Well, good morning. All. It's nice to see a lot of familiar faces and welcome to our case district panel discussion, the evolving landscape of talent management. My name is Joe who's and I serve as the chief of staff and vice president of talent management for the University of South Dakota foundation and alumni association. I'm excited to help facilitate this discussion amongst 3 peers who are our true leaders, not only at their institutions, but in the industry and excited to hear from each of them today. And I hope there'll be some great takeaways for all of you today. So, rather than me do an introduction of each of them, I would offer each 1 of my colleagues here an opportunity to introduce themselves and share a little bit about who they are and the institutions they represent. So, we'll start with Holly and then go around the room from there. Well, hello, and good morning. Everyone. I think it's still morning. Right? My name is Holly. Tilton burn. I am the associate vice president for human resources at the South Dakota State University foundation. I'm a proud SDSU alum, and I've been with the SDSU foundation for about 6 1⁄2 years now. And my role is very broad. We have a small HR team. It's me and 1 other colleague that is part of our HR team here. So, we cover everything HR related. So, thank you, Holly. And then we'll go to Christy Cates. So, we have 2 Christys on our panel today. So, we'll start with Christy Cates. My name is Christy Cates, and I'm the associate vice chancellor for operations for advancement operations here at the University of Denver. I have been at the University of Denver for about 3 1⁄2 years, but I have been in higher education advancement talent management since about 2000. I started at UC Irvine, and I was there for 13 years before going to Caltech, where I was there for 8 years, and my role expanded out of just the talent management to more of an advancement services role. So, here at the University of Denver, I oversee our talent management function, which is separate from, I think, what Holly's talking about. We have an HR department for the university, so we're only looking at what is affecting staff here in advancement. I also oversee our prospect development, all of our data analytics and reporting, gift acceptance, as well as the budget for advancement. So, I will throw it over to the other Christy. Yes, Christy. My name is Christy Horton. I am the senior director of talent, culture, and human resources at the Kansas State University Foundation. We are located in Manhattan, Kansas. We fondly call ourselves the Little Apple. I have also had the pleasure of having my career grow here at the Kansas State University Foundation. I am an alumnus of the organization, the university, and I've spent my entire career here at the foundation. I've had the opportunity to see us grow and transform and change quite a bit. We're under our third CEO in my tenure, so I'm coming up on my 20th anniversary here. So, I've got to see a lot of really interesting and unique things happen as we've gone from an organization of about 65 to 70 when I joined, joined to right around 150 full-time employees, plus a handful of student employees at this point. So, it's been a really interesting experience that I've really enjoyed so far. Well, thank you all, and thank you all for just the three of you agreeing to be part of this panel discussion. It should be a great conversation today. And really, I would share with the group, we really do hope it's a conversation. We do have an outline where we're going to talk about sort of what's working in the talent management realm currently, what has worked, some challenges we're facing, and how we're going to be good partners moving forward in our organizations. But during that discussion, if you do have questions, feel free to drop them in the chat box. We'll try and address it there. Or if you, you know, we're a small enough group that if it's something that is timely, please unmute and ask the question, and we will try to address that. I think all of us being familiar with CASE, we know that that is fondly known as copy and share everything. And so, I'm sure if there are follow-up questions or if there are takeaways that you want to go back to that any one of our panelists or myself can help get you connected with the person that shared that information and there's follow-up. I think that's one of the things that I greatly appreciate about this organization CASE is that there is an opportunity to work amongst your peers and folks that maybe you compete on the hardwood or the gridiron against. But in this space, we know each other very well. You know, Holly and I probably exchange an email at least monthly, if not more often. And so, very much a place that we can lean on each other. And so, excited for that. So, with that, we're going to go ahead and get started. And our first question for the group is, what have you learned or experienced in the past three to five years that will continue to shape your approach in talent management and human resources? And Holly, we'll start with you. Yeah. So, I think one of the things that we definitely experience here is the impact and the significance of our workplace culture. That's something that's been really critical kind of across the board as it relates to the work that we do. And for us, kind of ingraining that workplace culture starts with day one. So, that's a very comprehensive onboarding process. I'm always just blown away by how often we hear remarks about our onboarding process. I think some folks coming to our organization have probably worked at places where they're kind of given a computer and said, all right, get to work. But that's not the case here. We usually have a very mapped out, very comprehensive onboarding that usually takes approximately one to two weeks. It's tailored to each particular role, but it also provides folks a really high level overview of our entire organization and gives them an opportunity to meet with almost everyone on our team. And so, we're very intentional about that. We always warn people, we know it's a lot in the first few days. We don't expect you to remember everything, but I think that it really does give that strong framework for our workplace culture. I would say also just focusing on making sure that we're paying great attention to employee compensation and benefits, the things that are obviously important and critical for individuals in the workplace. We at the SDSU Foundation, and I know Joe is familiar with this, maybe some others on the Zoom today are familiar with this as well, but the SDSU Foundation does do an internal comprehensive compensation and benefits survey every year. It's one that we host and that we've selected our peer group for, and