Week 86: LMA School Priorities, Countway Strategic Plan and Performance Goal Setting

This message focuses on aligning our performance goals with the priorities and initiatives of the LMA schools and the Countway Library’s strategic plan.

As mentioned in my week 82 message, Dean Daley in his State of the School Address discussed his 4 institutional priorities: Collaborative Science, Inclusive Excellence, Transformative Education and Training, and Institutional Resilience. He emphasized the importance of collaborative science, advanced therapeutics, and translational research. The Better Together plan and the anti-racism task force from the Program in Medical Education (PME) are examples of the school’s commitment to inclusive excellence. The transition to remote learning is an example of excellence in education. For financial resilience, HMS balanced its budget for the first time in many years, and continues to build on its financial success.

Michelle has provided the following information regarding the Harvard School of Dental Medicine strategic initiatives, and the Chan School DIBAR initiatives:

The Harvard School of Dental Medicine (HSDM) has launched a strategic planning process that will set HSDM’s priorities for promoting innovation and excellence across four categories: Community, Clinical Care Delivery & Innovation, Education, and Research. Fiscal sustainability and diversity, inclusion, and belonging are themes running through each of these categories. The dental school is also updating its Mission, Vision, and Core Values. Below is a drafted update:

Mission: To foster a community of diverse global leaders in education, research and clinical innovation dedicated to improving human health by integrating dentistry and medicine.

Vision: To transform access to healthcare and advance science to find cures for oral diseases and conditions.

Core Values:

  • Inclusion
  • Compassion
  • Diversity
  • Innovation
  • Excellence
  • Integrity
  • Respect

At the Town Hall on October 25th, the chair of each category committee briefly presented their Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis. My highlights are that the Harvard brand, while strong and important, isn’t enough to maintain HSDM’s standing as a premier oral health care provider and research enterprise. There is competition from other dental schools for top students and faculty talent and subsequent burnout from lean resources amongst current staff and faculty. Clinical faculty are finding it difficult to balance the teaching and research loads and uncertainty around federal funding and internal support for pre-and post-grant support activities must be addressed. Improvements to dental clinic facilities and information technology infrastructure were shared as opportunities from the clinical care delivery category.

Each of these categories has a committee of staff and faculty dedicated to engaging stakeholders in discussions about what to prioritize in the final plan. There is an open call for feedback as well: email us. The dean and strategic planning team invite you to write your direct feedback regarding perspectives around our priorities and to self-identify interest in engaging more directly within the general process or specifically within one of the four broad categories of: Community, Clinical Care and Innovation, Education, and Research. They also invite through email your feedback on our current and emerging mission, vision, and core values during a comment period also closing on November 15. 

The Harvard Chan School of Public Health recently shared its first diversity strategic plan: Foundations for Sustainable Progress and Transformation: An Inclusive Excellence Strategic Plan for the Harvard Chan School for Academic Years 2021-2024. This plan was created by a Strategic Planning Working Group, a part of the Dean’s Advisory Committee for Diversity and Inclusion, comprised of Harvard Chan senior administrators, faculty, staff, researchers, and students affiliated with various offices and departments co-chaired by Lilu Barbosa, Chief Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Officer and Senait Mulu, Office of Financial Aid staff. The Inclusive Excellence Plan has three priority areas: Leadership and Institutional systems, Learning Culture at Harvard Chan School, and Diversity of Our People and Their Success. I highly encourage you to review the plan in its entirety and take note of the comprehensive discussion of action items, accountability statement, and assessment phases.

In the context of these three school’s initiatives, Countway’s administrative team has updated the 2017-2022 strategic plan with our new DIBAR goals. Because Countway administratively reports to HMS, we are mapping our goals specifically to the HMS Dean’s initiatives and strategic goals (from 2018). Please consider our plan, as well as the LMA school priorities and initiatives in your performance management meeting with your supervisor. This information is being provided as a guide for you and your manager. Consider making your goals simple (3-4), and we hope to submit performance goals into PeopleSoft prior to the holiday break.

Elaine