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COSIDA CONFERENCE CALL

November 10, 2016

THE MODERATOR: Good afternoon, and welcome to the fourth installment of the 2016, 2017 CoSIDA Continuing Education Series sponsored by Capital One. My name's Clark Teuscher. I'm the Sports Information Director at North Central College and the Chair of the CoSIDA Continuing Education Committee. As we celebrate CoSIDA's Inaugural Membership Recognition week, we have a pair of topics revolving around our membership as a whole, including an update on the CoSIDA's Volunteer 15 program, and a discussion on strategic communication with supervisors and upper management.

Attendees on today's webinar are welcome to submit questions in the chat window during today's presentations and we'll address as many as time allows. This webinar is being recorded and will be made available, along with a full FastScript from CoSIDA's official transcript provider ASAP Sports for on demand use exclusively at CoSIDA Connect.

Our first presenter today is Megan Hardin, the Sports Information Director at Southwestern University and representative of the CoSIDA Goodwill and Wellness Committee. She's here to share important information regarding the Volunteer 15 program. Megan?

MEGAN HARDIN: Thank you, Clark. Thanks everybody for taking time out of your very busy day. I know we're all very taxed this time of the year as both seasons are going. So thank you so much for joining us today.

I'm going to speak really briefly on the Volunteer 15 program, give you a little bit of history on it, and then some new exciting updates as we move into our third year of the program. So if you're not familiar with it, Volunteer 15 was an initiative to get CoSIDA members more involved in their communities. We know that most of you are already volunteers in some capacity, and Volunteer 15 is just a vehicle for us to be able to recognize all the ways that CoSIDA members are helping.

We all often promote the civic works that are done by our teams and we cover those extensively. But there is often no or very little promotion about what CoSIDA members are doing independently, and we're just striving to change that. So the CoSIDA Volunteer 15 program is designed to help promote the great efforts and success our members have in their communities, and we encourage you to volunteer at least 15 hours throughout the academic year, and record those hours so we can accurately show the impact we're having on our communities.

This year, we're moving away from the email submission, handwritten form, and have developed an online form, which you'll see a screen shot of it and there it is. Very straightforward, very easy to fill out. Name, school, affiliation, and then just more information about what you're doing. You can submit this after each time that you volunteer. You can wait and do it monthly if it's something that's recurring, or if you'd rather do it at the end of the year and just do it all at once, you're welcome to do that as well.

So whichever works out best for you, just go online and fill out your information. If you ever have any questions about filling it out or want to know where you're at hourly, you can certainly email me and let me know. Once you submit the form, it will have my contact information at the end of that if you ever need to get ahold of me for anything.

CoSIDA members that complete the Volunteer 15 service log, they're recognized a couple different ways. On the CoSIDA Volunteer 15 web page is a listing as well as at one of the luncheons during the CoSIDA convention.

So everything counts. Anything from taking dinners to somebody who has been sick to donating blood, to helping out at a food bank or taking time to coordinate any sort of volunteer opportunity. I just got done volunteering at the Ironman Austin 70.3. If you ever have a chance to volunteer at Ironman, those are really fun events and we got lots of free swag, so that was super fun too.

So just get on, log your hours, so you don't forget. I know a lot of times we get really, really busy and don't always have time to write our stuff down. So make sure you go online and fill your stuff out so you don't forget all the opportunities that you've had to volunteer. If you have any questions at any time, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Other than that, I will turn it back over to Clark so we can get into the real meat of this talk.

CLARK TEUSCHER: Thank you very much, Megan, you can also find out about Volunteer 15 at CoSIDA.com and CoSIDA Connect.

Our other topic today is titled: How to Talk to the Boss. Our three presenters are Charles Bloom, Executive Associate Athletic Director and Chief Communication Officer at the University of South Carolina. Amy Yakola, Executive Associate Commissioner and Chief of External Affairs at the Atlantic Coast Conference, and Paul Smith, Director of Athletic Communication at Arkansas Tech University.