there's about 16 schools that receive that survey every year. They provide the data freely, and then we compile all of the information and then send that back out in an anonymous version to all of the participants. I know it's looking at our compensation strategy and identifying possible benefits that we don't provide to our team members. And I also hear a lot of feedback from our peers that participate in the tool as they go through that process. So, those are maybe a couple of things I would highlight. Thank you, Holly. And I think we can all agree that the compensation and benefits in the last five to 10 years, that is a different conversation. It used to be maybe just about a number, and now it truly is about more. It's more than just a number. So, thank you for that. So, Christy from Kansas State would turn it to you for that same question. Well, I love what Holly said specifically about their onboarding process. We try to do something very similar, and I would agree with Holly that that's a great way for you to really make a dent in your talent management is to have a really meaningful and deliberate onboarding process. So, in addition to that, one of the things that we try to do for our team is really one of our strategies as an organization is to offer our employees their what we call a pinnacle career experience. And it used to be that our wording was about giving it to them, and in the last few years, we've really decided that it's actually not our responsibility to give it to them. It is instead our responsibility to build all the different options that they can then pick and choose from so that it's a little bit more customized. And so, because we know everyone's going to have different goals in their talent and their time with us, some people are going to want to grow, take on more responsibility, perhaps lead people. Other people want that option to stay in an individual, what we call individual contributor track. And so, we've really shifted our approach to career development to make sure that we, I liken it to a buffet at a restaurant. So, we are the chefs, we are the ones putting the different dishes out onto the buffet. And then it's our each individual employee's option to kind of go down the line and understand what do I want, you know, what am I in the mood for today, if you will, to stick with that analogy. And how can I pick and choose things to create something that is customized so that when I look back on my experience here, it really is the most meaningful for me. And so, that really gives our employees the opportunity to do whatever we want. So, that could be from employee engagement events. Maybe they don't want the opportunity to only do individual things, they really want to do things where somebody else is there with them. So, we do a wide variety of things and people can pick and choose so that they can create an experience that's most meaningful for them. And that applies to engagement events, professional development and training, career progression, all of those components. A couple of other things that we've really refocused in the last couple years are our leave package and specifically the label and usage of one particular leave. And that is we shifted our sick leave to instead being wellness leave. So, we've all made the joke about needing a mental health day or, you know, I just need a day off to like get my mind straight. We do that. We shifted our sick leave to wellness leave and shifted our policy to allow employees to take a day off to just get themselves and hit the reset button. And so, our people use that in a wide variety of days or ways. Some people are going to use it on the golf course. Some people go hiking in our local prairie area. Some people, you know, spend the day at the spa. And it doesn't matter to us what you're using it for. It matters to us that you're using it so that we, because we expect a lot of our people, right, we have metrics that we're driving towards. And so, we know that they need some time away to reset and recharge. And that's really important to us. So, those are some of the big things that we've really shifted in the last couple of years. Steve, that Pinnacle program, that buffet that you talk about, has that been something that you guys have had in place for a while? Or is that something that is recent and has evolved over time? It's been one of our four strategic objectives for several years now. We really just tweaked the language to, and that's really, I think, been the big deal for us. You know, it used to be that, you know, we give employees their Pinnacle career experience. And we just got to the point where we realized that was too much on the organization. And we're just an organization. And that's not why we exist, right? We exist to be a philanthropic partner to our university. But that doesn't mean we don't want people to have a great experience with us. But we couldn't feel like it was appropriate for us as an organization to take ownership of building that. We needed our people to have some, quote-unquote, skin in the game to make sure that they understood that part of having a great experience was relying upon them, too. You know, did they show up to work with a good attitude? Are they taking advantage of the training and development we've got available to them? So we needed to demonstrate to our folks that we will offer this to you. We will have these resources. You have to take the initiative to come and build it for yourself. We'll support you while you build it, but you have to build it yourself. Sure. No, that's great. Thank you for that. And then turning to Christy from the University of Denver. Christy, what have you learned or experienced in the last three to five years? Yeah, so first of all, I really like what Christy is saying because we use the Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey. And we just completed our third year. And we really look at employee engagement as what are those key things that are engaging employees? And Gallup has spent years and years and years researching, and there really are 12 very discreet components. And it's so great because they're very, very actionable. So we do the survey across the organization. And then we work with each manager to develop their engagement plan for their teams and help those managers sit down and have conversations with their teams. Have those teams identify what are the questions or areas they want to focus on each year. We then have them implement that into, put that into a plan into the Gallup platform. So everybody, every, each team has their personalized employee engagement plan. And to going back to what Christy says, our philosophy is we want to be an organization where people can choose to be engaged. So we set the