Staff
Karan Chavis is JABSOM Dean Sam Shomaker’s Chief of Staff. As she begins her role this month, we wanted to get to know more about her and the vision she has for our school.
Q: Welcome to JABSOM! You may be the first Chief of Staff we've had, so many people are curious as to what this role will entail.
A: The Chief of Staff role will vary depending on how the leader that the Chief of Staff supports sees the role. In our case here at JABSOM, I worked for Sam Shomaker in a previous position when he was the dean at Texas A&M. The way that he typically used the position was to expand his bandwidth to use the Chief of Staff role as an additional communication pipeline. Obviously, he can't be accessible to everyone all the time, so the chief of staff position is another way for people to reach the dean. Additionally the Chief of Staff role will be involved with planning and management of varying School level projects.
Q: Can you share more about your history with Dean Shomaker?
A: I started in higher education in 1984. So I am coming up on 40 years of that! I have worked most of my career at Texas A&M University in human resources and finance & administration. A predecessor to Sam Shomaker as Dean of the Texas A&M University College of Medicine recruited me to be Assistant Dean for Planning and Evaluation and Chief of Staff. Subsequently, Sam Shomaker came in as dean. I very much enjoyed working with Sam at Texas A&M University. I did a lot of work on staff development and strategic planning there. One of the things that I was most proud of at Texas A&M was the creation of something that we called Resource Team. At Texas A&M, we had one main campus where our students came for basic science instruction, and then we had a partnership for clinical instruction with a health enterprise that was about an hour's drive away in Temple, Texas, called Scott & White. We had coordination between those sites, but then we started what we called regional campuses spread out across the state of Texas. What we were finding was there was a lot of silo within those regional campuses and there were disconnects in how they perceived their ability to interface with the main campus. The faster an organization grows and the bigger an organization is, the greater your opportunities are for disconnects and breakdowns in communication. So we were very intentional in creating this platform of resource team to promote improved communication and where we could bring staff together periodically to look at some intentional organization, problem identification, and fostering better connectivity by putting names to faces for relationship building. This was a platform to look at what were some of the challenges that were occurring between campuses. We had sessions where we could talk candidly about some of our challenges and then look for solutions and rely on the staff to be a part of that solution generation. Of course we had been doing this at the executive level but engaging the staff helped with our agility and common understanding of goals and priorities. We gained efficiencies from this approach, saw improved communication, and a reduction in conflict.
Q: That's interesting, as we are forming a Staff Senate at JABSOM. What do you see for that?
A: In function, in a way that was local to the College, our resource team served as a quasi Staff Senate in that it was a school wide touch point for examining and elevating matters pertaining to staff. Texas A&M has a University Staff Senate and I was a part of the leadership team that designed and launched the staff senate. A difference between Resource Team and the Staff Senate was that Resource Team did not have elected leaders from units, everyone was invited to come in and be a contributor. We presented our Texas A&M University College of Medicine Resource Team model at an AAMC conference and the dean at the University of Louisville learned about it. When my husband was recruited to Louisville, the School of Medicine dean brought me in as Chief of Staff and she asked me to develop something similar for the staff at Louisville. At the University of Louisville, we called it “SMART Staff”. The School of Medicine Advancement Retention and Training for Staff and it was a similar platform, but designed by the staff at the University of Louisville. The needs and the prioritization will change based on the organization and the dynamics within that organization. I hope that we have something similar to that here, and if not, we need to examine if we need it and how we might design it in the context of this culture, and this school, and whatever the needs are for this institution. We'll do some information gathering, and it will be very important for staff to be involved in that information gathering.
Q: Going back to working with Dean Shomaker, what was it like to get that call asking you to move from Louisville, Kentucky, to Hawaiʻi?
A: I was very eager to come, but I jokingly say, even if he said he was going to Mississippi, Alabama or Louisiana (where the climate can be sweltering) I'd have still said, “Yes”! So it's a bonus that the place that he was going to was Hawaiʻi.
