Consultants from the recently chosen search firm that will facilitate Lakeland’s search for a new president met with college stakeholders last week.
The consultants from Witt/Kieffer, a national search firm that primarily works with nonprofit organizations in health care and higher education, met with students, faculty, staff, trustees, President Stephen Gould, and members of the Presidential Search Committee (PSC) Sept. 21-22 to try to better understand Lakeland and what people at Lakeland are looking for in a new president, according to Jeff Ottum, chair of the PSC.
“The purpose is to really help them understand who we are as a college—what’s special and distinctive about Lakeland, what makes this a great place, what goals we have, what challenges we have—and with all that begin asking, ‘What are we looking for in a new president?’” Ottum said.
Ottum said he and other members of the PSC will work with Witt/Kieffer over the next few weeks to write a profile of the college and a profile of what the college is looking for in a new president.
He said the PSC hopes to publish a profile in higher education magazines in mid-October. While the search process will look similar to last year’s, he said the committee will likely alter aspects of the search like their screening process and the way they will bring people to campus because of what they learned from last year’s search.
“One thing that we know is if we do the same things we have always done we’ll get the same result, and we didn’t get a good result last year. We didn’t find the person that we were looking for and of course that’s what we were trying to do. The first big change was selecting a different consultant partner.”
The PSC decided this summer to partner with Witt/Kieffer instead of AGB Search, the original firm they chose to work with in the search that started last year and saw three candidates essentially interview with college stakeholders at open forums but yielded no replacement for President Gould, who is scheduled to retire in May.
“We really felt we were swimming upstream by continuing with AGB Search just because, although they did an excellent job for us, they really had gone through almost two complete rounds of talking to candidates and bringing names to us and so on, and the committee decided, ‘We ought to have a fresh perspective on that. We ought to have some folks that probably have a different network, a different group of possible candidates we could look at. If we didn’t find the right person last time we don’t want to be recycling the same possible list of names.’ And so we decided to switch firms,” Ottum said.
Ottum said members of the PSC decided to partner with Witt/Kieffer because of its large networking capabilities and because the partnership “fit.”
“A lot of this is about ‘fit,’” he said. “It’s about, ‘Can you build a relationship with the people that you’re working with? Do you have confidence that they understand who we are as an institution and what we’re looking for?’”
Ottum said this year’s committee, made up of General Studies Division Chair Jeff Elzinga, Social Sciences Division Chair Elizabeth Stroot, and trustees Jeff Spence, Barbara Gannon, David Michael, and Ottum, was both energized and serious during their meetings last week.
“We understand that there are a whole lot of people at Lakeland who this affects a lot,” Ottum said. “The person that we pick, how long it takes, the kind of person we’re looking for—that matters to a lot of people. This is about their jobs and their livelihoods, and they care about this institution.”