Episode 87: Steve Charles on Board Governance to Make Hard Decisions
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How can colleges and universities be intentional about their governance so they are prepared to make decisions they've never made before, with higher stakes, in less time? How can boards strike the right balance between hindsight, oversight, and foresight? How can they create meaningful metrics on outcomes and the processes to achieve them? We dig into these questions with Steve Charles, Founder of the IMMX Group and higher ed board member (Note that Steve's views are his own. He's not speaking on behalf of any institution.)
The traditional image of a university Board of Trustees is often one of a group sitting in quiet rooms, discussing legal actions and fiduciary responsibilities. However, as the landscape of higher education shifts under the weight of technological advancement and changing student expectations, the role of the board must evolve. It is no longer enough for trustees to simply "watch the bottom line." To truly enable student success, boards must transition from passive observers to active catalysts for systemic reform.
Steve Charles, a member of the Board of Trustees at Temple University and founder of immixGroup, suggests that the path forward lies in a modernized version of shared governance—one that leverages digital connectivity and real-time data to create a more student-centric institution.
Defining Student Success in a Digital Age
In the past, student success was often measured by a simple binary: did the student graduate or not? But for today’s students, the journey is rarely a straight line. Steve Charles notes that for many, college is a period of exploration—running down "dead-end streets" to discover what they are truly good at.
In this context, student success metrics must move beyond lagging indicators like graduation rates. Instead, leadership must focus on the "micro-steps" along the enrollment and academic funnel. By understanding the data behind every student interaction, universities can provide the "frequent touches" and course corrections necessary to keep students from getting locked into paths that don't make sense for them.
The Board’s Role: Prompting Reform Without Micro-Managing
A common tension in higher education leadership is the boundary between the board's oversight and the administration's operations. Charles emphasizes that boards should not undermine the president’s authority. Instead, their unique power lies in "raising the concept to conversation."
By asking the right questions about modernized processes and digital connectivity, the board can prompt an administration to implement workflows that are more systematic and less reliant on individual human effort. The goal is to move away from an "artisanal" culture where information is siloed and toward an enterprise-wide system where relevant data is always "in the palm of the student’s hand."
Modernizing Shared Governance in Higher Ed
One of the most significant challenges facing universities today is the shrinking tenure of presidents, who often find themselves "fighting fires" rather than leading strategy. A robust model of shared governance in higher ed can provide the "connective tissue" between the president, the board, and the faculty senate.
When these three pillars of leadership are aligned, the institution can make high-stakes decisions—such as mergers, consolidations, or major technological shifts—more quickly and with greater trust. Rather than a top-down mandate, a collaborative approach ensures that all stakeholders have analyzed the tradeoffs, making the final decision a natural step in a transparent process rather than a sudden "event" that triggers blowback.
Building the "Operating System" of the University
Ultimately, Charles views the modern university as a complex system that requires a new kind of "architecture." This isn't about the board doing the monitoring themselves; it's about the board ensuring that the "machine" is getting smarter and more capable every semester.
By advocating for a "student-centric" design, boards can help inoculate senior staff against the friction of culture change. When leadership is transparent about the need for experimentation and "failing fast" to innovate, they create a culture where staff and faculty feel supported rather than marginalized by new technology.
Summary
The transformation of higher education requires boards to step into a more proactive, systemic role. By focusing on granular metrics, fostering trust through shared governance, and prioritizing the student experience, boards can help their institutions navigate a competitive and rapidly changing world. As Charles suggests, it’s about "redesigning the plane while we're flying it"—a challenge that requires bold leadership and a commitment to continuous improvement.
Episode 87 Transcript
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Elliot: To get, you just have to jump it. Yeah. So there'll be a pre recorded intro, but just so you get a chance to introduce yourself. I'll ask you a question. And I'm delighted to have Steve Charles here with us and to talk about the role of the board in enabling student success. Welcome, Steve.
Steve: Thank you. Thank you, Felix. It's Elliot. I'm reading my notes.
Elliot: No, I answer to, I have three, three first names, Elliot, Douglas, and Felix, so they can all work.
Steve: I get that with the Steve Charles thing too. I get a lot of people calling me Charles.
Elliot: So yeah, so tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up as a board of trustees member.
