I think last week, a lot of you who work in alumni might know it was National Volunteers Week at the start of June. And in the eagerness to celebrate the success of my team at my wider organisation, I sent out a lovely celebratory Teams message and got the got the stat wrong. So with all these things we should know, I looked at the wrong report and got excited and thought, wow, we've done particularly well in our volunteering and shared a number that wasn't technically correct. So I had to quickly do some Teams messaging to wider colleagues who already started to share that number and be like, actually hold your horses, it's not quite correct. But it was a nice way to remind my own team that we all make mistakes and it's just about how you deal with them. So yeah, it felt very appropriate in the run up to this webinar. But yeah, I guess on that, I will quickly ask our speakers to introduce themselves then. So Chris and Claire, I will come to you both. Chris first. I'd love it if you could just quickly say who you are, where you work, and also, I guess why you were happy to join a webinar on this topic. Great, so thanks. Yes, Chris Cox, Vice Principal for Philanthropy and Advancement at the University of Edinburgh. I've always been interested in this topic. And one of the great joys of our jobs is that you get to work with some very wise people who've got a lot of experience. And I remember two key volunteers when I worked at Newcastle many years ago, one of whom said to me, anybody who doesn't make mistakes isn't trying hard enough. And the other had come through the Marks and Spencer's training programme there where they'd been taught, we want you to make every mistake in the book once. Nice, love that. Wise advice. I should add, this is slightly self-motivated. I invited Chris and Claire into this podcast because I have worked with both of them before. And yeah, I was impressed by their failing ability in their jobs. But no, I thought they were both great leaders. So I was quite inspired by that book to why we invited them. But Claire, please do introduce yourself. I will. So I'm Claire Brownlee. I'm currently Director of Student Futures at Liverpool Hope University. And it's absolutely true. Marie-Rose, Chris and I work together at Manchester. I've taken an oath of secrecy on any mistakes at Manchester, that innocent and not so innocent will be protected. But you may recognise yourselves in some of the conversation. Maybe, I don't know. Hopefully, we've done a better job at disguising identities than the Baby Ranger team. Yeah. And the reason why I wanted to be... I've got a few stories, but not all. Oh, sorry, Marie-Rose. No, carry on. The reason I wanted to be involved today is because at the very beginning of my career, I had the benefit of having a job where I could make lots of mistakes and learn a lot in a very safe environment. And I think that's so important that people kind of confess. I'm a bit of a confessor in respect of mistakes. And I hope Chris remembers this. If anything went wrong, I would confess to it and then enlist somebody else's help to help me fix it. And I think that's the best way to be. I agree. All right. Well, thank you both. And thank you for not minding that we invited you on this, on that topic. Yeah, it's really great to have you here with our inaugural one. Great. Hannah, anything else from you or should we get going? No, let's dive in because I know that Chris, we've got Chris for a limited amount of time. So let's start with Chris, I think. Great. And Chris, I think it's fair to say your first failure was just the fact that you couldn't choose just one thing. So you wanted to come and discuss a few things. So we will hand the mic over to you to share a couple of the reflections and the stories you have. OK, well, yes, I've got sort of three. We'll see if we've got time to cover all three. And they're all rather different in nature. I'm going to start with what was quite a big, big picture mistake, as opposed to the sort of day to day mistakes we make virtually every hour. So this was on, I won't name institutions so I can be still more open about them, I think. But it was moving from one research intensive university to another. And I'd worked in an environment both where a university had an independent connected charitable trust, development trust, and I'd worked in a university also which didn't have a connected charitable trust, so where the gift income came in directly to the university. And I was moving into a role where the university did have an independent charitable trust, which, of course, does mean you've got to do all of the additional accounts, all of the additional auditing. And I came in with the view, and I think it was a pre-set view, and that was the big mistake, that I should seek to persuade this university to ditch its independent trust. And there were some good reasons for that, which is it concerns me to this day that unless we're clear in our communications, it could give the impression that you can't trust the home university. So you somehow need your funding to be held in some kind of safe haven somewhat separate from the institution. And I still think that's a potential danger with having an independent trust. And, of course, you've got to have independent trustees and you've got to make sure that their views are fully aligned with those of the institution. So there was some reasonably sensible thinking behind it. And I had seen it work without a separate development trust. But I came in and possibly with a bit of ego involved, possibly with the feeling I'd come into a big new role, and people would expect me to be wanting to drive some significant change. Too early on, I began to share that idea and then set up a consultation. I think it was a genuine consultation looking back on it, but I should probably quiz myself quite hard on that. And a senior colleague who'd been at the university for a good period said to me fairly clearly that she didn't think it was the right thing. And I listened to that and we moved ahead. And then we had to, we then did decide in the end, we would streamline this development trust. And over time, it would in effect fade out, couldn't be done immediately. And that had to be approved by university court, the Board of Governors. And so it was a big decision to take. And it was all approved. And within a couple of years of that decision, as we began to put it into practice, I began to see some of the pitfalls and downsides. And some of those became very real. And there were some circumstances within the university around the finance system, which created some real issues. And also, I had by then learnt more about the culture of that institution. And that actually there were a whole range of reasons for having that rather independent trust. So it was, I then had the