Ethics Challenge

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- Once the decision has been made on what departments to cut and at what level, a plan needs devised for handling future reductions. The best approach would be to enlist the help of the top department managers who have handled and managed their budgets consistently over the years. Discuss what they have done to be successful and then devise a training plan to help the managers in other departments learn what they can do to also be successful. Initially, this should help the departments that have had a problem with budgeting to identify their weaknesses, correct them and come up with ways to cut costs throughout the year. All departments may need to start to look at ways to do more-with-less. This may mean no equipment or facility upgrades for a while, sharing facilities and classrooms with other departments, combining support staff, and cutting back on special projects and functions that have required extra funding in the past to perform. The last thing to delve into will be cutting benefits for salaried personnel and hours for hourly personnel and, unfortunately, lying off personnel as a last resort. Too many organizations go to the benefits and personnel solution before trying the others. This should be avoided if at all possible.

- The decision to cut should involve both levels. The first place to start is with the bottom-levels, too include the managers of each department responsible for the operation of that department and its budget. One or more facilitators who intimately understand the budgeting and operations process of a successful department should be made available to help with this task. Get input from each department on what they believe they can cut and how they will work to streamline and/or reduce costs in the following year. If any of the department managers are having a problem doing this or understanding the entire budget process then utilize a facilitator to provide a crash course on successful budgeting and what has worked for them. For the rare instances where a budgeting anomaly may exist, this may need to be handled on a case by case basis.

Once all the inputs have been gathered and compiled then it is time to present to top administrators what each department came up with. If everything works out and a net savings has been realized that meets or exceeds the mandatory cut numbers then top administrators should have little to do but concur with the changes. (In a real world this is unlikely to occur, since top administrators have their favorites and will do what they can to protect them, but for the sake of this leading question it is assumed they will concur). If the numbers were not met, then it will be up to top administrators to decide where else funding needs to be pulled from.

- Protect-your-turf mentality, resistance to change, and consensus building each comes with their own issues. In general, people don’t like to give up any power they have obtained, are happy with the status-quo, and will go along with others and decisions of the group as long as it benefits them. The key is to get all parties to start thinking outside of the box about different ways they can manage their resources more efficiently and effectively. To get them pushed in this direction will take determination and even a hard line approach where they are made to understand in no uncertain terms that the cuts are coming, everyone will participate, and if they think they can do this, it will be done for them. This is where the person leading the charge in getting each department to come up with good solid solutions needs to be able to compartmentalize and separate his or her personal feelings, good or bad, for a department head or a department in particular. If favoritism, or vengeance, appears to be happening, any headway in getting all the department heads to cooperate may be in jeopardy. If everything goes well in getting all department heads to cooperate and there appears to be a good consensus throughout all involved, it means that some of the people that protect their turf and people that don’t like change have actually started to look at different options and ways of managing their resources and budgets. If you do have any department managers that just will not change the way they have done business since they have been that way for years, they may need to be replaced by someone who is an innovative thinker and has indicated they can handle budgets. This is all in a world where change can be affected. Realizing many of the department heads are tenured professors, it may come down to letting top administrators deal with how they want to handle the cuts these particular departments will be required to make.