Ask Christy Brown her action plan for the first 90 days of her Alverno presidency, and you’ll immediately get a sense of her leadership style.
“My 90-day plan is to listen,” she says. “To me, you can’t make relationships or create a vision if you aren’t a listener. I want to know what everyone thinks is important for me to be doing in the first 12 or 18 months. People care that you’re listening to what they’re saying.”
Brown is working to arrange conversations with the many members of the Alverno community: students, faculty, staff, the Board of Trustees, the School Sisters of St. Francis and others.
Only after listening can a comprehensive vision for Alverno be crafted. To Brown, this is not work to be undertaken alone or in a vacuum.
“It has to be a shared vision created with, by, and through our stakeholders,” she says.
Once a plan, decision or vision is reached, Brown says it’s equally important, if not more so, to communicate the outcome as well as the process behind it.
“People like that I share why we didn’t do something. Otherwise, people may think you didn’t hear them or that you’re making a bad decision because they may not know another fact that you know. That helps build credibility with people,” she explains. “They will see that we listened, we heard, we evaluated, and then we decided to go with a possibly different but well-reasoned course.”
In her first 90 days, Brown wants to identify stakeholders’ concerns as well as the many things to celebrate.
“Rituals are very important,” she explains. “What is it that this community is about? How do we celebrate things? Do we need to create new celebrations?”
Brown says such an evolution is something that every longstanding institution must confront – and Alverno may be no exception. She believes there are many things to celebrate and honor as the community works to build an inclusive vision for the college’s future.
“We have to hold onto our identity and the Franciscan values that drive us while creating space for listening and moving forward,” she says.
