Newly installed as president of Morton College, Dr. Leslie Navarro wanted to avoid appearing to be a micromanager, so she detailed staff members on how to negotiate a new contract with the faculty union.
That was in May 2008. The negotiations dragged on through the summer and into the beginning of the fall term at the community college outside Chicago in Cicero, Ill. “I just remember thinking that this just can’t go on,” Navarro says.
The first-time president got busy. She showed up at a bargaining session and made a date for a four-hour meeting with the leader of the statewide union, “a big gun” whom the campus unit had tapped to conduct the negotiations.
“It was probably less than an hour, and we knocked it out. We knocked out a five-year contract,” Navarro recalls. “It was amazing. He heard me talk. I heard him talk, and we just went page by page.”
There was a lesson in that 2008 breakthrough that Navarro has since applied across the range of her duties: “You can never do enough communication as a president. Some of my colleagues delegate communication. I don’t.”
That’s a practice that would make sense to Dr. John Roueche, director of the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin. It also would make him proud, because Navarro is a 2005 graduate of the doctoral program.
“When we are admitting students, we select people that we believe at that moment have excellent human skills, because leadership ultimately is about the ability of the leader to find common ground with people in the organization and agree on common goals and objectives and move forward,” Roueche says.