Our first presenter is Charles Bloom. He'll speak on the importance of finding your voice when it comes to communication with supervisors and what supervisors are looking for in conversations with their direct reports. Charles?

CHARLES BLOOM: Thank you so much, and appreciate you, CoSIDA, having me on to talk about this subject. I have written down a handful of notes, so I'm going to read from them and hopefully it will make sense to everyone on the call.

First of all, in terms of serving your boss, I think we have to understand that it's really not about us. It's about the boss. It's about making your boss look good. It's about giving him or her the data and information that they need to succeed. Do you know who you report to? Are there others on the leadership team that you can help and serve and that they can help you? You need to identify those people.

Maybe it's on a straight line or a dotted line on the flow chart, sometimes it's your boss that you report to. It's important to know your role inside the organization, what are the tasks that are assigned to you? It's about adding value to your role. Making sure that you are an important piece to the decision-making of your organization. Know where your strengths are. Make sure that your supervisors are aware of them. Always be ready to let him or her know the information that they need for the areas that you are a part of.

Base your input on facts, including your thoughts. Does your boss know, for example, social media like you do? Always provide that input that could help them to make those decisions. Being there is always important.

The hours are long. Obviously, as SIDs we have worked long hours for many years. But know your boss's schedule, be there when your boss needs you, coordinate schedules. In today's technological world with Outlook and Google schedule, you know, it may be easy to lineup the schedules to make sure that you're there when your boss needs you.

Make yourself indispensable, be the expert in your department on what you do. What PR advice will you give and back it up with what you need to give to them that will have confidence in your decision when you have to make the decision on what to advise your boss to do.

Do what you say; say what you'll do is very important. You try to provide a sense of confidence to the boss, and the boss relies on you. Being reliable is very important.

It took me a while to learn this, but I encourage delegation, not just of tasks, but of authority. It's one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I hope by enabling my team that they take ownership and more than likely they'll get better answers than I would ever come up with. But team work and making sure that there is ownership on the members of your team is important as well.

I think truth to power is a term that I use a lot, and it's different meanings to different people. But you have to be able to go into your boss's office sometimes and inform them of items that they may not be comfortable with. I can lean on an experience back in my former boss at the SEC. We had a disagreement on how to attack a problem. He said, you know, I'm going to go to my office and write a response, and I want you to write a response, and we'll meet ten minutes later and come up with an answer between us. We disagreed on the answer. I told him, I said, you know, your words are too harsh. It will drown out what you want to say. Eventually we got to a little softer response and it worked and he appreciated me telling him that, hey, he was wrong or needed work at the time. So that helped me in future meetings to work closer in getting into types of situations.

You know, public relations is the conscience of an organization. The ability to stand up to others when the current is going the other way is really important.

One other tip that I would give, and there's always something going on in your department, in your organization, and I personally hate when I call back to the office and the staff tells me, hey, there is nothing going on, you're not missing anything.

So what I keep in my desk is a pad, and my athletic director's name is Ray Tanner. So I have a list called Tanner Topics. And there is always something on the list. So whenever he pops in or whatever he calls I say, hey, this is what we've got going on. This is what I need an answer to. This is what you can help me with and I can help you with. So I think that helps in terms of always knowing that there's something going on.

Know your boss's mindset. You can go to him or her with the truth and be negative, but at what point does it become counter productive? I mean, don't go disagree with your boss all the time, but make sure that you defend the advice that you give him, and be truthful at all times. The old adage, bring me solutions not just problems is definitely true.

I need to know the problems as a boss, but also want help in finding the solution, so that's very important.

You've got to build a relationship with your boss, with your supervisor.

It can be lonely at the top, So I need to have a confidant or friend to tell me, hey, when the going is tough.

As someone who is giving advice to the boss, be comfortable with who you are. Stand up for yourself and the issue, and hopefully you can make waves with your supervisor. And understand your values and what's important to you. Never go against your values and the values of the organization to please the boss. I think that probably is most important thing.

You know at the end of the day, the boss is a person just like you are. And you need to maintain that relationship, it's vitally important. Clark, that's it for me.

CLARK TEUSCHER: All right. Thank you very much, Charles.

