to do it because that's the time you have to do and it's got to get done. You don't have the luxury of, I can dilly dally on this or I can procrastinate on this. No, that's just not reality. And also because I teach management and I try to teach these skills to my students, I feel like I need to model appropriate behavior with time management. So when I schedule a meeting, it has a very clear agenda and I stick to the time so that I'm respecting people's time as well as my own. 

When I schedule meetings, I'm very clear of, here's why I invited you to the meeting because this is what we're going to discuss. My understanding is you have expertise in that space. If my understanding is wrong, feel free to decline the meeting invite. I give the person the out, but I don't schedule meetings if I don't have a clear agenda. It doesn't have to be to the minute, but that here's the general topic of what we're going to discuss, or Hey, these are the two issues we need to discuss in the next 30 minutes and we need to walk out of here with an action plan. I do not schedule a meeting without that clarity, and when I invite people to that meeting, I'm very clear about why I invited you to the meeting and what I hope you can contribute and give them the opportunity to tell me, that's actually not in my wheelhouse anymore. 

It's been way too long since I've done it. And then I say, fine, let's take you off so I'm not wasting your time. I feel very strongly about modeling behavior, about really trying to show people the respect that they deserve, and one way to do that is to not waste their time, and it's also to not allow, if I had poor time management to impact other people's ability to do their job simply because I can't manage my own time. And so those are huge professional pet peeves of mine, and I work really hard not to have those behaviors be anything that could be used to characterize me, and it's just I'm very deliberate and intentional about that, and that's a deal breaker for me. 

RPR: It's interesting when I work with new career faculty or early career faculty that some of them really respond well to time management and calendar blocking. Some of them think a little more along the lines of priorities or just different ways of thinking. For some people, time management just feels really amorphous or something that they can't control, especially when you're still in that young faculty stage and you can't quite say no, you're not sure what you can say no to. So it's interesting to think about how we can build those ladders. I think as we grow into our leadership roles, 

VB: It's hard. It's so hard when you're an early career and you're at this point, you're just trying to say yes to so many things that you think will help fill the resume and show your breadth of talent. And it's so easy to get caught up in that. I had thing, I'm sure you did too, where I thought, why am I even on this project? I don't even know how I got on it. I'm trying to figure out how to get off of it. We have done nothing productive with it. Those are the worst. I always talk about, we got to come up with a sunset strategy. We got to sunset that project even as an early career. And if we can find somebody else who would be a good fit, you could onboard them while you sunset off. But it is definitely challenging as an early career person trying to navigate all of that 

RPR: Skills we have to develop though, right? We have to figure out what works for us and what we need in terms of things like connection and connection to our values and the work that we do, as well as things like prioritization and balance, whatever balance means to you in that time. 

VB: Yep, it's true. 

RPR: So as we start to wrap up, I'm curious, what about higher ed brings you the most joy right now? 

VB: Still the students, right. So obviously Alion College is a liberal arts college. It's all undergrad students, traditional 18 to 22 year olds. Though we are starting to see some more non-traditional students, a lot of first gen students, a lot of students of color, a lot of Pell Grant eligible students. Albion made a really concerted effort over the last 10 years to diversify our population of students. And obviously that comes with such great opportunities and challenges that you have to navigate and seeing that you become the person for so many of those students, right? Their successes in life, their failures in life, their heartbreaks in life. And again, it's a short period of time, relatively speaking in somebody's life, but man, are those some pivotal years, right? Coming in as a 17 or 18-year-old, leaving as a 21, 20 2-year-old. So much happens during those four years personally, professionally, emotionally, developmentally, and just the bond that you have with students. 