difficult situation of thinking, well, I'm not going to have to reverse this. And I did in the end, sort of reconsulted and agreed with the trustees of that trust that we should reverse that decision. But that was quite a big thing for me to have to do. And we had to take a lot of, having taken a lot of legal advice and costs associated with closing down the trust, we then had to take further legal advice to reverse the decision. And that had to go back to the Board of Governors. So that was something I've looked back on and thought, actually, if I just waited that bit longer, got to know the culture, got to know the full background of the institution I was joining, hadn't felt the need to rush a decision such as that, I think we would have reached a different place. So happy to answer anything on that. And maybe I'll just quickly touch on one other though, I'll focus on a donor related one. This is with an individual who was a wonderful donor to a research programme in regenerative medicine. He was based in the States, and I had the real pleasure of having a chance to go over to meet with him probably once or twice a year and have really long conversations, felt I'd really got to know him well. He was giving very, very happily to a terrific programme in regenerative medicine, getting super reports, meeting the academics and PhDs once a year, about as good a situation as you could get. At the time, that institution was launching a big new programme around a new form of undergraduate teaching, and with some really innovative dimensions to it. And I had had good, long, deep conversations with this donor, knew him and his wife well, knew their motivations, and I knew they would be interested in this programme. And I sort of took it on myself to, because it was a big priority for the university, and we knew that a significant donor would really help elevate it to a new level, so I took it on myself to start to introduce that topic with a view to asking him for a significant gift for it, thinking he would want to do it. And I had at least two quite long conversations with him about it, beginning to introduce him to the idea. It was on the third time when I was moving to a situation when I was, and he could see I was going to ask him for a gift towards it, and it was as I took that sounding that he stopped me mid-conversation and just said, Chris, I'm a little confused here because I can see you're going to ask me to support this programme. You told me three or four years ago that this programme in regenerative medicine was really important to the university, really strategically aligned. The president of the university has told me that. It's going well. You seem to be wanting to divert me away from that. Does that mean the existing programme is no longer a priority? And as I was about halfway through what he was saying, the penny dropped, and I said, of course, it's crazy what I'm doing. So I was just too quick again to feel my primary responsibility was to seek funding for a new initiative at the university, and I was sort of riding a cart and horses through what we all know is really important, that once you've found donors that are giving to a programme and are giving happily and finding it a very rewarding experience to give to that programme, you've got to have a very good reason to try to steer them away from it, and a more sensible approach absolutely would have been to see whether he would continue to support that first programme, and if he was interested in expanding his support, that would have been the right way to do it, and I got it badly wrong. The relationship was fine. We knew each other well enough that he could be honest with me, and I apologised to him, and I believe to this day that's still a very happy relationship. That's so good to know. I think they're two quite different examples, but very interesting. There's a few things I want to come back to in the first one in relation to the fact that I think that Hannah and I were discussing before this, that we are in a sector full of best practice and full of great ideas, and I think it's one of the nice things that we're often not competing for the same donors or the same alums, but I think you're encouraged to join a new place and bring learnings with you, but that's interesting when that kind of clashes with not knowing the institution, not knowing the culture, so interesting any reflections on that kind of balance between bringing your ideas, but also kind of, I guess, exercising caution, so we'll come back to that, but I guess on the second, the common theme I saw with both of those is like, if there's quite a big moment to kind of deal with being potentially the embarrassment of either making a U-turn or doing a wrong step, as you said in that conversation, how did you deal with that particularly? Did you dwell on it? What kind of reflections do you have about how you felt? Because in both instances, there is a reputational piece there, and I can see it's hard to kind of be told, actually, this has not gone the way you expected it to. Yeah, I think I remember the conversation very vividly, because it doesn't happen that often, and I remember just having paused for thought, and when he got to the end of what he wanted to say, I paused for quite a while, and I would have given him a very serious look back, and he would have known, and I would have just immediately, I didn't feel bad about it, funnily enough, because I knew that I was still promoting a program that I fundamentally believed in, and I had good reason to think he would be interested in it, but I could see, I could see too late in the day how it might feel from his point of view, but it was very clear I owed him an apology immediately, but I didn't go overboard on the apology, but we were just able to have a good conversation about it there and then, and it felt like it was very important to have the conversation there and then, and then we did begin to bring the conversation back round to the current program, but I just think it's always best to try to deal with it in the moment if you can, and just to be honest and open, and when an apology is due, don't go for one of these terrible political apologies, I apologise if what I said was interpreted, all that kind of nonsense, just say sorry, I really got that wrong. And Chris, obviously that was an in the moment kind of conversation between you and the donor, but with your first example, that obviously happened over a long period of time, so how did you start approaching those conversations with your colleagues where you realised, actually, we might have to go back on this? Well, it was quite a gradual process, I mean, so I've sometimes talked about it as the only screeching U-turn I've done in my career, that's probably not true, but in one sense it might have felt to the Board