Steve: Sure. I must confess that for the first few decades after going to Temple University, I never circled back. I just I struggled and was not all that successful until I started a company in my early forties. And by the time I was probably late forties the name of the company started showing up on lists and pretty soon an advancement person from Temple reached out. And that was the beginning of a relationship that I guess has been going on now for about 10 years. And it just started by supporting some scholarships in the school that I graduated from and then extended to, um, helping get the school named. And then ultimately joining the board of trustees at Temple University. And then taking advantage of the naming opportunity for what is now known as Charles library. So I've been on the board of trustees now for, I believe it's eight years.
Elliot: That's awesome. And in the small world department, the Charles library is something I had the pleasure of leading the library planning effort of working with no HEDA. And that's definitely a highlight of my career. So I'm extra appreciative of your support and guidance. What was the name of the company? And what did you do?
Steve: Sure, the company still exists. It's now owned by Avnet Electronics, but it's called immixGroup. The company specializes in helping Information technology companies grow their government sector business. So it's all about technology and enterprise deployments in large federal agencies. And we built the company by providing a mix of services for each technology company based on where they were in their life cycle.
Elliot: That's great. So thinking about your journey to the board as an alum and through your career, today's conversation is really about the journey that students are on and how they can be successful. And I'd love to hear your definition of student success. How do you define it?
Steve: Yeah, it really does vary depending on the individual. I worked my way through school. And for me, it was a matter of getting decent grades while also holding down practically a full time job. And then also but I love school so much. I would just take classes I was interested in. And all of a sudden I realized, wait a minute, I'm going to, I don't know, somebody pointed it out to me. It was like, if you want to actually get a degree, you're going to have to get a certain number of credits in a particular area. And so then I had to get focused in on actually completing, but I basically I guess it took me closer to five years to actually get done because I just studied whatever I enjoyed. I guess I just didn't know how the whole system worked, right? I wouldn't have known. Today, student success means that students actually understand options and are much more closely connected to folks within the university, because for me, and I think for many people, college is a time of trying things and realizing what you're not good at, and then realizing what you are good at. You have to be able to run down some dead end streets and be able to turn around and get maneuvered.
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Steve: So what I'm focused on is trying to help the university become more student centric and more digitally connected with students so that they can actually do that exploring and not get locked into a path that isn't making sense for them. Six months later, we need much more frequent ability to course correct. And technology gives us that opportunity today.
Elliot: So that's really interesting. So for you, student success is getting that careful balance of exploration and focus. And understanding your options and being able to make choices and pivot as you learn and grow. That's very different from someone who is on a very rigid track, say toward a particular profession that's all very structured and if the person is very happy doing that, that's great. But if the reason you went to college was to learn about a lot of different things and try to figure things out and figure out where your role is before committing to a track, you need a lot more frequent touches with people who actually know what they're talking about. That should all be part of your interaction with the systems and every class—that should all just be in the palm of your hand.
Elliot: And what role you, you mentioned, your aim is more student centric and more digitally connected. What role do you think boards of trustees play in enabling student success?
Steve: Let's start by being clear here, boards of trustees are really supposed to be above it all and not really get down into operations and undermine the president's authority and direction and the organization that exists. So trustees who actually want to see things change in a university, and who learn things from different folks around the enterprise, are particularly challenged to then raise the concept to conversation at a board level that would then get an administration to actually talk about that topic. It's very challenging. It's much easier to sit in quiet meetings talking about legal actions that we're not supposed to talk about, but we're supposed to know about, but actually reforming an institution, modernizing its processes when you're not supposed to like care about that or know anything about it, much less get involved. I don't know. It's a difficult thing. Part of the reason why I wanted to do this is to just be open about that and see if maybe there could be some solutions to this that would respect the authority of the administrators and the authority of faculty as well as the unique authority of trustees. And it just seems to me that maybe a modernized version of shared governance could actually play a role in this.
Elliot: So you talked about like the board should be above it all not into operation. So they're not undermining the administration. But where they can play a role is in prompting conversation about change or reform or modernized process or focus on students or digital connectivity. How does that play out in shared governance? If you're prompting conversation and you're bringing experience and expertise at the same time, you want to do it in a collaborative way.
