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Running head: LEADERSHIP OBSERVATION PAPER Leadership Observation Paper: Dr. Beth Buehlmann Ryan Bradshaw George Mason University HE 710 Dr. Lester LEADERSHIP OBSERVATION PAPER ra Leadership Observation Paper — Dr. Beth B. Buehlmann, > > g Not all higher education leaders work on campuses. The higher education leader I chose G to shadow for this assignment does not work for any one university, but she has an important role in helping shape the national conversation surrounding graduate education. This unique role was that reason that I chose to shadow Dr, Beth Buehlmann, the current Vice President of Public Policy and Government Affairs position at the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS). Beth grew up on the south side of Chicago and earned her Bachelor's degree in Science at the age of 19 at Chicago State University, completing the degree in ins woanda aor Within days of graduating, she began teaching high school math, In 1969, after following her husband to his new position as a faculty member at Illinois State University, Beth enrolled in a Master’s of Science program at the institution, focusing on educational leadership. Her final course in the Master’s program was Educational Administration, during which she was asked by the professor if she was interested in studying for her PhD in the subject and working as a graduate assistant. She admits that she had never before contemplated completing a doctorate, even though her husband was currently working on his PhD degree at the time. She quickly XN decided to pursue the degree and completed it two and a half years later. we? Beth's career took many different tums from that point. Following her graduation, she worked as an Instructor at Illinois State, while also working as an assistant for the institution's president. An opportunity presented itself shortly after her graduation to move to Nebraska to ‘work as the Executive Assistant for the head of the state’s Department of Education. Five years later, a fellowship opportunity in Washington, DC at the National Institute of Education, at the time the federal government's educational research entity, brought her to the nation’s capital for good. LEADERSHIP OBSERVATION PAPER After the fellowship, her former supervisor in Nebraska strongly encouraged her to explore opportunities in Washington, and her connections in the city led her to a position as a Legislative Assistant and then Education Director for the House Committee on Education and Labor, under the leadership of Representative James Jeffords of Vermont. After Jeffords left the House and moved to the Senate, another connection led her to apply for a position as the California State University’s (CSU) Director of Federal Relations in 1991. She considers one of her greatest achievements the work she did on behalf of CSU to negotiate with the federal government to have the land of Fort Ord, a ck © 5 CSU's 21* institution, CSU Monterey Bay. Ned RDS OS Gtrre VY ing Army base, designated for the creation of phon After seven years with CSU, Beth moved to the non-profit world as Executive Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Center for Workforce Preparation, an association whose goal was to help their member chambers of commerce strategically ensure that they had the skilled workforce they needed in order to compete in the 21* century. She says she enjoyed the work, but a meeting with staff members of the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), led to an interview in 2005 with the new committee chairman, Senator Michael Enzi of Wyoming. After being offered the job, Beth felt she had no choice but to accept, taking a $20,000 pay cut for the opportunity to work for the Senate as the committee's Education Policy Director. In this position, she had a fundamental role in crafting the 2008 re-authorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965. She remained on the north side of the Hill for eight years, until Senator Lamar Alexander, a former Secretary of Education, took over the committee and wanted to bring in his own directors. Yet another connection brought Beth to quickly interview for CGS, the position she currently holds. LEADERSHIP OBSERVATION PAPER As part of my assignment, I shadowed Beth on two separate occasions as she performed her duties for CGS. CGS is a member association of deans of graduate schools from over 480 institutions in the United States, plus 20 Canadian institutions and another 20 schools world- wide, Collectively the U.S. member institutions award 86% of PhD degrees and the majority of master’s degrees. For full disclosure, I currently work as the Program Manager for Best Practices, Strategic Initiatives, and Research at CGS, however, I do not report to Beth and do not regularly work directly with her. Observation 1 — Presentation to the Government Relations Representatives The first observation of Beth was a speech at a daylong seminar for government relations staff from member institutions of the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC). Beth was the final speaker to a room of approximately 100 government relations leaders from across the country. I rode with Beth to the meeting and long the short drive she was inquisitive about ‘my assignment and what I had done in the class so far. [ mentioned that I had recently completed the StrengthsQuest evaluation for our class and shared my results. Beth shared that she had only ever done the Myers Briggs Personality Test, but that her results always showed that she was an , ENTJ. A quick Google search told us that ENTJs were known for being self-driven, motivating, energetic, assertive, confident, and competitive and that they see the big-picture and will build long-term strategies. They are also sought out as leaders because they have an innate ability to direct groups of people. I was excited to see that Beth’s personality traits matched both with my own previous taking of the Myers Briggs assessment and my StrengthsQuest results. This information helped set the stage for me to understand how Beth’s