of Governors like it was a screeching U-turn, but actually it wasn't, because we'd agreed it would have to be quite a carefully phased approach to wind down the trust. In effect, we began a conversation to say, well, actually, let's just pause the wind down, and then was open with the trustees of the trust about that, and then in effect there was a pause period, and then we had the conversation with my colleagues and with the trustees to say, actually, we might reverse this wind down, but again, gradually. But actually, there were still some facets of the original proposal which have held true, so it remained true that organisations could give directly to the university, and for many organisations that was the right thing to do, for a whole range of reasons. So we did also need to set up systems to make sure that could be properly managed within the university's own finances. So it's still a bit of a hybrid model there, I think, but it was a gradual process, but then I certainly took the senior colleague to one side and said, oh, you could really make hay with this, because I've got to admit, you were right and I was wrong, and that colleague was very generous-spirited around that. But then we did need to work through the legal team and through the senior leadership of the university, and then eventually through to the Board of Governors, and they were fine about it. Sorry, you go, Myra. No, I was just going to say, it's really nice to hear they were generous with that, but I guess you would hope that they would be, and someone's actually commented while you were talking, Chris, that potentially in relation to, I know, going to the second example, that would that kind of misstep actually might have made the relationship stronger? And I wonder, in some ways, when you talk about your first example, your conversation with that colleague who had been right, perhaps, in some ways, being able to be candid with them and say you were right and I was wrong, did you get a sense, did that actually make it easier to work with them going forward? Yes, I think it probably did in that instance. I've often thought that, so we talk a lot in our profession about the importance of building trust, and that is the sort of bedrock on everything, everything good we do is based on that, both within our institutions and with donors and alumni and others. I've occasionally had a dark thought that you could take a very Machiavellian approach and make some deliberate mistakes, but I'm not that Machiavellian. But I can think of several instances where actually handling it well has built trust. In the same way, when there's been a comms disaster at the university and you've got a whole swathe of your alumni community that ups up, if you handle it well, you can bring people round. And another really important point that we certainly talked a lot about at Manchester, Claire, was that we would far rather have angry alumni than alumni that didn't seem to care either way, because if they're angry, they care about you. And they perhaps, if they feel the university's made some terrible decision, that perhaps suggests they hold the university in very, very high regard. And you'd rather be working with people that actually have the university on something of a pedestal and associate the university with high standards and want to be supportive of it than people who don't really care either way. Absolutely. I totally agree. Chris, somebody's asked in the chat if it was only you and the donor in that conversation, in the second example. And if it was, do you think you would have had a different response if there had been other colleagues in the room? It was just me and the donor. But no, I wouldn't have handled it any other way. I think it was a slightly easier conversation. But as a really interesting point that in general, about the pros and cons of having more than one person in the room, I certainly debriefed with the team back home and shared the learning back home. And there would have been others who knew I was going to be talking with them about it because I had some information about the new programme and they knew that I was going to be talking with them about it. Yeah. That sounds good. I guess, Chris, I'm quite interested of your time. So I wondered, actually, we might pass the mic to Claire and then feel free to chip in. I know one of your final examples is related a little bit to something Claire might share. So Claire, if you're happy for us to come to you, can you tell us what you reflected on, what failure or mistake you'd like to share? I can. I'll be honest, as Chris was talking, I was jotting little notes down to myself. So I remembered other mistakes. So clearly, my career has been peppered with lots of them over the time. So the big one for me was really, it was really embarrassing. And lots of learnings came out of it, both from a protest perspective, but also from a leadership perspective. So in a previous institution, we managed to kill an alum. So not actually kill them, but we killed them off. We announced their death in the alumni magazine. And we found out about it because the alum stepped into the office to suggest that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated, as I think a paraphrase, as I think somebody had previously said. And it was the most embarrassing moment because you kind of look around for the candid camera and think that somebody is joking, in a sense. But we'd announced his demise. And the reason why he knew wasn't because he'd read the alumni magazine and seen his death announcement, but because his friends from university had read it and had then contacted his mother to pass on their condolences. And it could have been an awfully emotional situation. We could have caused untold grief, even though it would only be temporary for this gentleman's mob, essentially. She obviously knew he hadn't passed away and contacted him, which then prompted him to come into the office. And almost the worst thing about it was he was also a staff member at the university. And because there wasn't that much correlation between staff and alumni records, it meant that we had no idea about that. So he was on campus, and we still managed to kill him off. And it was hugely embarrassing. And it made me realize that, as the leader of the team, it was my responsibility. So even though I technically hadn't written it into the alumni magazine, I technically hadn't marked them up as deceased on the alumni database, it was still my responsibility. So, of course, there were apologies. And then there was the obvious lessons learned situation, where we had to work out how it happened and how to stop it happening in the future. And we realized there were some holes in our processes that meant that if somebody called and said somebody's dead, there was very little checking