Steve: First of all, yeah, it takes time. So you have to be patient and put a reasonable timeline to your expectations. And then it's quite iterative. The way that it seems to be unfolding at Temple is that some of us in certain committees are working with our corresponding administrators, whether it's for student success the provost, into the metrics that indicate progress toward improving ultimate outcomes. One of the things that boards typically do is just look at outcome data. That's so after the fact, and really does not include metrics on the how we created these results. We don't want to just create metrics to have metrics. We want to create metrics to incentivize behavior and help organize processes so that they are more workflow oriented than individual human centric, so that we are measuring the raw materials, the ingredients, that help create the big outcomes that we're looking for like graduation rate.
Elliot: So one thing a board can do as part of a shared governance model is identify meaningful metrics that are steps along that path to a larger outcome measure like graduation rate or career placement that lets you know you're headed in the right direction.
Steve: Correct. It's academia is familiar with the enrollment funnel and if we think about the enrollment funnel or any other process, we can predict what's going to roll out the bottom of the funnel if we have a lot of data about all the little micro steps and activities that move a prospect from one major milestone to the next. So it's more granularity in measuring activity and micro results that allow managers to tweak process or reallocate resources differently so that we're not waiting until the very end of the process to say, oops, we missed our number. We are actually understanding what it's going to take to make our number. Now, the problem is that you can't have the board asking for that. This has to be something that the administration wants to implement with its teams. And so at the board level, you're just saying, "Hey, let's just get started." Let's get started and maybe each year we can revisit this and we can get a little smarter and have a little more data and a little more automation in our workflows.
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Steve: And we are always adjusting those incremental metrics. I just want to emphasize that again, the thing I've discovered in academia is they want to set it and forget it, as opposed to continually evaluate and tweak at each cycle. And so like in a process like enrollment, we should be evaluating and tweaking every semester. If changing metrics—I know in my organization, we would change a metric the minute it wasn't working or was creating the wrong motivation. We just confront it and work it through and get everybody to agree on how we're going to actually measure whatever it is that is necessary.
Elliot: I like that idea of understanding the funnel or the student journey and that there's all sorts of little things you're watching along the way. You're not trying to make adjustments at the end. You're trying to make adjustments as you go, as you learn more. So you can predict as well as adjust. And then ultimately, we do this. And in business, we would say, "Look, we're going, if we have to change the metric each quarter, we're going to do that." We're not locked in and wait till next year to make some change. And what do you think is changing the way boards work within higher ed? Are there outside forces or pressures that boards are responding to so that they have to work differently tomorrow than they are today?
Steve: Well, I think boards need to take seriously this rather alarming statistic that the average tenure now of a president is less than five years. Why is that? Does the board maybe have a role to play here in helping make the institution be more systematic in how it does things so that the president isn't just fighting fires and burning out? I think we need to start asking ourselves those questions in a collaborative way with administrators and faculty. These are really hard things to get focused on and act on. But I do believe that if you can build the connective tissue between the president, the chairperson of the board, and the President of the faculty senate to where these big concepts are actually being discussed and the idea that we're going to be just a lot more systematic and more institution-wide or enterprise-wide in our thinking of what we do as a system. I think we can make progress, but we have a really long way to go because we still have this individual contributor professional artisanal kind of culture where people didn't go into academia to be part of some big machine.
Steve: And yet today a student expects to get everything that's relevant to what they have to do in their hand. And to do that, our information needs to flow and our text alerts about when something is due need to be totally personal, totally timely and relevant. That's all data-driven. That's systems and getting our faculty and staff to adopt these newer processes without feeling marginalized or feeling like they're being asked to become part of a big brother or part of a machine is a really important socializing process that we really need to go through. And I feel if the board doesn't start wrestling with that, who is?
Elliot: So you've got changing student expectations and technology needs, the need for information to flow and also to be monitored as part of meaningful metrics. And you've also got shrinking presidential tenure as the job gets harder and people burn out quicker and quicker. Are there other external forces—social, economic, cultural—that are changing the way boards work?