Amy Yakola is here to provide some helpful strategies to prepare for a conversation with a supervisor, and what supervisors are looking for in conversations and how you might be able to expect to move on and improve if things don't go well. Amy?

AMY YAKOLA: Thanks, Clark, and certainly thanks for having me on. I'm really honored to participate. Similar to Charles, I've got a couple notes that I'm going to use as references to what I'm about to talk about.

But I would mention that I thought Charles did a great job of outlining, and there are a number of things in my notes that are essentially almost the same, and we did not compare notes beforehand.

In terms of strategies for preparing to go speak to your boss about a specific subject matter or maybe multiple subject matters, I'm going to build off of one thing Charles said about the Tanner Topics in his particular case. I think it's really important to sort of organize and prioritize and be efficient with the tasks and the subject matter and the items that you have to bring forward to your boss. I think that being prepared to do that (No Microphone) when a meeting is already set and you know you're going to have, or if it's something based on a relationship that you've built with your boss, that you're prepared to bring those things up when they're appropriate.

Let's break those down individually a little bit. In terms of prioritizing and organizing your content: Is it one topic? Is it a timely topic? Is it something that you need bring right now? Or is it a list of topics, and you have the ability to get through a number of those things?

I think it's important to make sure that you've identified certain topics that need to have an answer right now that are of immediate nature, verses ones that might take longer to discuss and to cover, and may take multiple meetings.

I think I've learned and everybody is different in terms of their relationship with their bosses. But, you know, as Charles said, mine similarly does not like to be surprised. So is it informational stuff that I can provide that is more of an FYI? Is it stuff that I need to plant a seed and say, "hey, in the future I'd really like to talk about this"? Have a plan or an activation of what my thoughts are about those, or on the case where we all can't necessarily identify these things, a crisis that comes up that you're going to need to manage and handle immediately.

So I think you have to be prepared and prioritize and organize based on the number of different buckets that the subject matter could come from.

Another part of I think being prepared and the importance of that, and again, Charles mentioned it in his remarks where offering solutions. If you're going to come down and say, hey, this event happened and people are looking for a statement on it or looking for reaction, take some time to think about what those message points or what that draft might look like so you can offer that.

There is a building point. You may not have it 100% right, and most often you're not. But just the fact that you've got something to build off of always has worked and seemed very effective from my experience.

And another thing that's really important is make sure that you have outlined when you're going to ask for something and make a request that you've got what does this mean from the investment of your time others budgets, your budget, other departments, to make sure that you're really showing the foresight and thought that I'm not just coming in on a whim and bringing something to you that doesn't follow under crisis or needs an immediate answer.

I think when you talk about expectations from your supervisors, I think that it's important to remember a couple of things. We're obviously all individuals that work as a part of an organization. There is the departments we all work in. There is the overall office or athletic department we work in, and then often the overall universities or conferences that we work in.

So I think it's important as you sort of build what you're looking to take forward, to be respectful and mindful of (No Microphone) to the larger strategies or vision within your office, within your department, within your conference, within your university and sort of its culture. So be prepared to offer suggestions and thoughts and feedback about why these all make sense within the bigger picture.

The other thing that I can't tell you how important it is, is never underestimate timing. Timing is critical, and that can play to your advantage or disadvantage. As we've talked about previously, crisis is going to occur. Those are going to happen and those are often out of a lot of our control. Hopefully we've tried to think through what various crises could be and have some thoughts about if those things were to happen.

But there's a whole 'nother set of initiatives and suggestions, and areas that you may want to take to your boss that are not timely. I think it's important to always remember to not have or put your boss in a position where they feel pressure to immediately approve something and not having need to be done in that manner. Somebody taught me a phrase a long time ago that was "none of us want to make somebody else's fire become our emergency." So whenever I think I'm going to take this forward to my boss, I want to make sure it's not a fire, and I'm not now making it his emergency.

I think the best ideas, if not presented effectively or efficiently, have the chance to be rejected more often if they're not done in a timely fashion.

