CASTING A VISION FOR THE FUTURE:
New Assistant Vice President Quick in Setting Tone for H&FS
(Reprinted from Fall 2007 Serving State)

By Eileen Morey, Editor, Marketing & Communications

On August 13, new Assistant Vice President for Housing & Food Services Vennie Gore began his tenure at Michigan State University. As previously announced in the June Serving State, Gore comes to us from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he served for approximately twenty years in various leadership roles, most recently as the Associate Director for Housing and Food Services. We recently sat down with our newly appointed assistant vice president to discuss his new job, his thoughts about the Division, and his hopes for the future. The following is the result of that interview.

Serving State: Why did you choose to come to Michigan State University?

Vennie Gore: MSU and the Division of H&FS are considered among the most elite programs, so when the job came up, it was something in which I was interested. It has a great appeal. Frankly, for me to leave Seattle, it needed to be something like this because the mountains and the water and everything else there — it’s all so spectacular. It’s all about this place — there are great opportunities and challenges. All of that appeals to me.

When I came and interviewed, I found the people to be just outstanding, and so the combination of where we are today and where we could possibly go in the future, and the people — this was a great opportunity, and one to which I just couldn’t say no.

SS: How would you compare the scope of your previous positions to this one?

VG: The scope of this job is bigger than others I’ve had. Something that interested me with this one is the variety of the auxiliary pieces. The operation here is much more complex; the business itself isn’t that different, but it’s three times the size. The Golf and Tennis pieces are very different for me — I haven’t done those. The Breslin Center is also new to me, so I’m looking forward to learning that. It’s about being in a place where we have a chance to do some really cool things, and also learning some things that are completely new to me. I really do enjoy the business challenges of that.

SS: What is your philosophy of customer service?

VG: First, we should be high tech, but high touch. We should really look at using technology to help us with our business practices and to make things self-service for our customer as much as possible. But we need to complement that with the people part — forming a relationship with our customers and making this feel like a very special place.

Secondly, we need to have the facilities that reflect our value promise, which we as a Division, are going to start working on. We already have a lot of that in what I’ve seen here. Take the residence halls for example. They’ve been well maintained and they’re clean; but they are, for lack of a better word, “Spartan.”

Thirdly is the idea that we have to continually innovate and evaluate. Our customer is becoming more sophisticated, and they want more from us. One could take the MP-3 player as an example. When it was first designed, it was a small piece that held a hundred songs. Apple got into it and made something that was really high design, very easy to use. It may not be the best MP-3 player in the marketplace, and it isn’t the cheapest, but they have over 80% of the market. What Apple does is come out with something new about every eighteen months or so, because we, the consumers, get bored. What we need to do is continue to innovate and make sure that we’re keeping up. We can’t just do something and say we’re done. It’s just part of our society today.

SS: What is your philosophy of leadership?

VG: My undergrad degree was in Physical Education with a minor in Economics, and I was only about twelve hours short of being pre-med. I was in the College of Health, so there was a lot of kinesiology and sports physiology, etc. I had the pleasure of taking a lot of coaching philosophy classes, so I come to leadership from that perspective. My job is to provide the game plan and to coach the coaches. It’s to develop a good cohesive leadership team and have organizational clarity. The last part of that is accomplished by good hiring, mentoring, and performance management, which results in having good people.

What I hope to do is to develop a culture where our staff members feel comfortable offering ideas. I’m the first one to admit I don’t have all the right ideas, but we have to develop a culture where it’s OK to participate; it’s OK to innovate and to give your best. What I really want people to do when they come to work is to feel like they can give their best, and when they walk out, they know they’ve made a difference. So if I can get our leadership group to model those behaviors, then other folks will model those behaviors — it’s a trickle-down effect.

My experience has been if the leadership group is tight and cohesive, we believe in what we’re doing, and we begin to lead that way, then I think everyone else begins to see that, and we’ll see some synergistic possibilities. The other part of leadership is pushing people intellectually to see more than there is — becoming a learning organization. The more we learn as an organization, the better we become. That feeds back through the customer experience, value, innovation, etc. If we’re continually learning new things, then we get better at what we’re doing, and ultimately what that means is that we do what’s best for the customer. Our customers are very broad based — they’re the students who live with us, the parents, the faculty/staff, the community. That’s what we’re really about. As we become customer focused, we provide that experience, and we’ll become a world-class organization.

SS: What’s your plan for the Division?

VG: One of the things that we’re going to do — this is an internal piece — is to take a look at our internal departmental divisional brand. We’ll begin the conversation about our value promise. When our customer buys our product or participates in our services, we, as an organization, are going to give them this experience — this is our value promise.

The second part is our division-wide customer service philosophy. It doesn’t matter where you work in our Division; we will have a common customer service philosophy. That’s our stock in trade — that’s who we are. We will develop that beginning this fall.

The leadership group will get together and we’ll start talking about our value promise. We’ll then roll that out to the employee groups and ask what they think. They’ll give some feedback, we’ll come back together, work on it some more and take it back to them again and ask what they think. Same thing with our customer philosophy — it’ll be a process in which everyone, from all levels, will be given an opportunity for feedback. We all have to buy into what we’re doing, so we need to get that feedback.