Steve: I think that I know for us, we're just beginning on this path to have more engagement with other constituencies in a respectful, professional way that respects the different authorities within each constituency. In terms of who makes recommendations, who does the analysis, who makes the decision, how do decisions get appealed—all of these process steps, we have them very defined and very baked when it comes to questions like granting tenure. It's a machine. Where we don't have a process, for good reason, are these big one-off issues or big decisions about things. And we don't seem to have a framework for that because we don't do that every day. But I would suggest that part of the design process include how and when the different constituencies are included, either as providing input or being part of analysis and reporting out or analyzing trade-offs. Ultimately, making the decision. Is it an administrative decision or is it a board decision? I just feel if we built that shared governance, this more holistic systems approach to engaging people the right way at the right time through a process, I think it would go a long way toward building understanding and appreciation for what each role plays as well as building a lot of trust along the way. And I think that the chief executive might not feel like they're on a rat wheel.
Elliot: Right, back to that burnout and presidential tenure point. I think that the idea that colleges are making big decisions that they've maybe never made before is a really interesting point. There's colleges that are thinking about closure and consolidation and mergers and acquisitions that they never think—it's unprecedented. And there are political ramifications and economic things. But the idea that colleges and universities are now making decisions that they've never made before that they don't have a template for, or a playbook for, I think that's a really interesting point. And they probably have to make them faster.
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Steve: They should be able to make the decision faster because they have engaged all the right people in the right way. And so the decision shouldn't be the big event. It should just be another step in this natural continuum of activities that very quickly leads to implementation and evaluation and maybe reconsideration. We need faster, more routine loops through these processes so that it's not a big deal if somebody brings something up. How to engage all the right people, bring all the right data, and get these people who tend to be very smart and passionate to participate in pulling the data together, but also seeing the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is what the board needs to be able to communicate. Which means the board then needs to be able to articulate all the considerations around a particular choice. To take all these different, sometimes parochial or constituency-based inputs and get everybody to see it from a big system perspective.
Steve: I just think that if the board said, "That's our job," to help make sure that this happens with the president, rather than just sitting back and leaving it all up to the president to make decisions and just watching the bottom line. If we actually took a little bit of a more proactive approach to make sure that we could articulate the system's view of things and make sure that everybody's input is getting analyzed, I just feel like a CEO might be in a position to be the coach or the referee and not always be confronted with bad options and basically feeling like it's just flipping a coin or the lesser of two evils. And then always being worried about the blowback because that always happens if you haven't involved the people up front. How are you going to implement? So I just feel like the kinds of things that we're wrestling with these days really do ask us to be a little more engaged appropriately at this system level. More than just being the fiduciary. It's just no way to run a complex system.
Elliot: Yeah, I get you said earlier, like all the little things we're watching, which I think is such an interesting way of thinking about it. Like you're looking along the funnel or along the path, not just the inputs and the outputs. I'd love to hear what are some examples of great board leadership? People who are really have really done shared governance right or evidence-based decision making? Who do you look to?
Steve: So I really don't know. I apologize. I don't really have that. Good examples. I'm trying to articulate what I'm hoping we are going to be able to do, recognizing that it's still attractive to just talk about something in executive session and make a decision or the administration rolls in with "this is what we're going to do" and the board just agrees. And we really have no idea whether there were other options or trade-offs. I just wanted to clarify one thing—at the board level, I just want to know that systems and processes and measures are continuously evolving. I don't need to be doing the monitoring. You're going to know if your machine is getting smarter and more capable because that's something that they will happily report to the board. So we just have to ask for it, make some suggestions, and see how it evolves. But as far as who's actually doing that, I just got started thinking about this and thinking to myself, we've got to crack the code on this because of the mistrust between various constituencies on so many universities. It just seems like every constituency is under fire from their counterparts. It's just no way to run a railroad and it's going only get more tense as we continue to increase competition.
Steve: Every school is going to be a little bit different in terms of how the board is structured. My stepson went to the University of Michigan. I was shocked—they had at least at the time eight board members. We have 36 and many of them are political appointees. So you have to be very careful about what you actually say in a board meeting because you never know who's going to hear something then take it wrong. Everything leaks. We need systems that are appropriate at the board level for the particular institution and the makeup of the board.
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Elliot: In our last couple minutes here, what other advice do you have for board members across higher ed? You've talked about making decisions and focusing on oversight, not operations and meaningful metrics and shared governance. What else should board members or senior administration working with boards do to better enable student success?