that we did to verify that. We would just mark them as deceased and maybe put a date by it. Also, we realized that our database at the time didn't have a breadcrumb trail that was infallible. So as soon as I entered the record of that alum, it showed me as being the last person to make a change on that day and at that time. And it lost any other changes that had happened previously. So there was an element of not being able to track back as to what had happened. And so the result was lots of apologies, making sure everybody was OK, obviously unmarking the alumnus deceased, and making sure that new processes were put in place where we would verify that somebody was who they said they were when they contacted the university. And the reason why this particular alum was so worried is because he'd had a recent incidence of identity theft, which had financial issues attached to it, the sale of a property. And he was worried that the person who'd performed the identity theft was maybe trying to kill him off, in a sense, remove a kind of electronic trail. So he was heightened to that as an issue. Anyway, it was all OK in the end. The alum was still alive. And he had a good laugh about it at the end of it. And I kind of fessed up to colleagues who were also working at other universities about this story and found out this wasn't that uncommon, that it had happened to others. And one particular colleague said that they'd done the same. They'd announced the death of somebody in their magazine. And in the stewardship of that person, after they presented themselves as still alive, he actually became closer to the university and went on to become a donor. So it's not all bad. And as Chris says, even if he was angry with the university for spreading misinformation, as it were, he cared about the university enough to then let us know, or in the case of the other university, to become a donor. So it certainly opens up the conversation, that's for sure. But I had to take responsibility for it, even though technically it wasn't me, because that's part of what leading a team is about, having ownership of all parts of the process. Anyway, I don't think it's happened since, so that's OK. My second exam. Oh, sorry. Did you want to say something? If I may, because I'm so sorry, I have to jump off the call. But I'm very happy to follow up with any questions afterwards. But I've just got one other example of getting things wrong in print of a different kind. And it's something that I still have problems with now. But in my very first job at UCL as the alumni officer, to come in to organise a whole range of new events for alumni in London, big, exciting programme. The very first one, letter sent out by me to 20,000 alumni in the whole London area. And for the big launch with the provost of the university and a key external speaker, really exciting programme, put the wrong day with the wrong date. I have done that, anybody who's worked with me, I've done that consistently for the last 30, 40 years. So I'd said Thursday the 11th of December, and it was Thursday the 10th of December, or whatever it was. And it sort of brought back to me the next day. And I just thought, oh my goodness, how have I managed to do that? And I couldn't blame anybody. So I just went straight through to my director and said, I've really messed up. Really sorry, very embarrassing. He was great about it. And ever since then, I don't think I've done it on a big mailing like that. Because I, but even in my, the odd informal email, it'll still happen. But anything I know is going to a lot of people, I will always make sure somebody double checks the right day with the wrong, with the right date. You're not the only one, Chris. I've done that before. This issue of copy checking. And you think you've copy checked everything, everything's fine. And then the first thing that happens is when the, you know, a print publication comes back to the office, you open it up and you immediately see the piece of copy that is incorrect, that you didn't see the 15 times you copy checked it before it went to print. Absolutely. And you think it's a complete crisis. I thought my whole career was over. It was the first event, I'd been brought into these events, the very first event, I'd stuffed it up before it had even started. I'm sure it was fine. But yeah, it's that panic, isn't it? And it's like, no, surely it must be right. But it isn't, it's wrong. There are bigger things in life. It's reassuring to see, Chris, it didn't affect your career forever. So I guess knowing that you have to jump off, that's a nice note for you to have. And we'll continue this chat with Claire. But yeah, thank you for- Thanks so much. See you again later. Thanks, bye. See you later, Chris. Claire, just on your example, and just to share one of my own, I think this is really interesting in terms of this sending something out. And I know we've got a lot of questions and follow-up on this, but in my team recently, we had an alum join in a really senior position as Chief Transformation Officer, and she was an alum of the university. So this is an amazing opportunity for us in the alumni team to do some celebratory, look what our alumni go on to do. They've come back and they're feeding in. And we sent this newsletter out that accidentally, A, spelt her name wrong, and B, named her just Transformation Officer. So we missed the chief, which is probably quite an important part of that role. And because she is an alum, she's the one who then came to me to say, there's a bit of an error here. And it is that thing of, oh my God, she's just started. She's in the senior leadership team, and we've made this error. So I think we'll probably have loads of questions for you about the follow-up and who, somebody's asked in the chat, did senior management find out about this? And how did you deal with that? If they did, how did you approach that? They did find out because I told them. I am genuinely a confessor, and the best thing that you can do, or rather the worst thing that you can do is to try and hide something. One, when it's so public, and two, when it's something that if you confess to it, can help make things better going forward. So I didn't really have any choice, but to confess, especially because the alum was a member of staff as well. So yes, senior management did find out, but because we'd already kind of sorted out the problem in a sense, we'd already spoken to the alum, they were already happy with the way we were going to take things forward. They were already reassured that we were going to make sure that the same thing couldn't and wouldn't happen again. So yes, they did find out, but because we confessed essentially, because it was the right thing to do. And Chris and I experienced a copy issue on a Manchester magazine where we misspelt the name