The next part of the picture is the comprehensive strategic plan. That’s for us — we’ll be asking the questions: Who do we want to be? What do we want to be? How are we best going to serve? How do we align with the institution? What we don’t want to do is to create a strategic plan that’s not in line with the values of the institution because we won’t be successful if we do that.

SS: Can you elaborate on the Strategic Plan?

VG: There will be three phases. First is the visioning phase, where we’ll discuss who we are, what we’re going to be, and how we’ll align our goals and values with those of the University. We’ll engage a consultant group to help us, and we’ll have an Advisory Committee, which will be a broad-based group of senior level campus administrators from student affairs, campus planning, and the academic side, which will include undergrad education. When we lay this out for the next 15-20 years, it’s important that we engage the University because that’s who we serve.

Second will be the data collection and analysis phase. We’ll have focus groups for our employees, customers and stakeholders, along with market research and surveys, so we can look at what the private sector is building out there and see what the market’s saying. We need to ask lots of questions.

Once we gather and analyze all that data, we move on to the integration phase, where we can pull it all together. As we then look toward the future, we have a pretty good roadmap, and we’ll feel like we can make some good decisions.

SS: How is this different from the existing Strategic Plan?

VG: The 2002 Strategic Plan was a facilities plan — it talked about buildings, facilities, etc. That met a part of the total strategic plan, but it doesn’t necessarily say to us, “Maybe we shouldn’t be in this, or maybe this is an opportunity we need to be doing, and this is where we need to put our investment.”

SS: What do you expect as the outcome of this process?

VG: This full process will take a year — we hope to have the report by September 1, 2008. It’s a pretty aggressive plan. But by the end of the year, I hope to have a strategic plan put in place that we all feel good about, including the staff of H&FS, the Advisory Committee that’s been helping us, and my boss, Dr. Poston. That plan will lay out our priorities for the next twenty years, and we’ll know what to do from that point. Since it’s nearly impossible to know what’s appropriate twenty years out, we’ll need to revisit it every five years. What I believe is, when it’s all said and done, we’ll have the commitments that we need, of time, money, and resources, and we’ll be able to move forward as quickly as possible, and make things happen. I think everybody will be happy with the product because it won’t be me sitting in a room saying ‘this is what we need to do.’ This will be a collective effort.

SS: What are the benefits of hiring consultants for this?

VG: We will send out a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a consultant team. We’re hoping they will bring a myriad of skills to us — we’re looking for a general architect / campus planner kind of person, a food consultant, someone in the hospitality industry, someone who has a good understanding of market research, and someone who has a good understanding of finance. We will give them all the documentation that they need to crunch numbers. We will have ongoing meetings with them. [CMID Manager] Sharri Margraves and I are co-leading this effort. They’ll be working with us, but they’ll be the ones who go out and do the market research and find out what our customers are saying through focus groups. That’s important because staff and students need to feel comfortable that it’s not us doing it so they’ll feel safe saying whatever they want to say. People who do market research know how to ask the right questions to get to the salient issues, and that’s really what we want to do.

We’re not only looking at today’s customers; we want to go into high schools and start talking about these issues with high school students. I look at my 13-year-old daughter and her friends who will be here in five years, and I already know that our services won’t meet her needs. We don’t want to develop a plan based solely on information obtained from today’s students because the students of the future have a different experience. That will be part of that whole feedback and data collection that we’ll be doing.

SS: How will the plan be rolled out at the end of the year?

VG: [Marketing Communications Director] Tony Frewen has put together a communication plan that will include a number of different things, including a blog, town hall meetings, and various different communications including the web. As we make progress, we’ll be sharing information through these channels. As we go through this process, our direction will become very clear to everyone.

I anticipate that the consulting group will develop a white paper at the end of the visioning session, which will capture the essence of what we’re about, what we’re trying to do, how this all lays out. So I’m excited about this.

When we finish with our value promise and strategic plan, we will be asking ourselves if a particular service or program or plan is in line with our values. If not, it’s not value added, and we won’t do it. You can’t be all things to all people — you end up being nothing to nobody, and you become mediocre. So if we’re really clear about who we are, what we do, and what services we provide, then we can do that very well and be world class. I haven’t met a person yet in this Division who wants to be mediocre. It’s not part of the culture here — everyone wants to be their best. I think we’ll end up with a very clear idea of who we are and the services we’ll provide.

SS: Any closing thoughts?

VG: This isn’t about money. My personal belief is that when you base everything on economics, you become a commodity. When you become a commodity, the only way you can do anything is based on cost, and when that happens, you’re always cutting costs, and you’re no longer providing the service. So this is about value. It’s about our customers and what they want and expect. Good customer service is about attitude — going the extra mile. It’s about giving your customer the best possible experience, and that’s what this Division is about. So, as a division, and for myself as a leader, we need to make sure that our people not only have the products, services and facilities that our customers want, but also the training and support that enhances their ability to deliver those exceptional customer experiences.

Division of Housing and Food Services | Michigan State University © 2005 - All Rights Reserved
Please Read Our Disclaimer.