Paul Slaggert shares how he began his career in financial institutions in New York City and moved to working at a university. He found his passion in Executive Education and built on his strengths and desire to offer a unique connection to a university for his program participants. Paul shares his strategy of expanding programs by accessing the Notre Dame community and making it stronger. He explains how faculty is the face of the center and the university and how he selects them. He recalls a very interesting example of a collaboration developed from his network built at the Conference on Management and Executive Development over years. Paul shares how his responsibilities changed as he took on new roles and how he achieves a work-life balance.
“We had an unexpected opening in the person running our Management Center. And I was having conversations with the Dean and he was commenting about the extra work from all the phone calls that were being sent to his office for programming and things like that. So I in fact volunteered to say “Well, that sounds interesting. I think I can do that””
“What I liked about that position which is the same I like about all of positions, actually that I’ve had to work within the university is “I am the only one doing that thing whatever it happens to be”. And that’s a strong motivator for me”
“Great. Exec Ed at Notre Dame includes both degree and non-degree. And you know that’s a little different than a lot of my colleague that I’ve met through CMED.”
“As you know, your faculty represents you and you can only control so many variables. When you walk out of the classroom and close the door it’s that faculty member who becomes you or becomes your center, or your institution.”
“What I like to do is to try something a little different every year because that way you never know where that next lead is going to come from.”
“So finding new clients, evaluating new programs, finding ways to get more people into our open enrollment programs; finding ways to be better stewards and reduce costs and manage better to budget, therefore improving your bottom line performance; those are all challenges we all have. And not being overwhelmed by those can sometimes be the biggest challenge that you have.”
“My job as director is to do a better job of looking ahead to figure out a way how to help the people who work for me be successful. Because that’s a critical piece. Because I can’t do this by myself.”
“We finished the first delivery of the program and one of our corporate folks stood up when we did the de-brief and said “We did a really good job”. And you know, that was so gratifying because it wasn’t about us. It wasn’t about me. But it was about us as a group.”
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Links:
University of Notre Dame, Executive Education
Paul Slaggert LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn Showcase page, University of Notre Dame, Executive Education
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