personality had led her to her to the leadership roles she has been in and what to expect in my upcoming observations, but also to see how my own traits could be used in leadership roles in the future. LEADERSHIP OBSERVATION PAPER When we arrived at AAMC, Beth was greeted in the parking lot by the event organizer. On our trip up to AAMC’s conference center, Beth discussed the presentation and the topics they wanted her to touch on. With that, Beth was introduced to the room and took the stage, knowing that she was the only thing standing in the way of the attendees’ happy hour plans. Beth spoke without notes, but the speech appeared thought out with specific topics to touch on. She started by introducing CGS and her role with the Council before diving into the meat of her talk. A hot button topic of the day for the attendees was the proposed re- authorization of the Higher Educ yn Act. Beth explained her experience with the 2008 re- authorization and then began tying the i iportance of the advocacy work (not lobbying work, she later clarified for me) of the individual campus’s government relations representatives to the process. She instructs the attendees to not focus on the short-term goals, but to look 10 years in the future and to identify their goals, including how students will learn at that time and what new technologies may arise. I see this type of futuristic thinking tying into her ENTJ personality. One poignant directive to the attendees is that they should continue to harvest and publish Ne. Sse eee LE the stories of their students. She points out that public perception of higher education, puarerenarene particularly of graduate and professional education, is at a historic low, but uses an example from the December 2017 federal tax reform bill to exemplify how institutions can change the story During the tax reform process, original versions of the bill called for graduate students to be taxed on both the stipends and the tuition waivers they receive, potentially making graduate education inexplicably unaffordable for most students. She believes that the graduate education world changed the story by sharing anecdotes of current graduate students, particularly the AN financial struggles they experience while completing their degrees and the added benefit they bring to research and undergraduate education. She encourages the attendees to use these types LEADERSHIP OBSERVATION PAPER of stories as they advocate for graduate and professional education in the future, using them to make the point that most of AAMC’s member's students are not getting their medical degree to make millions, but to help people in need. Beth's 20-minute speech wraps up by making the point that higher education reauthorization will only take place with bi-partisan support — it’s the only way the bills have passed in the past, so advocacy work must be done with all members of congress and the senate. ‘Throughout the speech, attendees are attentive and engaged, nodding in agreement and taking notes, even after a long day. Only one question comes from an attendee, which Beth answers after taking a thoughtful pause. In my follow up interview with Beth, she asks me if her speech made sense and if it was relevant. I said yes and that I liked the way she included relevant facts and statistics from some of CGS’s previously published reports. She reveals that she was glad because she had no plan in place when starting her speech (hence the lack of notes) and that she had attempted to address the subjects that the AAMC staff had asked her to touch on moments before she was on stage. Her level of expertise onthe subject and her ability to command the room and to inspire others to take action was evident to me throughout the speech, but the revelation that she had come up x* with it on the spot further galvanized my view of Beth being a leader in this field. I recognized ao my own preference for having a well-stocked memory bank of facts and figures to reference when public speaking and enjoyed seeing it put to work by another leader. Observation 2 — Meetings with Senate Staffers ‘The second time I observed Beth was for two visits with staff members from the offices of Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas and Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin of LEADERSHIP OBSERVATION PAPER Wisconsin, both members of the HELP committee. For both meetings, we were also joined by Kenneth Polishchuk, Beth's Program Manager at CGS. At the meeting with Senator Roberts's staff member, we arrived at the office in the Hart Senate Office Building and were greeted by a staff member who escorted us to an interior conference room. Beth began by learning a bit more about the staffer and how long they had worked for the senator and on the education portfolio. This staff member was quite new to the education portfolio. Beth then let Kenneth explain a bit more about who CGS is, what we do, and. what types of resources we have available. He also provided a list of current CGS member institutions from the state and contact information for the dean of that institution’s graduate school, Beth then spent a few minutes talking about CGS’s opinion on what is needed in the Higher Education Act Re-authorization, particularly that loan counseling is needed for graduate students when they start and that graduate students need to be informed of what loans they are eligible for and how much of the loans they need to pay for their education, which they do not currently receive. She also mentions that graduate students need more access to Pell grant and that access to these grants for graduate education could be use as on incentive for timely degree completion at the undergraduate and masters levels. She concludes by offering CGS, her, Kenneth, and me as resources for information the senator’s office needs in the future. ‘Once the formal portion of the presentation is done, the meeting turned into a bit ofa gossiping session, with Beth asking the staffer about where the bill is currently at (Senator Alexander, the chair, wants to get a comprehensive bill done this year) and then