table, but we also, there is onus on staff members to come to that table to raise their hand and say what they want to be involved in. And that we're giving our managers those skills and tools so they can engage at a local level. And what we see is those managers that are engaging at a local level, their scores are going up over time. I've been involved with this Gallup survey since 2015. And we actually have a small consortium of about 17 higher education advancement organizations that do this survey across the country at the same time within a sort of a six week period. And so we have consortium data where we can evaluate our engagement scores against those other institutions. This last year we had over 3,000 higher education advancement employees take that survey at the same time. So we're really starting since we started, when I was at Caltech, we started this consortium in 2015. And now we have, you know, quite a few years of data that we're able to say, how are we doing as a profession? Are we focusing on the right things? Because we know that highly engaged people have a higher ROI. So they come to work, they're pushing hard, they're doing the best things for our organizations. Because, again, back to what Christine and Holly are saying, we are here to help advance our universities. And we want to create scholarships, we want to create funding for research, making our organizations more accessible. And to do that, we have to have highly engaged employees that come to work, ready to roll up their sleeves and do wonderful things and make a true difference. Great. Thank you all for sharing. Just a couple things that I think you each touched on is just the meaningful, the intentionality, how we are creating and building these programs and how we're engaging our employees. So I appreciate you sharing all of those things. We do have one question, a follow-up question maybe for Christy at K-State regarding the wellness program and if you're willing to potentially share some of the mechanics of the actual policy, but is there a cap if someone takes a wellness day, is the manager, you know, asked to ask why, is there any proactive outreach that a person is doing, you know, I mean again trying to be proactive and take care of our employees. That's a great question. So for us when it comes to using wellness leave, we treat it just like we would our vacation leave. So we don't, I know every organization is different, we separate our wellness and our vacation leave. So those are two different buckets that employees work out of based on their own personal situations. And our philosophy has really been that if you accrue it, you have earned it, you have the ability to take it. And you don't necessarily, we do not require in our policy a rationale for why they're using it, we don't require them to report, you know, what they're doing on that wellness day. I think most managers, I bet if I asked most of my managers, I bet most of them know probably what their folks are doing on their wellness day. I know my recruiter, if she's taking a wellness day, she's going to go out hiking. That's what she loves to do, like that's what refreshes her. So it's a little bit about, I think, knowing your people and encouraging them to use it as well. So no specific requirements on telling us where you're going or what you're doing, but we've also spent a lot of time working to build trust. And, you know, I think that that's where that comes from is having trust in your team members that they're using it appropriately. And then if you find out after the fact that it's not being used appropriately, then that's a conversation to have. But for us, what we're going to do is we're going to trust that it's being used correctly on the front end. And if we find out something different, then we'll address the situation. But we don't want to build bars when there's no rationale to do it upfront. And that's just how we operate because it's what works for us. Great. Thank you for that. Appreciate that further explanation. So switching gears a little bit, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about sort of some of the challenges that your organization is facing and how within the realm of talent management you are addressing those. So Holly, I'll start with you. What current state, what is on your mind, so to speak, and what are you focused on? Yeah, great question. So I would say one of the challenges that the SDSU Foundation is faced with right now is a good challenge to have, and that is that we just came off of a very successful campaign. So about nine months ago, we raised over $604 million for our university, very proud of the success of that campaign. But sometimes when you're sharing that final number, what you hear from the community and alums and sometimes even the university itself as we are a separate organization is, well, you now have all the dollars, you have what you need, you have the people you need, you can hire all the people you need because you've raised all these dollars. But when in reality, some of those are deferred gifts, some of those are gifts that have a very specific purpose. There might be a capital project that's happening on campus. So really, that pool of money isn't just available to us to use in any way that we wish to do so. So kind of coming up against some of those misconceptions, I think is something that our organization overall is finding to be a challenge. And we're seeing that sort of enter into the HR and talent management space as well, especially as it relates to compensation. Obviously, our people also see that dollar amount that we raised. And so with that, there's some expectation as it relates to compensation and benefits. The other thing, maybe a little more specific to talent management that we are facing right now is the development of a succession and professional development plan. So up to this point, we've had great team members, we've cross-trained people very well, but we haven't ever had that formal piece of a succession plan or a professional development plan. And so as we sort of enter into this post-campaign phase, we're realizing that it's very critical that we get that executed at this point. So over the last two to three months, we've started rolling that out in phases. We're in our third and final phase of that plan right now. The first two phases were to gather succession, written succession plans from our executive leadership team, and then also from anyone within our organization who serves in a management or supervisory role. We look at those a little bit differently since the context around those and the need for succession might be a little bit different than those who are sort of entry-level or non-supervisory positions. But we also see a lot of