Some campuses have better luck than others with open houses. On the ISM e-Lists, people have shared their successes as well as their frustrations concerning their open-house events. The one thing everyone agrees on is that if you can get families to tour your campus, and you have taken the time to plan and practice, an open house can be a profound event.

As Admission Director, you’re responsible for keeping your families, alumni, and faculty engaged with your school. You do this through multiple communication channels, which most likely includes social media sites. If you take advantage of free social media platforms, your plan probably implements Facebook as a resource for connecting your school’s events and news to your audiences. Significant changes have been made to Facebook over the last year. Are you maximizing these advances?

On Tuesday, August 28 at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, pop music got another first…a song debuted from the Mars Curiosity Rover. Singer-songwriter-producer will.i.am, best known as a member of the group Black Eyed Peas, released his single "Reach For the Stars", carried live on NASA’s online live TV channel during a Jet Propulsion Lab Mars Special.

Risk management is everyone’s responsibility. However, it inevitably comes down to the School Head as to whether there is a proper risk management plan in action or not.

Here’s a question for you: Why did you become a Division Head? You probably have a mix of reasons—maybe you just enjoy leadership activities, or you wanted a new challenge, or you wanted the chance to impact a larger number of students, or you wanted a better salary, and so on and so on.

We have written on this topic before, but continue to see it as one of the biggest risks schools face today—the absence of serious crisis planning. At a time when the amount of and types of risks are increasing (e.g., cyberbullying, cyber-risk, issues of facility safety, discrimination suits, etc.), it is critical that schools take crisis planning seriously, and plan for a variety of risks.

A recent episode of The Food Network show “Restaurant Impossible,” reaffirmed an important lesson about managing: employees want their bosses to trust them, and there’s nothing like delegation to show trust. Conversely, when trust isn’t present, it can crush an employee’s spirit … and his/her performance right along with it.

ISM has long written about the key role that healthy faculty cultures play in the long-term success of a school. One aspect of faculty cultures that administrators need to examine is the level of trust between teachers and administrators, as well as trust among all teachers. One simple but powerful way of assessing the state of your culture regarding trust issues is by using a continuum chart, which we’ve drawn in informal fashion below.

Q: We have a number of faculty members who have been advocating for us to move to a merit-pay program. The Board is also encouraging us to move quickly in that direction. How long does it take to implement a merit-pay system effectively?

All too frequently, the Board urges the School Head to root out weakness and develop an “ideal” faculty, and then drifts away when the Head makes a difficult, unpopular, but necessary decision. Without Board support, the Head fights a lonely battle.