also offering a couple of tidbits of information she had gleaned from previous meetings with other staffers. The LEADERSHIP OBSERVATION PAPER meeting concludes with Beth again offering our support in the future, if needed. The entire meeting took about 15 minutes. We then headed to Senator Baldwin’s office. I was unsure of what to expect, since this meeting was with a Democrat versus a Republican, Almost to a tee, the meeting was identical in format, except that the staff member was a bit more versed about education, having worked on the portfolio longer. Similar to my observations at Beth's AAMC speech, in both meetings she spoke without notes but sounded like an expert on the subject, spouting off numbers and prior research results on the subject. She also continued to show her ENTJ side, continually pointing to the future by stating that the HELP committee must think about what the workforce will look like in 10 years while working on this bill, [later learned that some of this came from regret about her work on the 2008 re-authorization, as she felt that they had underestimated the ways that student borrowers would see Public Service Loan Forgiveness as a way to avoid repaying loans rather e than their intended goal of incentivizing public service. KS = Follow-up debrief ae Our follow up debrief of the observations took place a few weeks after the observations ¥ due to scheduling challenges. I took Beth for lunch and we discussed the meetings I observed her in, and also her back story and her role as a leader. The biggest surprise for me was that Beth did not consider herself a leader. I asked her eases Sense) how that was possible, given that I had observed her motivating peers and advocating in support of higher education, She responded that she saw these situations as simply being examples of her completing the required tasks of her role. | asked if she had considered herself a leader when she LEADERSHIP OBSERVATION PAPER was the Director of Education Policy for the HELP committee, working on the re-authorization of the Higher Edueation Act, or when she was the working for the CSU system, leading the way to the establishment of CSU Monterrey Bay. She again said no, that she was primarily just doing her job, She felt that a good example of a leader, to her, was Suzanne Ortega, the president of CGS. She felt that she was innovative and leading the way for the future of graduate education, while leading a growing organization. I let her know that I disagreed with her assessment of herself as a leader and she asked me why I thought she was a leader in the field. I explained that I saw her as someone who was thinking about the future of graduate education, who was rallying peers to achieve a common goal. She contemplated it and then shared a story of having mentored a young female staff member when she was on the HELP committee. She said that the staff member had developed verbiage for a bill and presented it to the opposition party senators at a meeting, something that ‘was unusual. ‘The opposition senators and their staffers started criticizing the language and the staffer had gotten defensive. Beth said she instructed the opposition senators and their staffers to come up with something better if they thought they could and to get back to them. In the following days, the young staffer started getting anxious and proposing her own re-writes to the verbiage, saying that they had to take it to the opposition leaders who were upset. Beth coached her to not negotiate against herself and to wait for them to come back to them, and if they did not, to just not bring it up again. In the end, no one ever spoke about the subject again and the original verbiage passed. Beth saw this as an example of her acting as a transformational leader for her staff member and helping her grow and succeed. I agreed with her, based on my research ail cet ah eee LEADERSHIP OBSERVATION PAPER, on transformational leadership for my other assignment for this class. I thoughts that this was a strong example of transformational leadership being used effectively in the workplace. Other subjects we touched on were the role that gender played in her career as a leader. She identified Iinois State as the only time where she felt it had affected her. When she was an instructor and working in the President’s Office, a new male faculty member who was just as. qualified as Beth, was hired as a full tenure track professor in the department she taught in. Beth thought nothing of it, but the Equity Officer for the institution filed a grievance on her behalf. ‘The chair of the department brought Beth to his office and informed her that he was disappointed inher for being a part of the grievance. It was after this instance that the president of the institution met with Beth about this and encouraged her to apply for the job in Nebraska. She said it was not because the president was upset, but because she felt he was looking out for her and thought that this situation would prevent her from growing at the institution long term, Beth also stressed the importance of networking in her career success. Her willingness to have informational interviews and to meet people led to every job opportunity she has had imme een ene throughout her career. AA final question | asked Beth was “what advice would you give to an aspiring leader in higher education?” She had to think about it for a minute, but said that it was important for the leader to align their goals with their association and their associates. If they were wor towards a different goal, they were not going to succeed. 1 thoroughly enjoyed observing and debriefing with Beth. From my previous experiences taking the Myers-Briggs test, I know that I am also an ENT. This opportunity allowed me to see how a visionary leader in the field of higher education has used her personality strengths in many 10 LEADERSHIP OBSERVATION PAPER diverse ways for the betterment of higher education in the country throughout a successful career. I hope to continue to use Beth as a mentor in the future. "

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