54
IRSC at 60
LEADERSHIP
PIVOTAL CULTURE CHANGE
A dozen years into his presidency, Massey had achieved
much. The main campus in Fort Pierce and those in Vero
Beach, Stuart and Okeechobee were growing, and a new one
had been established in the early 1990s at St. Lucie West in
Port St. Lucie. By 2000, Indian River was celebrating its 40th
anniversary. A new health science center had opened to train
health-care professionals. There was a new planetarium.
Online classes had begun.
Massey attended a conference where he was impressed
by Olaf Isachsen, a Norwegian organizational psychologist.
Massey invited him to study the college. He talked to more
than 200 employees of all stripes about their working conditions,
how this or that program and process was working.
Isachsen gave Massey the results, and they jolted him.
“I could not believe what these people were saying,” he
said. “I did not sleep that night.”
Massey was down in the dumps. He wondered whether
“we thought we were running something a little better than
we were.”
But Isachsen told Massey he should not be hurt, that he
had to realize that every one of those more than 200 people
loved the college and wanted to help make it better.
So, Massey asked the employees for anonymous replies
about the issues that concerned them, even if it may seem
trivial such as better air conditioning in bathrooms. Massey
hosted nine meetings at various campuses, attended each
time by about 100 employees. He told them he was there to
listen and respond to the issues they thought important.
It was to be the beginning of a pivotal change, which,
Massey said, led to administrators being more proactive than
reactive and allowing more people to have a say in how the
college is run. Instead of administrators deciding how to
design a new classroom building, the task was turned over to
faculty members who knew what a classroom needed.
“Yeah, I was a stuffed shirt, at that time,” Massey admitted.
“Isachsen said, ‘You have to go from formality to informality.
Are you showing people that you’re human? You’ve got
to be a little vulnerable.’ ”
So started the change in the school’s culture, Massey said.
Too many rules and regulations were stifling staff creativity.
“When we freed up people to be creative, innovative, take
chances, do things, that’s when we went sky-high on student
learning, performance, retention, graduation rate, those
kinds of things that allowed us to win the Aspen award,”
Massey said.
ASPEN PRIZE
The crowning achievement of Massey’s tenure occurred
last year when IRSC won the prestigious Aspen Prize for
Community College Excellence, the top honor among the
nation’s 1,100 community colleges. IRSC won after being
measured on a wide range of attributes of student success, including
achievement by low-income students, job placement
of graduates, number of graduates and transfers who further
their higher education, affordability and more. The Aspen
Institute is a nonprofit research institute that tackles a myriad
of national and international issues.
“The remarkable thing about Indian River,” said Josh Wyner,
Aspen vice president and head of its higher education work,
“is that the culture drives toward continuous improvement. I
give Dr. Massey and his team … exceptional credit for that.”
Dr. Massey congratulates a new bachelor’s degree graduate at Commencement.
>>