of a flagship lecture. And the family attended that lecture every year, and it was misspelt in it. And the horror of opening the magazine and reading the misspelling of such an important family name to the university, repeatedly, not just the once, repeatedly, was, yeah, it was heart in the mouth sort of situation. And Chris and I took a different vantage point as to what we would do afterwards. Chris wanted to reprint things. And I was saying, I'm not reprinting 200,000 magazines. It's not happening. And this knee-jerk reaction that you just want to fix everything. And again, it was fine. We approached the family and explained to them that this mistake had happened and they were fine because we told them rather than they discovered it, that would have been really embarrassing. I think that was going to be one of the main follow-up questions. And I think, obviously, the caveat being, I don't think there is a perfect answer to this, but how do you make the call on whether you kind of acknowledge a mistake like that in terms of in the next edition, for example, would you print a retraction? In terms of the alum death, for example, did you obviously provide a correction when it's just something like a misspelling, even though it's quite a major misspelling? And it can be really tricky when you're in those comms roles. And I've been there many times and I used to do the comms job of deciding at which point do you highlight that error for even going down to hand this kind of dear first name example that we've all done over the years. What are your views on that? Because it's tricky to decide when you want to highlight something or just kind of move past it. Yeah, absolutely. I think it depends on the case, on the situation and the mistake that was made. So if, for example, you left off the chief bit of somebody's job title, then printing a correction rather than a retraction, I think is always a sensible way forward because you're correcting a mistake that was genuinely made and acknowledging that you were providing the correct information then for that person. Because I think if you've made it to C-suite executive, you want to be recognized as such. And so I think printing in the next iteration of whatever that publication is or whatever the next email is, a correction is important. I think in the cases where what you have printed is of detriment to the subject, again, I think it's important that you acknowledge that you've made a mistake and either retract or correct. In other cases, I think these mistakes, we wouldn't have put in the next alumni magazine 12 months later that we'd misspelled the name of our flagship lecture. It was quite embarrassing enough that the apology happened personally with the family rather than 12 months later, scrape the scab off that particular wound again. So I think it depends on a case-by-case basis and whether you have genuinely caused harm or provided significant misinformation about the subject that you've been referring to in whatever publication or online presence you've done it in. So other people might have a difference of opinion, but I think you shouldn't just automatically confess publicly. Sometimes it's that private apology that makes all the difference. Yeah, and that's the approach definitely that we took within our team. It was an apology. We definitely did some social media profiling of our chief transformation officer over the next couple of weeks to try and get that message out. To try and get that message out there. Exactly, exactly. And everybody makes mistakes. I have never met anybody who's not made a mistake. And so people will generally understand when somebody else has made a mistake. Can I ask how close do you now stay? Obviously you are now kind of very senior in your team. How close do you stay to the kind of day-to-day of like comms and things that are going out? Do you still like to kind of see everything? Do you delegate that? Do you know? Because I think I've worked with different senior leaders who've been either a lot more involved for fear of those things happening versus those who are very happy to kind of devolve it to the team and just trust. Where do you set to sit on that? I absolutely devolve it. I think micromanagement can be quite destructive. It's not my preferred method of leadership. The reason why people learn is because they make mistakes and then they fix them themselves without somebody swooping in from a leadership position and double-checking everything. That creates an atmosphere, I think, where more mistakes are likely to happen as people get very stressed about their ownership of a piece of communication or something that they're organising or a conversation they're having with an alum or with a donor. So I absolutely delegate. I think it's so important for people to find their own way and take responsibility for their own communications and organisation of their bit of the team. Did you have a moment, Claire, when you killed off the alum? Because I completely agree with everything you just said. Did you have a moment when you thought, am I going to have to check the comms? Or have you always thought, you know what, no, that's absolutely fine? I have had periods where I've thought I need to check something, but only in a finite time. So I would never kind of say, right, that's it. Everything has to go through me forever. But it's in a supportive way. The next couple of times something goes out, let's just cast some more eyes over it and see if we can pick up where there are things that have been missed. Because it absolutely happens. And there used to be a member in our team at Manchester who was brilliant at spotting a mistake after it had gone to print. So I just wouldn't let him read the alumni magazine until somebody else had read it. And sometimes they were really tiny mistakes, you know, a full stop was missing or whatever. But yeah, I think, isn't it just part of what we do? There are always going to be mistakes and you can't fix, you can't prevent everything from happening. So maybe I would just cast an extra set of eyes over something for, you know, a couple of issues, but not on a more permanent basis. So I did a master's in journalism. So copy checking was a thing. So it would be like a personal failure if I missed something in the copy, but it also robbed me of any enjoyment of reading things like newspapers when we used to have actual paper newspapers because I would spot the copy errors because that's what I'd been trained to do. So there's, yeah, there are some people whose eyes go to it more than others. So I might cast my eye, but not in the medium or long term, no. It's down to that team member to own their own area. Thanks Claire. I guess, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Just coming back then, I'm thinking about something Chris said