When moving from one athletic director position to another, how did you analyze what went well at Loyola, as well as what didn’t, to focus on how you wanted to improve your own leadership style?

As I have stated many times, I will forever be indebted to Loyola for taking a chance on a first-time athletic director. There is nothing that can replace the inevitable on-the-job training that occurs sitting in the AD chair, and Penn is no doubt the beneficiary of my experiences – both successes and failures – at Loyola. While every situation is different due to campus climates and priorities, there were a wealth of lessons learned that enabled me to refine my leadership style in my second AD post.

I am a highly reflective person who believes in life-long learning and continuous improvement. I credit much of this to having two educators as parents, and earning a couple degrees in science where you develop a mindset that experimentation adds to the knowledge base, and sometimes failures result in richer learning than successes. This has enabled me to embrace past challenges as growth opportunities, staying positively focused on lessons learned. 

I have consciously tried to modify two aspects of my leadership style in my second AD position. The first is the level of collaboration, information sharing and outreach with which I approach the job. The second is endeavoring to model that it is impossible to move a large organization forward without taking calculated risks, meaning that accepting and owning failure is part of the job. I have tried to model this for my coaches and staff, talking very openly about failures along the way, not just successes.

I had the amazing fortune of having recruited Pat Kraft, current Temple AD, to be my deputy at Loyola. Pat and I started together and did everything as a team. We were both relatively young, bright, ambitious and driven. We worked really hard at taking a program with a rich history and tradition yet little in the way of current success, and working tirelessly to move it forward. We did some great things, from hiring a lot of new coaches, to building a leadership team, repositioning conferences, opening a new facility, rebranding, and enjoying one of the most competitive years in the last twenty years. But what was reinforced in the process was that higher education is as much about the process by which you achieve your product. 

I always felt my work product would stand on its own if I was smart enough, worked hard enough, and designed a good enough solution. I gained a new appreciation for how important it is to be highly collaborative and bring other people along with your thinking. Pat did a lot of this behind the scenes for me, and when he left for Temple, no one stepped into the void. People seemed to have hit their limit of change tolerance, and I should have done a better job of continuing to socialize the reasons for continuing to move forward.

At times things move much more slowly than you’d like, but if it means you develop true partners and advocates in the process, the end result is apt to be that much more successful. So, the biggest evolution in my leadership style as a result of my Loyola experience is I now tend to be highly collaborative, highly inclusive, and view it as my job to educate and facilitate dialog at all phases of the process in working toward a desired solution.

Regarding failure, I have tried to model both at work and for my four children at home that failure is inevitable. The important things are to create safety rails so we can keep our failures small and growth-oriented; we own our mistakes and actively apply what we learned toward improvement; and we never take a chance on anything that could damage our character or credibility. If you create an environment where coaches and staff aren’t paralyzed by fear of failure, you experience more creativity and genuineness, and you have a much better chance of maximizing what you get out of your team.

So many of us have amazing professionals “right in our backyard,” but forget to build intentional relationships to help push our departments forward. How do you and your staff actively engage with academic personnel and resources on campus?

This is a great follow up to the last question as I have stated that partnerships and collaborations are extremely important to me and the division I lead. In fact, I’ll go a step further and say that campus relationships are the most important relationships external to your athletics department. 

We are launching into a new strategic plan, with three overarching priorities. One of those priorities follows the university’s strategic priority of engagement. Within the Division of Athletics and Recreation at Penn, we have defined engagement in two ways: getting as high a percentage of students, faculty and staff as possible actively benefiting from recreation and wellness programming; and building spirit and community around intercollegiate contests through special events and attendance goals. Both recreation and intercollegiate goals will not be achieved if we don’t invest in strong partnerships on campus.

My staff and I spend a lot of time meeting with other area heads, understanding their goals, and brainstorming how we might find some alignment. Whether academic-based initiatives with faculty and deans, or co-curricular programming with campus partners such as student life, business services, or human resources, strong relationships start with being a good listener and ascertaining how goals can be mutually advanced. 

You often find help in interesting places if you keep an open mind and look for it. Any time invested in campus relationships will pay dividends beyond what you could imagine. I not only routinely see my president, provost, and executive vice president at events, but I also see most of the vice presidents, many of the deans, and a good cross section of faculty at games. Some are just general sports fans, but many have become invested through strong relationships with coaches, student-athletes and athletics administrators. The outreach and collaboration are working.

Further, my coaches, staff and I do our best to reciprocate and attend as many campus events as we can to make it clear it’s a two-way street. One of my favorite moments at Penn to date was doing a 2 a.m. ride-along with Penn’s vice president and superintendent of police to personally witness what the officers have to patrol on a typical Saturday night. It gave me first-hand knowledge in addressing the student-athletes about behavioral expectations. When there are problems to address, it is reassuring knowing there is a strong relationship in place. Regardless of the size of your department’s budget and number of specialists on board, an athletics department that is heavily integrated with the university is bound to be on more solid footing. If you don’t have these relationships, start setting up some meetings.