value in those positions. So this third phase that we're currently in is sending out succession plan documents to even those entry-level and non-supervisory individuals within our team. But within that process, we're focusing not as much on succession per se, but more on professional development and helping them to grow into those roles, identifying where they'd like to grow. And in some cases, we're sort of surprised it might be somebody in finance saying, well, actually, I'd like to explore a development position in the future. And maybe we weren't aware that they had that interest. And so really identifying not only who could eventually step into those leadership roles, but helping them to also identify what their own personal goals are professionally as well. Thank you, Holly. Holly, just as a quick follow-up, succession planning sometimes is a tricky subject because people feel like, oh, I'm maybe riding my way out of a job. And has that been a perception that you've had to overcome at all? Or has it been generally well-received by your organization? Yeah, great question. We've been really fortunate, I think, for a couple of reasons. One is our board of governors really helped to drive this effort. So our board was very interested in seeing our organization enter into succession planning. I know that our team really respects the leaders that we have at that level. And so hearing that message not only internally from HR and our executive leadership, but also from our board was really powerful, I think. Also, because of the great groundwork we have laid within our culture, I think people are realizing this isn't an effort to sort of kick people out and move on to the next phase. It really is about preparing our organization for whatever is next. And I've actually been pleasantly surprised by the number of individuals who one of the optional questions that we listed was, what is your ideal number of years when you would exit the organization, whether that be retirement or for other reasons? And the number of people who have said things like 30 years, or I'm never leaving, or you'll have to kick me out has been really encouraging. Because I don't know that that is what you would see in succession planning everywhere that you go. It is also very refreshing to see that people are actually answering that question, even though it is optional. We've had, I think maybe one person so far just choose not to answer that question. Other than that, we've had 100% participation in that question. I think that shows the trust that they have. Absolutely, I would agree. So switching our focus maybe over to Kansas State, Christy, what are some of the things that is occupying maybe the challenges in your world right now? For us, a substantial challenge that we've always had has been recruitment. And a lot of that has to do with specific to our geographic location. So we are about two hours west of the Kansas City metro. And that is our closest metro. We've got Wichita to our south. But when you're trying to recruit fundraising talent away from perhaps Houston or Arizona, the places where they have options, not in the next town over, but multiple options within the city where they're already living, it's been a real challenge for us. We talk a lot about growing our own fundraisers. And that's something that we do a lot. We do a lot of transferable skills. So we're not getting a lot of folks with direct fundraising experience at our most basic level fundraising officers. Those are folks that we are training how to be fundraisers. And so one of the things that's really, really recent for us is instead of us trying to consistently fight this and treat it as a challenge or a frustration of getting people to come here and stay here, what if instead we decided to start embracing who we really are? And I got this idea. It just hit me recently because for those of you who are athletic fans and specifically college football, the national championship football team, Ohio State, their quarterback, Will Howard, was a transfer from Kansas State. So Will Howard left Kansas State, went to Ohio State and won a national championship. And I think when I was watching that game, I kind of just was a little bummed. I was like, man, why not us? And I saw a friend afterwards say something to the effect of, you know, let it be known that Kansas State University builds national championship quarterbacks. And for some reason that just clicked in my head. And I thought, yes, what if we took that approach for everything? And what if we took that approach in our organization as fundraisers? Let it be known that Kansas State University is a top-notch place where you can build the fundamentals and we will teach you how to be an excellent frontline fundraiser. And so that's kind of, I think, the mentality that I would like to try and build in our organization over the next few years. And just shifting that mindset instead of a scarcity mindset, going to like a growth mindset, which I think is so important for organizations to be really successful in the area of talent development. How do you get people out of the scarcity mindset away from the nobody wants to stay with us? It's so hard to recruit talent because of our location. How do you shift that mindset into the growth mindset so that you can embrace it, utilize it, and harness it to your benefit? So I think that's what I want to start us really pushing towards. That's like really a big thing because the recruitment is challenging for us and we do have a lot of folks who use Kansas State as a step up in their career to move on to the next thing. And instead of worrying about that, let's be proud about that and use it to our advantage because that could be a great resource to help us bring talent in as well. And then along with that, on our positions that are not frontline fundraising, we've got a really good career progression identified for our fundraising staff. For the rest of our staff who are not frontline fundraising, it's not as clear for them. So our challenge right now is going to be building up that career path opportunity to make it a little bit more clear for the folks who aren't in fundraising. And then along with that comes succession planning, just like Holly mentioned. So that's another significant thing kind of on our to-do list in the future. Great, thank you for sharing. Can I just dovetail off of something that Christy said that I think is really important, especially as managers or talent management professionals? Embracing the fact that people came and they built their career and they learned skills that got them recruited somewhere else is something to have pride around. And the more that we let people go in a really positive way, the more likely they are to come back. I