Steve: I think that a board needs to understand, at least personally, I would really like to know a lot more about the detail of what of all the micro activities that actually spell student success. I think if you put it in the form of a flow chart and thought about the touches to the different systems and what it looks like for the life of a student rolling through from beginning to end, a handful of people would start to say, "Hey, how can we make this more student centric?" Rather than telling the students to go to this office for that and that office for that, as opposed to places that seem to have reorganized things to where all of that disappears. And they're basically interacting with a chat bot, and the human jumps in when the AI signals that we need a human involved. They get what they need at 3 a.m. That's happening at places like Georgia State now. I really don't know how that board is organized, but I know that team has done incredible things there. Mark Bennett—he's now the president of APLU—so the guy who transformed Georgia State would have a bird's eye view on this.
Steve: He also knows that the board can't begin to understand all the system re-engineering that has to happen and all the change management stuff that has to happen to take these individual contributors and boil down their best practices and get them into a system. That's what we're trying to do at Temple, starting with enrollment. I just think that the board can say, "Hey, we know it's hard, but we're going to support our leaders and we want you to reach out and tell us how hard it is." We need to get over reporting only what people want to hear.
Elliot: It strikes me that when you're talking about educating the board on the student journey, a lot of times that detail isn't shared because there's a lack of trust. Trust might be one of these foundational things because if you don't have it, then there's going to be less risk taking and less reporting. I don't know if that's resonating with you and how you build it.
Steve: The idea that a new chief executive could come in and say, "Listen, we're going to try stuff." That's great, but there has to be structure to that. That has to be thought through and quick evaluation. It's really hard to change people who have operated completely opposite of that. So how do you bring them along? The only reason I was interested in a board seeing the complexity of that would be appreciating the leadership required to redesign the plane while we're flying it. And to me, that's where the board can get behind our people and give them confidence and be honest about the culture change so that some detractor who doesn't agree with what we're focused on doesn't call a friend on the board to make a big stink. A board needs to inoculate their senior staff against that. And to do that, they have to know something about what they're inoculating against.
Elliot: And to me, that's where design comes in, right? Because the idea of a structure in which you can experiment and thinking holistically and systematically and focusing on people—those are like the core tenets of design.
Steve: I love how you said that. The language I use is basically born of frustration and how are we going to change these things that seem dysfunctional to me, but we have no other models. When consultants come in and just talk design thinking, I'm guilty of it, but what are you talking about? I don't know specifically because I'm not supposed to know any specifics. Doesn't that just seem wrong?
Elliot: Yeah, it's a conundrum, right? Because you need to share more to gain people's trust and to be transparent so they know what's going on so they can protect senior leadership and create space to experiment. But if you haven't built that trust, then you can't. So it's a little bit of a chicken or egg thing.
Steve: And somebody has got to go first. It would be interesting to build a little model. What would the operating system model of a university really look like? If we were thinking of it as a system—processes, workflows, the doing the work creates all the data that we need to see how we're doing on every front. What would the layers be? Then we say, okay, let's just talk about enrollment. That would be a way to explode out the complexity but say we have frameworks for this. We know how to get organized rather than just throwing our hands up in the air. We need an architecture for how we approach things, a playbook on how we modernize these complex bureaucracies. Our provost, Greg Mandel, and I were talking about this yesterday. He said we have a 30-year-old framework and we keep adding new rules to it. It's like the code of federal regulations.
Elliot: Yeah, higher ed definitely grows through accretion. One before we wrap up—your thinking about the operating system got me thinking about a book called "Brave New Work." The anchoring idea is this operating system canvas. It's a way of breaking down any organization and thinking about it like an operating system. Steve, thank you so much. This was really great. I'll be in touch with the draft.
Steve: I'm really looking forward to trying to do this. I'm walking a tightrope in terms of what I can say without breaching trust. At the same time, I'm trying to lead the board. I want to lead the board. We can just start doing this.
Elliot: For sure. But the draft, I'm going to start working on the draft in the next month or so. And feel free to set another time.
Steve: Yeah, I'll do some research. I can get some insights from some other folks.
Elliot: I think Georgia State is a great example because they've been so successful with student success. Speed of decision making seems to be a very good predictor of success.
Steve: I would clarify it as speed of decision making that involves all the stakeholders leading to immediate implementation. We need to get that in there because most of these boards, they're like "we made a decision and now we don't have anything more to do." I'm like, that's irresponsible. Anyway, we'll keep working. Good stuff. All right.