From Friction to Commitment: Rewiring Culture and Transforming Administrative Performance
Higher education doesn’t struggle because people don’t care. It struggles because care is unmanaged. Most institutions are filled with smart, committed professionals trapped inside systems of mistrust, silos, escalation chains, and endless clarification meetings. The result isn’t incompetence. It’s structural friction.
This breakdown stems from mismatched expectations and misunderstandings. At Brown University School of Public Health, the Finance and Administration division faced exactly this reality: reactive service, strained relationships, and recurring breakdowns within administration and between faculty and staff.
In this session, Walsh and Teibel share a multi-year journey of transforming a decentralized finance and administration unit into a high-performing, people-centered organization. By prioritizing "Compassionate Leadership" and "Commitment-Based Management," the school moved from reactive firefighting to proactive stewardship.
Learning Objectives
Apply a four-pillar framework (Mission, Work, People, Structure) to align administration with academic purpose.
Determine how to strengthen individual and team performance by transforming how people make requests, promises, and follow through.
Translate Brown’s three-year longitudinal case study and apply this to your faculty engagement, job satisfaction and service excellence.
Sarah Walsh - Brown University
Howard Teibel - Teibel Education Consulting