The presidential search committee has been working hard with the board of trustees on constructing the leadership statement for the next Guilford College president. They have now finished the long anticipated first draft.
To mark the completion of this step, The Guilfordian sat down with two members of the search committee: Carole Bruce, chair of the search committee and trustee, and Kathy Coe, trustee emerita and member of the search committee. They shared their thoughts on the tricky task of creating the statement.
CB: On the leadership statement, we have had a very collaborative process with our search consultant creating a very first draft of the statement, followed by Ty Buckner’s (associate vice president for communications and marketing) team helping us conform the early draft to Guilford publishing standards and adding facts and figures to the draft.
We then shared the draft with the full search committee, the board of trustees and the entire Guilford community for their reactions and suggestions and are continuing to refine the leadership statement.
Remember also that we began with input from faculty, trustees, students and alumni and have based the qualifications for Guilford’s next president on that input … I hope we are capturing the sense of Guilford College and Guilford’s opportunities and challenges that will inspire excellent candidates for Guilford’s next president.
We do need to complete the statement and share it with people who may be presidential candidates or may know good candidates so that we may continue to build an excellent pool of candidates for the search committee to review early next year.
KC: I was honored to help with this while (Bruce) was out of town. In a presidential search … it is often the task of the search consultant to develop a leadership statement, which is then approved by the board of trustees.
Our search consultant … spoke with a number of faculty, staff and students. I believe they gave her important insights into the Guilford community, its values, its commitment to excellence and its sense of participation and shared governance among other things … It was important to have feedback on the statement draft from the community.
We had a very short time period in which to work, since it is important to release this statement before the holidays in order to reach as many potential candidates as possible and to give them time to consider applying.
In the last two weeks the preliminary draft was made available to faculty, staff, students, the search committee and the board of trustees for their comments … which has been full of important insights, reminders and viewpoints.
I am profoundly grateful to (Buckner) and Dan Nonte (associate director of communication and marketing – editorial) in the Office of aimportant feedback; to (Buckner) and Rob Whitnell (professor of chemistry) for making the draft available through the campus intranet; to Barbara Lawrence (assistant professor of justice and policy studies and search committee member); Kami Rowan (associate professor of music and search committee member); David Dobson (professor of geology and search committee member) for bringing comments from the faculty meeting; and to all those who submitted their individual comments. They are being heard.
I hope that the resulting document is a reflection of Guilford’s community, priorities and needs.
The next step involves the search firm taking the statement to seek out the best possible candidates. The search committee will then review the applications and eventually conduct off-campus interviews. The committee emphasizes that community participation is encouraged, especially in the spring, during the candidates’ campus visits.