and I was quite interested to get your take on it and also Hannah yours, because I think we've discussed this offline. What's your view? You've worked at quite a few different types of institutions now, from schools to large universities to obviously like London, Manchester. What, like, have there been many things that you have taken from one institution to another in terms of coming in with these kind of preconceived ideas? How, and how do you manage that? Because I imagine a lot of the time you've been hired for the next job off the back of your brilliant experience and people saying, what a successful alumni program at Manchester, come and do that for us. How do you balance that? And yeah, Hannah, feel free to jump in because I know we've talked about our own views on this as well. Yeah, I think you always bring your previous experience with you, but then you have to take time to appreciate the context of the place you've moved into. And whether that's the kind of technical skills that you might have in alumni engagement or in fundraising, or whether that's more transferable elements around management and leadership and things like time management or team working and that kind of thing. Yeah, I think it's important to take those skills, whether they're technical or transferable into the next role, but take some time to appreciate the context that they're in because not everything is directly transferable. You're entering a world that you haven't experienced and you might be working alongside people who've been there for a long time. And actually arriving and changing things too quickly can be very unsettling for people and can affect the psychological trust that a team needs in order to be high functioning. You can't, years ago I did a kind of mini psychometric test where you kind of had to and you had to decide what animal you were, one of those you know what sort of cloud am I, that nonsense, and you had a choice of animals and my animal was a rhino because I tend to you know run at things head on and leaving a trail of destruction is not an option but for some people that seems to be something they can't help but do so I very much try and kind of kick open the door without leaving a trail of destruction to try and change things within the context of that organisation. I definitely learnt that the hard way I think when I joined Regence originally because I'd come from London Business School which was a very similar institution in some respects in that it was really international and Regence didn't have the alumni set up internationally that we had at London Business School and so I thought yay I know what I'm doing here I can come in and set up a worldwide alumni celebration that I know that we did at London Business School for example and so I put in all the budgets, I sold the idea for everybody without even thinking for one tiny second that we had a team of 80 people in the advancement centre in London Business School and there was just three of us that could not deliver in any way shape or form the same thing that we did at London Business School and it wasn't lucky but in some respects quite timely that the pandemic hit so I had a very good excuse as to why I could not deliver on this worldwide alumni celebration but I have a very clear memory of setting out all my plans realising that I'd sold everybody on this big celebration day that I was going to deliver in the October I knew there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to do it absolutely not and I just blindly brought everything from London Business School over to Regence without thinking about the context and it was that thing that Chris was saying earlier of it was my ego I'd come into this new role I wanted to make this big change or this big impact without thinking about what is it that I actually need in order to do that yeah and the context is is so important and this this one isn't a story about coming from one place to another and not understanding it it's more about just not having a plan doing something and not having a plan to deal with the consequences of it and it it was very early in my career it was just me and an assistant and there had been an alumni office previously but it had closed um when there was a round of funding cuts and then we were just starting out again so I was the only alumni officer in a public relations team and um I was like oh we need to be speaking to our alumni I shall send them an email and ask them to do things and I sent this email out and I got hundreds and hundreds of responses because the alumni um very warm to the university and they were just sat waiting for somebody to connect with them and then that was it this huge tsunami of responses came and I had no way whatsoever to be able to respond to all of them and it was it was awful because I knew I was damaging those relationships by not responding in a timely fashion to to to all of them and uh and in the end I just it a new director of development came in the development team was was being built and he said just delete them delete them that some of them have been sat there for so long just delete them and start from ground zero again and because I didn't have the confidence or the seniority to just delete them and ignore them I was trying to plow through them all and he said if any of them are really important they'll come back to us um and that was a really hard lesson to to always know that you should that you've got a plan to deal with the consequences of your actions because I absolutely didn't my enthusiasm just took over and um and I I thought I shall just do this without a thought so that's what the next year was going to look like so yeah that comes in such a nice enthusiastic place though I can see I think like you know it's I can I can imagine so many people that start alumni programs and think the same have been like well let's just cast the net and see what comes back yeah absolutely it was such a mistake and uh yeah I've never made that mistake since as Chris said make all the mistakes but only once I like what you've just referenced there though and I'm just really I'm not sure if we've lost Hannah yeah maybe she'll come back hopefully what I like in that is that they you're also recognizing this I feel like there's quite a theme of self-awareness coming through in terms of kind of what you said what obviously Chris was touching on around ego and the same with Hannah and I think you equally you're there with yourself and wearing up in that genie position to know you couldn't take the call on deleting you know an easy way would have been to delete them and just not say anything about it you could have probably got away with but actually it's recognizing that most most of us unless you are literally the vice-chancellor have someone above to send a check in temperature