There's this picture in my office and it's a group of students, and it's the first students I ever saw teaching in ent. It was a Monday in August of 2007, literally, and I could tell you where these students sat, and that class was my first day of teaching. Fast forward three years later, and it's graduation and my birthday always falls on or around graduation. So if you could see the picture, there's two young women in the middle and they come into my office the day before graduation and then slowly some of these other students come in and they said, Vicki, we have this present for you, but we're going to wait until graduation, but we thought you would be emotional, which I was. It was ugly cry. I could not get it together. And I open the gift and it is a picture they emailed, the administrative assistant, got the roster from that class, emailed their classmates, they got together and on the steps of the kc, they had a professional photographer take this picture, and at the top it said, “you were with us all the way. Now we're with you forever.” And it gutted me. It was such an ugly cry. I could not believe that they would do that just to be in an environment where all those pieces, the relationship with the administrative assistant, the relationship with the professional photographer who is always at the student events that they know, taking pictures and just to get together to do that. And to this day when I point to that picture, I'm still in touch with every single one of them. I tell prospective parents and students, I have been to their weddings, I have held their babies. I have been to graduate school graduation ceremonies. I have hugged them at their highest of highs and have hugged some of them at their lowest of lows, either at Albion or once they leave Albion. And that is what brings me joy that to look at that picture. 

And I just was at an alumni event speaking, and several of those individuals came to the alumni event. And as I was doing my talk, I just looked at the table and I literally got choked up in front of everybody, and I go, I'm so sorry. I'm looking at these faces that I saw 19 years ago. And here they are, these incredible men and women who still saw the invite for this event and said, Vicki, we saw your name on it. So of course we had to be here to come see you. So that's the joy or getting to work with women faculty and mid-career, and what does this mean for you now? And let's invest in you, right? Let's take this time to invest in you and figure out what life looks like for you personally, professionally, emotionally, all the things. So those are the spaces and the relationships that I find the most joy and that I like to spend my time investing my time in. That's where my bucket gets the most full. 

RPR: I always like to wrap up with one question. What's one thing you wish women associated with higher education knew or practiced? 

VB: I'm going to go back to the three questions that I kind of floated in the conversation earlier, right? So whenever I get approached with an opportunity, whether it's a collaboration, whether it's an associate dean role, right? Whenever there's an opportunity on the table, there's three questions I ask myself. Number one, can I provide a value add? Do I have the knowledge, the skills, the abilities to move the needle in ways that I think are necessary in this role or in this collaboration? Two, will I grow as a result? I've definitely been, and I'm sure you have been too, of course I can add a whole lot of value there, but I don't see much of anything that I'm going to take away from this that is helping me grow as a person and as a professional. So that's the second question, will I grow as a result? 

And the third is now the right time. And I think women especially need to ask themselves those three questions because women a lot add value and people ask you to add value, but are you getting value and investment and connection in return and is now the right time? Maybe it's not right? I've always said, I'm never going to take a 12 month appointment. Even my associate dean, I do work through the summer, but it's not a set 12 month because I have kids at home who still need me, and I'm not willing to sacrifice that time. So I always say, if that's what you need in the position, you're not going to hurt my feelings, have Adam find somebody else because now's not the right time. Can I add value and will I grow? Sure. But if it contradicts what my values are or what my priorities are in a given moment, now isn't the right time. 

So I want women to walk away from our conversation really thinking about those three questions. I think a lot of us add a whole lot of value, and people sometimes take advantage of that value. It is also very much okay to say, do I grow as a result? Is there an investment in me as a person and as a professional? And if that's yes, then you come to the, is now the right time? And if the answer is yes, then consider it. If the answer is no, it is still okay to say now is not the right time, even if these two other factors are in place. So I would say that's kind of my departing thoughts or feedback that I would share, especially for women. 

RPR: Such a great heuristic. So useful. I think a lot of people are going to be able to take that away. And thank you so much for joining the show today, Vicki, it was lovely talking to you. 

VB: Oh my gosh, you too. I'm always happy to connect. Love, admirer of your work. Glad we've had a couple opportunities to collaborate, and this was just another one, so I appreciate the invitation and the conversation. Thanks so much. 

RPR: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Agile Academic podcast for women in higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. To make sure you don't miss an episode, follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps and bookmark the show. You'll find each episode a transcript and show notes theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care and stay well.