The last thing I think in terms of this topic is really keeping in mind that as we probably all know and have been told many times before, I know my parents engrained it into my head, we're never going to always get what we want, and we're all going to make mistakes. So as we think through those and being human, it's important to take responsibility for the discussions and the conversations and the work that you do with your supervisor, whether it's coming back from events, whether it's coming from statements or releases that go out. What was positive? What could you do better? If it's an annual thing, making a file and notes of what you're going to do better, to have those dialogues and those conversations, because I think it shows that you're constantly thinking about ways to improve and ways to get better. It's not just coming and going with each passing day.

I think along those same lines is really encouraging feedback from your boss. I don't think there's anything wrong with asking when you've had that relationship and you have that time to talk through things to say, help me understand what ways do you think I can make this easier for you? How can I support you better? How can I be more prepared? Or am I providing things in a manner that are most effectively for you in the way you like to work?

So I think, again, it goes back to a lot of what Charles said in terms of the relationship and the conversation, and having the ability to want to accept thoughts and feedback, but also provide and be comfortable with knowing that you're an expert and this is what you have to offer in different situations and potential solutions, and how do we tweak those to get to what's going to make your boss, your organization shone in the best light possible? So I think that's it.

CLARK TEUSCHER: Amy, thank you very much. As a reminder, all of our presenters today are staying available until the end of the webinar in case there are any questions that you have for any of them. There is still plenty of time to submit those.

Paul Smith is here with guidance on how to make discussions with the supervisor easier. How best to submit yourself to get a yes to a request, as well as how to handle a know. Paul?

PAUL SMITH: Thank you, Clark, and thanks everybody for joining. First thing I'll be echoing a little bit of the sentiments that both Charles and Amy have put forth. I think transparency is a very big thing, and having that level of trust with your supervisor makes those conversations a lot easier.

Mine's more of a case study, running you through a major purchase that we're in the process of making to show you how we got from point A to point B. To give you background, when I started here at Arkansas Tech, our video efforts which would include your typical highlights, but we also have Jumbotron video boards at football and basketball. Those were under the president's office. They did not report to athletics. There was an individual who kind of oversaw that and had other duties assigned as a big portion of his responsibilities.

About two years ago that was switched and brought under me, and when I went in there to kind of take inventory of what this office had, what the department had, it became clear to me very early that a lot of this equipment which was seven, eight years old now, had not been maintained at all since it was purchased or had not been upgraded. As components began to fail in our control room at football, the company that built the system in the first place did not even exist anymore. So getting those things serviced was not an option.

After talking to a couple people, I concluded pretty quickly that the thing just needed to be stripped out and we needed to start over. So I started going out and gathering prices. Getting estimates on what it would cost to bring our control room up to standard. It looked like it was going to be about $75,000. That was kind of the ballpark we were in.

As I approached this, I just kind of went forward with it, and it did not seem to be the most priority. I don't know that I ever got a hard no, but as is the case at state schools and I'm sure it is that way at private schools, there is some point you make a request, and it ends up in developmental hell and stays there for a long time and then ends up just being a no.

So I kind of pulled myself back and went to the drawing board. I looked at it from the standpoint that, yes, this would benefit athletics, but how can I sell this to be a benefit to more than just the athletic department? I think it was very easy for me to sell the benefit athletically. This is something that's going to upgrade our presentation, improve our branding, grow our audience, so on and so forth. But in order to have that translate to something where people on the other side of campus would see a major expenditure as being a benefit, I had to figure out how to do that.

Ultimately what I decided was there was really no way I could do this with a control room that was strictly set for football. It had to be something that benefited more than that. As I thought about this, I thought we've been wanting to add web streaming to baseball, softball, so mobile production might help there, and things continue. There is a possibility, and again, I can't sit here and say anything is in the plans, but there have been questions about what if we added soccer. And I think as our university has attempted to make some serious outreach into the Latino community, that they felt that having a soccer program might bring a point of affinity in.

Being able to produce a broadcast and even a Spanish language broadcast would certainly be something that a lot of people are not doing. So as I thought about this, I, again, went back to some people I know, and I said, what can we do to put something together that would do all this and a production trailer was proposed to me. That got me thinking even more.

