Yesterday we were given the news that Prof. Mohd Roslan Sulaiman is appointed as the new Vice-Chancellor of UPM, beginning 1 September 2020 until 31 August 2023.
He was our Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Student Affairs before this and had taken over the duties of the Vice-Chancellor since early July. It is good that this temporary period kept short to avoid uncertainties (recalling my own experience of carrying out the duties of the Director for almost a year but of course I had a relatively minor role). During my stint as Deputy Director of INSPEM, I haven't had the chance to be in smaller meetings with the then Deputy Vice-Chancellor like I do with the other Deputy Vice-Chancellors because of his portfolio. Hence, I do not know him well. I only had one brief meeting with him at the end of last month. In any case, I hope UPM will grow further under him. Congratulations and all the best.
Having held an administrative position, I know how difficult to balance the various responsibilities one need to handle. Handling a bigger entity (the whole university) will of course be much more challenging. One of my own (minor) experience is trying to balance the wants of the upper management and the wants of the members of the institute. Some can be reconciled but others remained challenging. And often one gets criticisms from both sides. Having left my admin position was a great relief for me and now I just need to answer to my most immediate boss, the Head of Department and express our wishes (especially for the growth of our science) to the person. As a person who leads, it is sometimes easy to perceive someone else's wishes as mere complains, causing one's own restlessness and inconvenience. But perhaps lesser realised is that the wishes of those up in the hierarchy can also be perceived as complains by those below. So there ought to be a balance, a stance that opens to reasoning since our organization is not that of military-oriented one (where safety or time-criticality is of essence). There are places that we need to be led by those up in the hierarchy and there are places where individuals themselves lead. I remembered once somebody made this remark to me saying something like, sometimes one needs to be a boss instead of a leader. I perhaps have neither qualities. But as mentioned earlier, we are not in a military-like organization but an organization that thrives on creativity and academic ideals, one that stands on reasons. Some may say that I'm stuck with the old school of university concept and should be more critical on what has been practiced in the past. Universities now need to be more adaptable to arising challenges and one can see worldwide that universities are acting more and more like corporations. Thus, I would also invite the same level of criticality to question the changes made to our university environment. In this regard, the following news item caught my eye: "‘Universities are not corporations’: 600 Australian academics call for change to uni governance structures". Dare we do the same?
Anyway on leadership, I tend to like what Simon Sinek has been saying (see e.g. https://www.facebook.com/simonsinek/videos/359211858400289/). Also on treating changes, I've been following what Dave Snowden has been doing with respect to what systems are we looking at. It is high time that we make our organization more human and less that of workers as mere cogs in the machine. For a recent interview with Dave Snowden, see the following:
No comments:
Post a Comment