was at a university. I was at the University of California, Irvine, which is right in between UCLA and UC San Diego. There were lots of universities in between. And so there was this poaching happening all the time. But what we decided was if somebody leaves us, then they're seen as high talent. That reflects really well on us. And then if we keep a strong relationship with them, when we've got the next step in their career, we want to actively bring them back into that fold. And so really understanding what people are learning at these new organizations and making them feel valued as they leave your organization is critical. On that note, is there anything specific specifically that you are doing or have done regarding sort of that offboarding process? I mean, obviously, there's always like the traditional exit survey, but I mean, yeah, but I mean, it feels like maybe there's more to it than that. Yeah, you know, that is actually something that we've implemented. Because again, we're a little bit different. I don't run a full HR department here. And I'm pretty clear that talent management and advancement is all the good stuff. And then the policy and the discipline is really pushed over to our HR partners, which probably isn't very nice, but we want to create this relationship where people are coming to either me or my director about their future and about what's positive. But one of the things we have done is my director of talent management, now she does personal exit interviews with each person that's leaving, so that we can see are there trends happening that we're not aware of? Is there something that we need to fix within our organization? You know, sometimes you hear something and you're like, oh, no, we let that happen. How did this happen? And sometimes you're like, this one is out of my control. But we can always learn and try to figure out other things we can do to improve. And so just taking that extra time, and I think it's important. I'm just going to tell you, our university does an online survey. That's great. That's not the personal touch people want. We're in the relationship business. So if you can especially have somebody that isn't the direct manager do that kind of activity, you're probably going to get some nice, candid feedback. People are going to feel like their opinions are valued. I mean, we love to be able to talk about our opinions and feel like we've been heard. That really creates an environment that said, oh, this organization did care about me. And, you know, I did one recently and I thought, this was such a great employee. They left us and they got a fully remote job and we're not offering fully remote and he's going to say some terrible things. He actually said really great things and, you know, said, I might want to come back at some point. So it's not bad. It's good feedback. One of the things I will say just to kind of thank you, both Christy and Holly touched on this, but we try very hard to create some career ladders within as many of our verticals as we possibly can. And sometimes that's hard when you're a small organization, we have about 140 FTE, but that includes alumni relations, that includes student career development, advancement operations, you know, development in the colleges and centrally. So sometimes it's hard to have those career ladders or you only have so many ladders and you still need particular work done. I'm a big advocate of being super clear about that, which is, and again, that idea of, we're gonna set a table. I wanna give people the opportunity that they have the skills and the resume to support a promotion when a new position becomes available. But we have to have the need and the skills together. And sometimes those collide and sometimes they don't. So when you're thinking about career laddering and professional development, I do think it's important to layer on appropriate expectations because sometimes our organizations are only as big as they are. So to help people understand, this work is gonna make you very marketable when that next position becomes available. And so that we are level setting what we actually can do. If I could piggyback on that, I would just say, I really appreciated what you were saying there about making sure there's that personal touch in the off-boarding process. Our organization is smaller, we're about 50 employees, but anytime we have someone exit our organization, I personally sit down with them and do an exit interview. And I allow them to just leave it very open-ended and it's really just a conversation. Again, like you said, we are in the relationship business. And so that's really what it's about. I would also say that another thing we try to do is if there is an individual who's left our organization that we intentionally would like to keep our tabs on and would welcome back if the opportunity came up, then we're doing things like maybe on their first day of work at their new location, we're sending flowers or sending a card and congratulating them on that new achievement. If they had a mentor here or someone that they had a very strong relationship with within our team, we're encouraging our team member to stay in touch with them, have lunch with them, if proximity allows. But again, it really is, it's just as much about building those relationships with our employees as it is with our donors and our alums. Absolutely. Sometimes that career ladder happens outside our organization. And at the Tenement Management Conference just this year, they talked about those boomerang hires, those people that come back. And I think we can all nod in agreement that they're those that we have experienced and very much appreciate. So thank you. Sorry, Joe. I think also recognizing when you get those folks back. So we have some boomerang employees and we give them a little sticker, a little with a little purple boomerang, and we make a big deal about it because I do think that is important. That's a great, like, I don't, you know, I just, I think that's a great thing that maybe sometimes we don't give enough credit to is when we do get those folks back, but it's a really important component. Yeah, absolutely. And Christy, to your point about Will Howard, we actually currently have a Kansas State athletic development director that spent a few years at your shop. And so he's great. So happy to, the skills you've instilled with him are great. So switching gears, and I think we've talked about this a little bit, but would love to hear each of your thoughts on, you know, the sort of the partnership between talent management and long-term organizational strategy and how we continue to grow our organization. So Holly, I'll start with you. What does that look like in your organization and how you maybe approach it