In August 2020, Kristi Schramm came on as the Training and Development Coordinator for Employee Services. One of her primary goals since then, has been to provide all faculty and staff with the appropriate tools to become successful leaders.

Schramm and her team recently launched a training course, called the Leadership Foundation Series, which covers topics including traits of effective leaders, communication skills and active listening, as well as how to handle difficult conversations.

This three-part training course was designed to target faculty and staff who wanted to develop their overall leadership qualities, leading to running a more effective workplace.

This is the first time Employee Services will be offering foundational leadership training to faculty and staff. It is for those who have had little leadership training over the years and moved up quicker than they expected.

The Leadership Foundation Series consists of three, one-hour training sessions that hit on the overarching strong points of leadership development.

“By breaking it up into three sessions we can break it down into the three main points, which are determining traits of an effective leader, how to communicate and listen purposefully to employees, and how to address those uncomfortable topics in the workplace that no one wants to address,” Schramm said.

With Schramm filling a brand-new position as Training and Development Coordinator she plans to continue new initiatives that enable faculty and staff to grow in many new ways. Schramm and her team are adjusting based on feedback, as they want to tailor these initiatives to higher education to inevitably benefit students.

“In 2021 we plan on developing more ways to build leadership qualities, because we all know this past year has been COVID-19 dependent and that has altered things in many ways,” Schramm said. “We hope to do things more face-to-face, interactive, and engaging, because it is the best way for faculty and staff to learn, through doing role play exercises and examining leadership involved scenarios.”

Employee Services hopes to reach beyond the target audience for this leadership series, they want to develop everyone, including those who think they don’t need more development. That constant cycle of giving back to faculty and staff ends up paying off as it also gives back to students.

In doing this, they are developing a more in depth Leadership Boot camp which will give candidates selected for the program the ability to spend a longer period of time, one half day, rather than one-hour sessions. The Leadership Boot camp will launch in 2021 and will occur quarterly, in hopes of always attracting new leaders as they move up in the ranks.

They will also be launching a nine-month leadership and development course in September of 2021. It will be called TSU Life, and any staff or faculty can apply to be considered for the cohort.

The cohort will be given the opportunity to learn leadership styles from various departments around campus that they are not usually exposed to. Once each month the cohort will travel from department-to-department hearing presentations from the administration of that department.

“We hope using internal development will lend the skills of each department to the next so we can all learn and become stronger together,” Schramm said.

These plans are all just the beginning of what Training and Development plans to do in the coming months and years, they would like to see much more development of every faculty and staff members around campus.

The Leadership Foundation Series may seem baseline, but it has been extremely beneficial to staff. The series includes limited attendance due to required participation and interaction. During the hour long session, each attendee must state one thing about themselves and interact with at least one question or scenario.

“People do not learn effectively with a presenter just talking at them, presenting facts and statistics for an hour straight. That is why I am being so strict, limiting the number of attendees, so I know every single person in the session will walk away with valuable development that they can apply in their section of campus,” Schramm said.

Ms. Schramm took the place of someone who had coordinated things in the past, but the position was not focused on training development. Now, all her focus is training and constantly developing faculty and staff to make a more productive campus as a whole.

“The number one thing is, when we are investing in our faculty and staff, and giving them the appropriate tools to help their team be successful, it’s a direct trickle-down effect to student success,” Schramm said. “When faculty and staff support each other and believe in each other it is going to show immediately when they interact with students, creating that positive growth environment.”

Employee Services’ number one goal right now is to help all faculty and staff be successful. While they are already successful, there are so many more ways to develop them and multiply that success.