and be like actually is this okay and I think it's you know it's encouraging in that situation that you obviously had a good enough relationship with your colleagues to be able to do that and sometimes that is just what you have to do sometimes you need to get that decision made elsewhere I think so yeah exactly because and I still feel guilty about it now I do wonder about those alumni who never got a response from me um and if there's any of them out there could you get back in touch with the university please um so I still feel a little bit guilty about it but he was absolutely right just just start again and make sure you don't make the same mistake twice I'm always so envious of those people that put that on their summer auto replies saying just I'm going to delete my emails absolutely bold um I guess just welcome back Hannah um just conscious that we only have about 15 minutes left if anyone else does have any questions please do pop them in the chat I think we've got one or two more for Claire but otherwise we will wrap up so yeah do pop anything else in there but there's a question Claire that's come in which I kind of think we've touched on a bit in some of the answers but um what do you think the tipping point is on something on where you have to address the mistake I know we've talked specifically around like whether you would reprint a correction in a magazine for example but um part of the question is you know something that could seem really big for you and the team but not very big for everyone else I think that I do think that is quite a difficult one to judge sometimes because we all know you know most of us in at are not saving lives or like not day-to-day we're not working in hospitals whatever but equally you don't want to be so reductive that people don't take it seriously and don't try to kind of reflect and learn from it so I guess yeah any thoughts on that as a general question what is that tipping point what when do you think you do need to address something versus just saying you know what things happen don't worry about it yeah I think the tipping point for me comes with reputational risk so if if I perceive something or the leadership perceive something as being um a risk to the reputation of the organization then you have to address it also if there's something that you can do to address the mistake if there's a practical thing that you can do to prevent it happening again in the future you can't prevent everything as I said before but you absolutely have to address the mistake if there's something you can do to make sure it won't happen again but for for me the main thing is about reputational risk for the organization and for the subjects if there is a subject um who's personally affected by your mistake you have to think about what the risk is is for them um because you might come out smelling smelling of roses but they might they might find that um they are less well respected based on a mistake that that you made so yeah again it's case by case for me and whether there is a reputational risk and whether it's a mistake that was avoidable or even whether it's a mistake that was kind of borderline negligent in a sense where somebody knew that there was a high possibility of this happening and went ahead and did it anyway um so it purely for me depends on on the individual mistake and what the reputational risk is I totally get that so Dan in the chat has just asked am I up for admitting to a mistake no pressure I mean I think that is pressure putting in the putting it in the event wide chat I think yeah all my time in comms so many mistakes I'm pretty sure I sent out um a fundraising email with the wrong giving link or to a giving day when that's right that was one of my worst ones I was looking after a giving day at London Business School first ever one and I think I sent out the it's live email instead of the 24 hours to go email which of course then a whole segment of donors got a it's going went to a link and then they got a coming soon page which was in the end I think we managed to work it looked like it was one of those deliberate things that companies do when they're like oops we emailed you by mistake and then we got your interest got away with it but of course there was no escaping that I went to a few thousand people in terms of that segment and it was mortifying but do you know what and again the classic thing we all checked it 100 times we thought the scheduling was set up ready sometimes you can't avoid it sometimes planning you know it then meant that we quadruple checked everything else out over the following 24 hours and you know I love I'd not actually heard that expression well I know it's not necessarily expression but the whole idea of like rather angry alums and apathetic alums that as Chris is saying that's so true and I think the amount of people that have emailed when you sent out a dear first name or something like this it's actually like what a great point to connect with them and to re-engage them so I'm going to be passing that on to my own team and kind of try every time not that we're quite lucky at the centre so we don't get many angry ones but yeah maybe I'll watch out for that and see it's a positive thing not like that when I was doing a student calling job but yeah it probably didn't feel like that when you're on the end of the phone to somebody who you'd interrupted their dinner and with a random phone call they weren't expecting I think this element of a deliberate mistake that you just mentioned there Mary Rose is that so my favourite ever mistake in a previous institution work was when we emailed out to a whole bunch of alumni reminding them that they booked themselves on an event in London the university wasn't in London but it was a London event and we said oh we're really looking forward to seeing you here's your reminder about an event and we'd actually sent it to people who hadn't booked on the event we'd sent it to random other alumni and they were in London but they were the ones that hadn't booked on the event and some of them actually thought that they had booked on it and had forgotten and we had the best turnout for that event ever to the point where I actually a little part of me thought we could just do that every time and just email people reminding them of an event that they've booked onto when they hadn't and then you know some of them would still turn up I couldn't believe it that people said oh I haven't booked on but it looks good I shall come so sometimes that deliberate it wasn't deliberate by the way but a deliberate mistake can sometimes you know actually galvanize people's action that is very true that's interesting because there is a comment in the chat from from someone you know Claire Marcus has commented going not all angry alums can be converted unfortunately