with your work? Yeah, great question. So I would say, first of all, one of the things that we do to make sure we're focusing on that long-term relationship with our employees is not only doing an annual review process, but also doing things like mid-year review processes and making sure supervisors are touching base almost on a weekly basis. Most of our supervisors do have weekly touch points with their team members. And during that time, not only are they talking about the work that they're doing on a day-to-day basis, but they're also talking about growth, professional development, things that they would like to see in their own career path. And then in turn, those supervisors and individuals are coming to me and my colleague to say, hey, here's what's coming up in our conversations and what we would like to focus on. I think we'll see more of that as our succession planning is becoming more central to what we're doing within our organization, but that will just strengthen our organization overall. In addition to that, we were very intentional about planning and implementing a new strategic plan right on the heels of our campaign. And so we now have our new strategic plan and we've gone through a process where we've been able to identify the top five KPIs that we will be tracking in order to determine the success of that overall strategic plan. And one of those KPIs is employee retention. And so we recognize that KPIs aren't just fundraising, it's not just dollars raised, it's also our people and our talent. And so employee retention is one of the top things that we're looking at overall. We're really fortunate here at the SDSU Foundation, as I'm sure most folks on this Zoom are aware, the average retention rate of a development professional lands somewhere in like the 18 to 24 month range. Our development tenure right now is sitting at an average of something like five to six years. So we're really fortunate in that regard. We know that, we recognize that. Some of our development team members have been on our team for 16 to 20 years that we recognize that that is rare. And so we really value that and highlight it and try to replicate that with the rest of our employees as well. Great. Thanks, Holly. And Christy, you, what does that look like in your organization, that long-term strategy and partnership between talent management? So for us, that really understands kind of along the same lines with performance management. We, again, have a responsibility to fundraise dollars for our institution. And we wanna make sure that we still have a great environment. You've heard us say culture, I don't know how many times today, right? So for us, performance management is about emphasizing not only the need to meet and achieve goals for every individual in the organization, but also competencies. So our employee performance score is a combination of metrics and competencies. And that's because we believe it's really important. And we talk all the time about we're not gonna tolerate jerks at work. And that's something we've really laid down in and we use, we measure people's behavior actively. And we've also talked about our promotion formula. I think Christy was talking about, the organizational need and someone's skills sometimes collide. That is 100% what we've experienced as well. And because our promotion formula equals consistent performance, and that's meant to be your behavior and your metrics, do you have additional capacity? And is there an organizational need? And oftentimes the organizational need is the most challenging one to find. Sometimes the organizational need is that like we need to retain that knowledge base. Sometimes it really is there. But again, it's about emphasizing that it can't just be, we can't just be a high performing organization. If your behavior isn't in it also, no one's gonna work with you. And we've got collaborative gifts coming in and dual households, all of those things. And even our CEO will tell you that high performing employees, that's the combination of behavior and metrics. And just because you're a strong producer on the metrics doesn't mean I consider you a high performing employee. He sees those as very two different things and we try to reinforce that as well. And that just means that employees have to understand that leadership as an activity, not a title, and you have the ability to demonstrate leadership even if you are not in a position of authority. And then I think the thing that's probably the biggest component for us in terms of long-term strategy is our manager training curriculum. So many years ago, we've been doing this for quite a few years now, we started doing manager training. We call it People Leaders Workgroup and we meet once a month for an hour and a half. And that is a long time. And we believe that that is so essential to driving the employee and manager relationship. And we all know that that employee manager relationship is so vital to our engagement for our employees and having that good experience. So we've developed even this past year a more specific manager training curriculum, we're calling it Meaningful Management so that we could get all of these things that we've talked about over the years and put them into one formalized training. And that's gonna help give us a common vernacular to use, really consistent understanding of how we do things as an organization. We pull a lot from Gallup, they're a great resource for us. And we also use a state organization called the Kansas Leadership Center who has some great philosophies about leadership as an activity, not a title. And so we've got to invest and by investing really meaningfully in our managers, we know that will trickle down and we know that that will impact the value across our organization. We've seen our employee to manager engagement score go up in the last 10 years substantially. We were around the 40th percentile, we moved up above the 90th percentile from our very first engagement score to our most recent one with employees to managers. So investing a lot of time in the employee manager relationship and giving our managers the tools they need to be their best manager selves is probably one of our biggest long-term strategies. Christy, not to get into too much of the weeds of the people leader curriculum, but is that something that is just for people that are actually direct managers or are there people that are like aspiring to be or thinking about kind of that growth mindset that you're instilling some of those traits into? Yeah, so right now it is just for our direct managers and it's our managers who are only managing full-time. We do have some individuals who are managing some of our student employees. So it's just our individuals who are managing full-time