Q: I think your loyalty speaks highly of Dean Shomaker. What about him or his leadership abilities made you want to travel across the Pacific Ocean to work with him again?
A: He designs a vision very well. He's very effective at knowing what he wants to achieve, and then he is committed to how we do that by designing the path to success and then he lets people do their job. He's available enough when you need to have a touch point that he's accessible. He's available and affable, but he respects professionals and lets them do their work. He's not someone that's hovering and micromanaging and that I think for me that has always been a good fit. I think most people come to work with the intention of doing a good job and adding value, and that aligns very well for me with his style. He's got a relaxed approach but with enough intensity. So you need enough tension to make it move forward, right? So he has enough expectation and enough of that tension to keep the motivation there and the movement happening with momentum. He's realistic and very supportive of creating a healthy environment and culture that will help people feel good about the effort they expend through the process. So that is what I liked about working for him.
Q: Going back to the Chief of Staff role, what are some of your priorities?
A: I'll work closely with Brayden Wacker in the coordination of strategic planning. We'll make sure that we have a strategic plan that's continuously up to date. Still, also the Chief of Staff will serve as sort of the tip of the spear to make sure that the resources are connecting to the plan, that the timing stays on track, and that the prioritization of different needs will be done in the frequency that's necessary to assure that what needs to rise to the top does.
Q: What's your vision for the strategic plan?
A: I look at strategic planning in two buckets. I look at what we have to do continuously to improve our operations, but you also have another form of strategic planning, which is your aspirational plan. Those are the things that you don't have as your daily operational needs, but they are the things that we need to think about when envisioning where we want to be in 10 years or what we want to move toward to make us great. There are the aspirational plans to include things that you currently aren't doing but will need to do to further your institution over the next five to 10 years. I will be very invested in the aspirational planning for the school and making sure that as we do the operational planning, we are intentional about creating capacity for the aspirational plans.
Q: How did Dean Shomaker utilize your role previously?
A: Under Dr. Shomaker's leadership, I wore a number of hats, one of them was to look across the school, seeing what we needed. The staff is sort of like the gas in the tank; you can have a great vehicle, it can look great, and it can have lots of bells and whistles, but if you don't have gas in the tank, it's just gonna sit there and be this beautiful thing that doesn't run. So we know that we invest in the FTEs for staff, but we have to go a step further than that and invest in the development of the staff in those FTEs. So, one of the things that I will look at is what we are doing for staff development. Do we have a structured mentoring program? Do we have opportunities for regular dips into professional development? Are we intentional about looking at the kinds of professional development that the staff at the school want to have to grow in their roles? If we don't have that available, then let's orchestrate the opportunities for that kind of development here at the school.
Q: Moving across the country is a big step, and we're happy you're here. What's one of the first things you're looking to do?
A: I have been bowled over with the sense of welcome that my husband and I received once we landed here. We are truly feeling the Aloha Spirit. I have learned to say 'mahalo' because responding to the many generous offerings we've received with that beautiful word is necessary. I'm trying to learn my Hawaiian pronunciations! I am just delighted to be here. It is a beautiful place to be, but when you come as a non-tourist, and we loved Hawaiʻi when we were tourists, but when you come as a non-tourist realizing that you're joining this community, you look at it through a different lens. I couldn't imagine it could be more beautiful than when we came as tourists, but the people here have been so warm, embracing, engaging, generous, and kind. What I'm looking forward to, I think, is understanding Hawaiʻi from the inside. So, the thing that I'm looking forward to most is enjoying the immersion in the cultures here. I certainly want to spend some time learning more about the Native Hawaiian culture, which is, I think, the root and base of all of it. You appreciate the Native Hawaiian influence, the Japanese influence, the Korean influence, the Chinese influence, the Portuguese influence, the Puerto Rican influence, and the Filipino influence. The list is so long. I just didn't appreciate how diverse Hawaiʻi is, and I am excited about sticking my toe into all of these cultural experiences that are all Hawaiian because they're a part of what is shaping our current culture of Hawaiʻi.