The VetMed 3A building, left, and the Multi-Purpose Teaching Facility at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine at The University of California, Davis.
Review and optimize the School's organizational structure
The School’s large and complex organizational structure has developed over time to allow the establishment and growth of its diverse programs. Evaluation of the optimal structure and alignment of programs, departments, units and administrative structures in support of the School’s strategic plan and core missions will be advantageous to the future success of the School. This includes addressing the need for leadership development and mentoring to support the next generation of faculty and staff leaders.
Current Actions
In support of our goal to promote faculty and staff leadership (5.4.) an initial leadership retreat was held for the Academic Council and Dean’s Cabinet members last week. This ½-day session is the first in a series of workshops which will be offered to other up and coming faculty and staff leaders over the course of the year. This session focused on understanding different leadership styles and how successful leaders employ these different styles to different situations for best practices. The session included a number of scenarios for lively discussion.
- Create an optimal organizational structure that supports the strategic plan.
- Clearly define the units within the organization by creating standard definitions for departments, programs, centers, and institutes.
- Implement regular evaluations of units within the School to improve efficiency and assess continued relevance to the mission.
- Develop a leadership succession plan.
- Mentor the next generation of staff and faculty leaders.
The organizational structure of the SVM has the capacity to either hinder or facilitate implementation of the Strategic Plan. Hence there are key aspects that must be addressed quickly, and others than can be developed over a longer time-frame.
Our first steps are designed to identify and prioritize those aspects of the organizational structure likely to impact our ability to implement important short-term programmatic goals (for example; development and implementation of the new curriculum).
We plan to canvas opinions from the leaders of the various functional units within the school (including but not limited to; the Departments, Centers, VMTH, Curriculum Committee), and then discuss those issues with the Academic Council.
Independently, but in parallel, we seek to:
- clarify the exact nature and definitions of the numerous organizational structures within the school (Departments, Centers, Institutes) in an attempt to clarify the areas of overlap, synergy, redundancy and conflict.
- identify existing programs and Departmental plans for mentoring staff and Faculty with the same goal as outlined above.
