Sarah Parker, president of Washington State College of Ohio (WSCO), has four children in elementary and middle school. Mordecai Brownlee, president of the Community College of Aurora (Colorado), has two children in elementary school. Kim Barnett-Johnson, chancellor of Ivy Tech Community College’s Fort Wayne and Warsaw campus, has a son who turns 14 this year and two grown children.
Given their competing, ongoing and time-consuming demands, these leaders — none of whom has a stay-at-home spouse — and others like them need to strike and re-strike the right balance for themselves, their families and their employers. Tough decisions continuously present themselves about where and when to look for a job, attend after hours work-related events and go on work-related travel — as well as when and how and to delegate some of those leadership-related tasks to their direct reports.
This excerpt comes from an article in the new issue of the Community College Journal, published bi-monthly by the American Association of Community Colleges.
Parker became interim president at WSCO last July after serving as vice president of academic affairs for six years, a role she has continued to hold since being named permanent president in November; although Jona Rinard, who has been academic dean of technology and transfer, is poised to take over the vice president role. Parker’s family is blended — she has two biological children and her current husband, who works as a regional director for nearby Ohio University, also has two. Her ex-husband and his parents live nearby.
“I’m lucky that I have so much support,” she says, adding that her husband has some flexibility in his work hours. “For him, that’s really important. … Raising four children is not easy. On a podcast once, I heard the phrase ‘work-life integration.’ It made a lot more sense to me [than work-life balance] in terms of how work and life actually works. Work ebbs and flows. There are really busy times, with certain things I need to get done. Other times, things slow down a little bit and I can maybe prioritize my family a little bit more.”
For example, the college gives Fridays off during the summer, which provides to everyone more family time, Parker says. If there’s a weekend college event, Parker might bring her children along.
Work travel decisions
Work-related travel also involves triaging; Parker attended the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) and American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) annual conferences this spring, and she’d like to attend others.
“But I can’t do all of them,” she says. “I pick the ones that are most important to me right now and focus on those. Next year, maybe it will be two different conferences.”
Before leaving for the HLC conference, Parker had dinner with her two daughters and talked about the fact that they wouldn’t see one another that weekend. “That’s a little hard,” she says.
And attending AACC required her to miss her youngest child’s first soccer game, “which really stinks.” She adds that “it seems like a lot of times, it is the family thing that has to get sacrificed, unless I can find somebody to fill in [at work].”
Delegating tasks
Parker has delegated when she can, beginning when she took on the interim role, before it became clear whether she would stay on as president.
“I didn’t think I wanted to [take the permanent position] because of this very thing,” she says. “I was concerned about whether the integration would work. Another VP sits on the SE Ohio Port Authority board. A dean sits on the chamber of commerce board. I’m not sitting on every single board. But we’re such a small team. We talk all the time. It helps them to be in the community and getting involved.”
That teamwork brings about an alignment of purpose and strengthens the college’s overall leadership structure, Parker believes.
“Sure, the president could do all of those,” she says. “But it helps to give other leaders the opportunity to sit on those boards and do all of those things. That’s something I have continued to do when I took on the [president] role permanently.”
Self care
As part of prioritizing, Parker ensures that she makes decisions as her best self. That means “getting enough sleep — sleep has been my number one priority for the last 10 years, since my children have been able to sleep through the night,” she says.
“I make sure I’m eating all of my meals. I make sure I am taking care of my mental and emotional health. I see a therapist and talk through stress and difficult personalities. I am active at my church. I sit on the vestry. I don’t know how I do it, but I do it because that spiritual community is important to me,” Parker says.