employees. We've gotten a lot of feedback though that our aspiring leaders want something like it. So we're actually in the process right now of developing some curriculum that will be that next level that people can come to, people can be nominated to join in, and it would be kind of like a leadership development course. So what we've got, our curriculum today, will help inform what that curriculum will look like. It'll be pared down, more focused in. So we're in progress on that particular item. That's great. So thank you for sharing. And Christy, at the University of Denver, where does talent management fit into the long-term strategy of the organization and how are you partnering with your leadership team? Yeah, so I mean, for anyone that's ever heard me speak at a case conference before, one of the first things I say is that 70 to 75% of our budgets are people, are people costs, but we don't spend that much time investing in our managers at that level. And that's our competitive edge. And unless we are investing in our people and investing in our managers doing a good job with our people, we're not taking advantage of the resources that we actually have. And I'm sure all of us have been like, God, we need a little bit more. We need this piece of software. We need this additional FTE. But we also have to make sure that our managers are actively managing. And it is a really hard thing to do in higher education advancement because I think Christy was talking about the performance management. We've got all of these individual contributing responsibilities and these have deadlines and our people are gonna be there tomorrow, right? So how do we ensure that managers are saying my management responsibilities are equal or more important than those individual contributing responsibilities? So we do a lot with our managers and it really is around the Gallup curriculum. And I know Christy talked about Gallup. You guys, it's cheap, it's easy, it's actionable and it's understandable. I can't tell you enough good things about it. The more you can access that curriculum, they have about boss to coach. We do a boss to coach session, really sort of changing that paradigm of, I'm gonna tell you what to do, to I'm gonna coach you and we're gonna achieve wonderful things together. That's definitely our philosophy here. And that goes into all of our outcomes. So those of you that have been involved in the talent management world, we always say, what are the most important KPIs? And we talk about all these things and we're like, oh, turnover. Well, some turnover's good, right? So how do we do bad turnover versus good turnover? How do we do cost to hire? I've gone through all of these things and they tell us some really good outcomes. But I think the best way we can decide what our talent management strategy and KPIs are, are we setting the goal, the organization is meeting the goals that we set for ourselves. Those outcomes are telling us our people are engaged, they're working hard and they're doing great work. But we're in a point in our campaign where we're doing the next five, we're sort of in the public phase of the campaign and we believe there's about five years left. So we're developing that five-year strategic plan that matches our campaign. And the people piece goes through all of those pillars. And the more I can help, what I've done and seen across my career is we spend a lot of time where we have a people pillar over here and then we have four or five other pillars that look at everything else. People should be in each one of those pillars when you're thinking about a strategic plan because you can't get any of those things done without your people. Absolutely. Absolutely. Something that, yeah, people are in every pillar. We have to recognize that. Absolutely. Yeah, and sometimes we set them over here and then they say, talent management, what are you doing for my people? Oh, no, we're working with managers because the managers are the ones that actually have the day-to-day interaction and the most impact on somebody's professional experiences. And we can all look back at those managers that we say, we learned a lot because we shouldn't be like that. And then we look back at the managers and we say, thank God I had that person. They were so important to me. Absolutely. And I promise this is not a gallop pitch, but I would echo what Christy is saying that there are a lot of great resources and actionable takeaways. We've utilized the Q12 and the StrengthsFinder and it does some really great things for our staff. So, and there are other programs out there as well. They're out there. I'm just, I happen to be- I am with you, yep. A disciple, I think. Yep, yep. So, I know we've had a couple of questions in the chat that I think that we've sort of addressed, but please, if there is a question that we have not addressed, you know, as we wrap up here, would welcome you to either unmute or type that question in the chat and we can try to address those here in the closing minutes of our call here. All right, well, if one comes in, we will address it, but just a few things, you know, I took a couple of notes as we're going through this, but I think some of the things that stood out to me and just kind of a few key takeaways I would offer to the group is, you know, I think you heard from all of the panelists, the important of the, you know, the experience, the employee experience, and the intentionality of building culture and you can, I mean, honestly, from all 3 of you, you can feel that culture as you talk about it. That pride, and so I appreciate you sharing, and I know it's one of those things that it can be up and down, but yeah, you can feel what you're doing, and then just the importance of talent management as it plays and being a partner and driving success for the organization people, it is the largest, you know, budget item in our budget, for sure, and we have to be intentional and invest in our people. And that's very important for the long term success for all of our organizations and being good partners to our managers, our people, our employees, all of those things are absolutely important in that. So, as I was sharing there, I did, we did have 1 question and maybe I would throw it out there and please any of you, Christy, Holly or Christy can answer, but how much weight do you do transferable skills hold in more senior positions? Well, for us at Kansas State, the higher up a position becomes on our career progression ladder. So, for example, if we are hiring a unit lead for the College of Arts and Sciences in a frontline fundraising position, that individual, we're going to expect to see more direct experience and transferable skills for us are probably not going to be able to do a lot of the work