With 33 varsity sports, is it possible to stay in consistent communication with all your head coaches? If so, how do you do it?

Absolutely. Since people are our most important resources, being highly visible and staying in regular communication is one of the most important parts of the job. Penn’s model has all 33 sports reporting through one of four sport administrators, so I don’t get heavily involved in operational issues. However, I want to and expect to be consulted on key strategic issues. As long as they are not breaking chain of command, all head coaches know that they are able to meet with me directly at any time.

Perhaps the best way I have tried to stimulate this access is through monthly head-coach-only meetings. These are beyond any standing coaches’ meetings we do where education is given or announcements are made. Since a couple of our sports have a head coach over the men’s and women’s program, we have 26 head coaches. We set up a circle of chairs, the 26 of them and me, and they drive the agenda. 

We speak very candidly about issues and staffing. It’s just a great 90 minutes of talking. This not only generates really great brainstorming, but it also has helped to foster an even stronger sense of community between head coaches. The only rule is that our conversations are to benefit them and as such must be highly candid and therefore highly confidential, and if they betray this confidence they are not invited back. We’ve been doing this for three years and no one has been uninvited. I think they really value this time, and respect the responsibility of it.

Additionally, I do my best to show up a few places each week in a very impromptu fashion. Whether it’s popping into an office suite, sending off a bus before a road trip, or just walking the halls, I improve my ability to lead by having better first-hand information, but it also enables me to be more accessible and approachable despite the huge size of the division.

The last thing I’ll add is we are very fortunate at Penn that all coaches help to promote the culture of support and open communication. It doesn’t matter what sport you coach. When you sit in the circle or walk the halls you’re a Penn coach just like the person to your right or your left.

The Ivy League has been known to be a very conservative, slow moving conference. How do you as the athletic director work to keep your department at the forefront of innovation while still adhering to the (often restrictive) ideals of the conference?

It is true the Ivy League has more restrictive rules than the rest of Division I. We limit practice and playing seasons, are more restrictive with scheduling (e.g., basketball teams play back-to-back nights to limit missed class time), and regulate admissions standards conference-wide to name a few. All these restrictions ensure the primacy of academics, and student-athletes’ abilities to get fully engaged on campus. However, this does not by any means make us “slow moving.” In fact, the second of Penn’s third strategic priorities is innovation.

Penn is aggressively building out its sports performance program at present through an extensive partnership with Penn Medicine. Not only is the Orthopedics unit of Penn Medicine run out of our athletics building, but we have researchers and physicians assisting with performance evaluation, recovery, nutrition, sleep, sport psychology, and injury prevention. Our goal over the next five years is to become the gold standard of sports performance programs. We absolutely believe that you don’t have to sacrifice nationally-competitive athletics for world class academics.

To cite another example, we have just launched a first-of-its-kind partnership in the Penn Athletics Wharton Leadership Academy.  Again, world-class faculty will be working with our student-athletes through co-curricular programming and team evaluations. We all know that sports participation builds leadership and life skills. However, the ability to add to the richness of learning by having internationally-renowned experts offer their insights and observations will not only ensure Penn’s student-athletes are reaching their full potential in college, but will put them on an even better trajectory for life after college.

I’m a brand new development officer in athletics at a highly-ranked academic institution, but would like to get back to a large, football-passionate university similar to where I was a student-athlete sometime down the line. Is raising money in the Ivy League really any different from raising money at, say Florida or Loyola?

If you work in fundraising, you know that the fundamentals are the same regardless of what colors you wear – the ability to build successful relationships, having a passion for what you do that clearly comes through, and being a good listener so you are able to match donor interests with institutional needs. The biggest differences are the scale of the needs (and therefore the asks) and what tools you have to motivate giving (seat locations, parking, elite donor clubs, etc.).

My career has taken me through three Ivies, two Power Five schools, two Catholic schools and a conference office, so I have some fairly diverse points of comparison. While I don’t have premium tickets or parking spots to use as levers, I do have an alumni base which is passionate about their university, and I find the message of giving today’s student-athletes a high-quality experience to aid in their holistic development is a message that is timeless and well received across generations.

Due to the size and scope of the operation, there is often more pressure to fund raise at Ivies than most people may imagine. My staff and I will target raising upwards of $25M - $30M in each of the next several years. We have leveraged a Board of Overseers who serve as an advisory group for the Division of Athletics and Recreation as a whole, and 18 sports boards made up of alumni and donors who help us to get alumni, parents and boosters participating in our sports programs, both financially and as volunteers (mentors, hosting events, etc.).

The best advice I received early on was to do an exceptional job at the job I had at the time. Use your levers to make a difference for the student-athletes, athletics department and university. Then, when the next right opportunity comes along, you will be ready.  I often cite the skills I had to hone in more challenging environments where I had fewer tools with which to work. If you can be successful with less – even if on a smaller relative scale – then the right leader should understand that you have developed what it takes to do more with more.