The way we're funded, the way we're budgeted, there is a certain amount of funds that athletics has access to. It's a lot more difficult for money to get to this side of the street than it is to get to academic units. So as I thought about this: How could we partner with our broadcast journalism department to make this a reality for all of us?

So as I went through, it became clear to me this is not something athletics would need to own or even want to own. It's something we could definitely benefit from, but definitely not something we were going to take ownership of and quarterback the thing. So as the proposal kind of grew, what I put forward was we should buy a mobile production trailer, and we're looking at 8.5 wide by 16 long, four HD cameras, a 12-video input switcher, a 16-channel audio mixer, live social networking feeds. 10 person communications replay, tape recorded, edit, CG.

Maybe one of the bigger selling points for us is our campus TV station has a direct feed to the local cable company. And if we are able to get this trailer, we'd have a direct uplink to that campus TV station which would then put our games on the local cable system, putting us into about 60,000 homes in the area which would just be tremendous for us.

It's something as I push this forward, I wanted to be very clear. This isn't something that can just be used for athletic events. When we have complications or different things inside or Coliseum or campus, we have the ability to go right to the TV station with the signal so long as we have internet access. From people who have used a similar trailer, they've told me hard-wired access is obviously the best. But a simple Verizon hotspot would meet your needs.

So as I thought more about this, I moved it forward and met with our journalism department, and we met with other people just to decide how we could possibly build a curriculum around this. I think ultimately that was kind of what got this ball moving forward. Because as they saw the possibilities, they saw the possibilities for an academic program to be built around this trailer to complement their existing broadcast journalism efforts. And that's where we started to gain some momentum.

Now we're to the point where we've gotten the trailer approved. We've gotten $160,000 for the base trailer approved. Once the bids start coming in the next week or two, we'll have to start sorting out just what's going to go in, what's going to go where. But the really exciting component of this is they are going to start building an academic component around this where students in the first two years of the program will get some kind of classroom style learning. Then the last two years they're going to move on to a practical at this come model where they'll actually work the trailer, work the events and provide the web streaming services.

The eventual goal, right now we're going to tie into our commercial radio. But going forward, we're hoping to have it fully student-run where you have student play-by-play, color, sideline analysts, and full HD production. I think that's going to put us above where a lot of other Division II schools are doing. And being able to find that academic tie-in, what that did is we found the paying point. We found the point where it got the rest of the campus interested, got some very divergent units on campus to buy in on expenditure.

Yes, very clear from the start. This is something that's going to benefit athletics. But we're able to find this is going to be even more of a benefit for other units on campus. When you look at these big ticket items you have to look beyond your office, beyond your apartment and find somewhere else on campus that's going to drive just as much, if not more, benefit from than you are and that's what we were able to do.

As we move forward, I think we did the math. If we got ten students to work in this trailer and study in this program, the trailer would be paid for. Another big reason for doing this goes back to the funding. I know athletically we were not going to get the money to keep this video equipment up. But now that it's an academic exercise, they have access to more money, and we'll be able to put students out here every year being trained on industry-standard equipment and work live events and they'll be able to go right out into the field and work. I think that's going to help grow our program.

That's all I've got.

CLARK TEUSCHER: Thank you very, very much. We continue to appreciate Capital One's sponsorship of this year's Continuing Education Series. The recording of today's webinar with the ASAP Sports FastScript will be available for on demand use exclusively in CoSIDA's online community at CoSIDA Connect later today. All continuing education and resource library materials are now available only on CoSIDA Connect.

Mobile users can download the CoSIDA Connect app on iTunes or Google play. More information on the mobile app can be found at CoSIDA Connect and CoSIDA.com. Make sure to check back in at CoSIDA.com or follow on Twitter for dates, times and topics for upcoming webinars. And regardless who it is, whether it's someone you've worked for or someone who has worked for you, do remember during this membership recognition week to thank your SID. Thank you to everyone for participating. Have a great day.

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