that we're doing right now. To meet our expectations. Now, if you're talking a just a development officer, which is a brand new fundraiser of the same college, you know, that would be a position where we would look at transferable skills. So maybe they've had significant time as a retail manager. You know, maybe they've had a position before where they've had to make lots of cold calls. One of our big components is a metrics based role. So you tell us if you've got a metrics based role, we'll think, you know, that's something we'll discuss. It doesn't necessarily have to be fundraising. But once we do get in those senior level positions, we are going to be looking for someone who has more direct experience. So I can't tell you there's a particular title or a cut off, but across the organization, I would say it's not just fundraising. That'd be for all of our positions. You know, if we're going to be hiring at a certain level, we're going to look for direct experience versus transferable skills. Thank you, Christy. I would maybe say for us, we've actually taken transferable skills and applied them to a lot of roles that we have. And we find a lot of value in that. Obviously, direct experience is probably the most enlightening about the type of work that we do. But I think as we have in the past kind of come up against some of the same challenges that I think some folks are finding as it relates to recruitment, we've been much more open to looking at transferable skills. And so, for example, we have, in the past, we've had development directors who maybe are serving as the development director for the College of Education and Human Sciences. But rather than having a previous experience in development itself or sales or fundraising, they instead were previously a teacher. And so, they actually had the skills in the field that they were fundraising for. And so, they could speak that same language. Other times, it has been transferable skills of things like maybe they have been in sales or maybe they have done similar work in a nonprofit or public sector. But we found a lot of success in evaluating those transferable skills and seeing them as a tool and a resource that we can learn and grow as an organization. And I would say we're probably more like Christy, where we have not an entry-level position, but a professional-level position where there is a more senior manager on top that can teach the position-based skills. It is hard if you don't have some of the technical experience to be that lead individual. There are some places where you can do that. I think we've seen over the course of my career, I've seen like corporate relations, having some pretty good transferable skills. But again, I think that's another reason why having some career ladders in place, it creates an opportunity for transferable skills. And quite frankly, it's a great way to be able to ensure that there's opportunity for new people to enter our profession. We need more people in our profession. We got to be out there and providing a place for them to come in and know that this is something that's available to them. I did see something in the chat about the cost of Gallup. It kind of depends. I think if you just want to do the survey for your staff, it's about $15 a person. If you buy the platform, depending on the size of your organization, it's about $15,000, I think, or somewhere around that. It gives you all the access and everybody in your organization, the access to the platform and the resources. But any of their classes that you can take, you get all the resources and they let you share like crazy. You just have to credit them. I'll do a plug for their Summit at Work, I think is what they call it, their annual conference that they do. It's usually in the summer. I've attended it both in person and virtually and come away with a wealth of information, both technical and then also strategic based. So just ideas, getting the juices flowing, because sometimes you just need to kind of get out of your talent management rut, what's comfortable and what you've been doing, and this has worked, it's check in a box. I think Gallup's conferences are great for kind of getting out of your talent management rut and getting some good data behind your practices for your folks on your team who are really, they're not convinced unless it's got a number behind it, because maybe they see talent management is a little too soft and they need a number. Gallup is great about providing you some good data so that you've got some information and metrics behind those behavioral skills you're trying to promote in your team. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, we are quickly approaching the top of the hour. And before we do that, I just truly want to say thank you to Christy, Christy and Holly for you taking the time and sharing about what's happening in your organization and providing our group just an opportunity to learn from each of you. It's been a great session. I know you all and in the sense that I know if anybody wants to reach out on LinkedIn or connect, I'm not going to speak for you, but I see the heads nodding and I would share, please do. This is a place where if you are looking for, if you have follow up questions, reach out to any one of us. If you have follow up questions, reach out to any one of us. We're happy to connect and share. We've all had those experiences. Maybe you're new to this space. Maybe you're just learning what talent management is. I've been there before and I think we're all happy to share and help you shape what's happening at your organization as well. And hopefully we can share resources back and forth. Thank you, Christy, Christy and Holly. It's been great. Any parting thoughts from any of our panelists? I just want to echo what Joe said. We talked about copy and share, collaborate and share. When I started, it was copy and share. One of the best things about CASE is that these are partnerships. These become long term friendships over time. Don't hesitate putting yourself out there. I'm sitting here looking at my email from three of my very good CASE friends that I get to see in two weeks and I'm super excited. Build those relationships. Absolutely. And I would just say thank you so much for having us. It's been a pleasure to share about what we're doing and I would just echo, yes, please contact me if there's any follow up questions or any further information you'd like about anything we talked about today. Yes, same. Thank you. Thank you all. Hope you all have a great day. Thanks for joining us and we'll talk soon.

talent management

workplace culture

employee engagement

onboarding process

recruitment challenges

performance management

succession planning

boomerang hires

offboarding