I mean I think this is true and I think it's a valid point to make whether you're talking about donors or alumni or any stakeholder there yeah as much as sometimes it's a great attachment for other times they are not going to be compared to be equally I think it's important to remember they may they would have there are people that would like to be well enough about something whether it's your email or the typo in that day or the magazine they pick up with the mistake or getting sent the wrong gift link I think you know sometimes you do have to accept defeat and that you can't win everything and that's okay and to kind of keep a bit of context and kind of you know I don't know it's all relative I think I remind yourself that it's not the end of the world share it with your colleagues and also empathize share with the network that's why I think it's nice to be in touch with peers at different institutions because what's coming out of all of this is everyone has similar experiences and I think the more we just share um you know Hannah and I was saying we don't often see on on app and develop on that mailing list people saying of this issues happened as anyone else kind of counteracted it it's often people saying I've wanted to launch something new I want to do something fun but I think like let's have more mistake sharing across the whole sector the more we'll do that the more we'll keep a bit of yeah perspective on it I think yeah keeping it real and Marcus is right they can't all be converted and I did manage to upset Nalum because he was sitting at the top table with the vice-chancellor at an event and the vice-chancellor looked at the table plan which had already been published and she wanted him moved so she could move somebody else onto her table um and I moved him and moved the other person onto her table and he was really angry um that he'd been moved he did not take it well at all to the point where he wrote in to Chris Cox actually after the event to complain about me because I'd moved him off the top table and you know I hadn't moved him the VC had wanted to move him um but he was super angry and I can't imagine that he could ever have been converted. I think there's always alumni who like Maira said there's always alumni who pick up on the things that no one else did I recently did a trip to India and Dubai and I posted on social media all three events all the events were wrong as in all the dates were wrong and all the times were wrong yeah it got so much traction it got so many likes and so many um so many comments and when you click through onto the event everything was right so I thought well you know what uh I'm just gonna go with it and then they'll they'll see the correct event anyway I knew there was going to be with that one alum and I knew who it was going to be who messaged in going you've got all your dates wrong on your social media you need to take it down and get it right and I knew that was going to happen but worth the traffic yeah incidentally uh Marcus uh the Derren Browning uh strategy I actually think Derren Brown might be an alum from the university that this happened at don't quote me on it but I think he might be so you're spot on with that uh giving it that title I'm interested to see that also Strathclyde did a similar thing with the pre-webinar thing and boosted their numbers because they sent it to people who had registered I'm learning so much I'm now going to try this but equally as Marcus has pointed out there is always that quiet fear with any event that you'll do that and that'll be the one day that you get 100% of your original registration I feel like it's quite anxiety inducing but who knows maybe that fake mistake with the registration thing is a good method thank you for sharing that Claire I had one more question before we finish um you've said that you are a confessor and that you have to and I am the same absolutely but I wonder how that how you translate this to your team so I look back at when I started I said at the beginning I was so fearful of making a mistake and I always try and say with my team now if you made a mistake just come and speak to me it's absolutely fine everyone makes them but the main thing is just come and get it out there how do you how do you kind of promote the benefits of mistakes and and encourage people to learn from them in your team with guys so I guess lead by example so you can't expect people to come to you if they've made a mistake if you're not public about when you do the same and then also be really public about the lesson learned bit and how valuable it was um it you know the more senior you get possibly the more confident you are about admitting mistakes or possibly the better you are at kind of um hiding them in a sense where you can quietly turn a conversation in another direction so it almost looks like um it was never a mistake in the first place I think that can be sometimes um dishonest the light side of dishonest but if people see you being that way then they're more likely to emulate that sort of behavior so just being just leading by example really because you can say look if you've got if you made a mistake come tell me and we've all been there haven't we with our parents where they say if you've broken it just tell me I won't be angry and then you go I broke it and they go right that's it and so the lesson they're providing there is that they will get angry if you confess so it's just being genuine in your response and genuinely not being angry but going okay so how might we utilize this in order to move you know move forward into a into a better place and sometimes you are really angry that a mistake has been made because you know it's avoidable but you've got to um you've got to put to dampen that down in a sense take the emotion out of it and say okay why did it happen what responsibility we need to take from it and how are we going to make it better going forward um and I've got quite a volatile personality um so that's hard for me to kind of not have a oh my god what are we going to do moment but just dampen that down so that people don't feel afraid to to uh to confess I mean if there's people who've worked in my teams in the chat maybe you could I mean thank you if I've blown up at you and you're not writing it in the chat now and uh uncovering uh my darker side that I hope that's what I do um just saying Claire thank you so much uh thank you for joining us to kick this off we've got another one in two weeks time but really appreciate it um having me and yeah we'll hope to see everybody in a couple of weeks thanks so much here's my rose to say goodbye say goodbye bye everyone see you all again bye

alumni relations

philanthropy

career mistakes

transparency

accountability

trust building

workplace culture

error management

open communication