The Job Interview of a Manager Report

In any company, institution, or organization, managers are integral to developing and executing strategies to move the entire forward. Throughout this class, I have learned that there are many different types of managers: front-line, mid-level, and top managers, each requiring different skills and strategies to complete their work. For this assignment, I wanted to interview a high-level manager for two reasons: one, I wanted to see how a high-ranking manager works, and two, I would like to hold a managerial position in my career at some point, so I wished to learn from an experienced mentor. I had the remarkable opportunity to interview Dr. Frederick Corey, the current Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education at Arizona State University. Dr. Corey has held multiple roles at ASU since 1986 and has held this specific job title since 2013.

In this role, Dr. Corey is most certainly a high-level manager. Five people directly report to him, and no less that 200 people report to him indirectly. In this rank, he mostly acts as an interpersonal and informational leader. As an interpersonal leader, Dr. Corey leads all the colleges at ASU and coordinates all new academic programs. He works closely with colleges as they develop their majors, minors, and certificate tracks. Interpersonal skills are needed to work with all the colleges, as they range from engineering to business to the arts; however, Dr. Corey effectively works with the colleges’ representatives and guides them through the approval process for new courses. He also holds an important informational role within the university. At ASU, all academic advising is decentralized; that is, all the advisors report within their own colleges, but not to the university. Instead, the advising system is centralized. Due to this unique setup, Dr. Corey works with Provost Searle and the Provost’s office in maintaining the advising system, major maps, degree search, degree audits, and advisor portals as a whole, so the advisors of each college can work and reference a common database with minimal issues. Dr. Corey said that his current role does not hold much of a decisional element in it.

To complete his tasks as Vice Provost, Dr. Corey said there were four main skills he uses (which relate to Katz’s technical, human, and conceptual skills of an administrator): accuracy, diplomacy, clarity, and austerity, all with a sense of humor. Accuracy and clarity are the “technical” skills needed to manage such a large organization, austerity is the “human” skill, and clarity of the organizational goals would fall under the “conceptual” skill of Katz. However, Dr. Corey emphasized the importance of a little humor in management to maintain strong and effective interpersonal relations.

ASU as a university has multiple challenges and goals, but the one that Dr. Corey is most engaged in is the challenge to increase ASU’s overall first-year retention rate to 90% and the six-year graduation rate to 80%. There are multiple sub-challenges in this goal, including finding the reason why students leave ASU, and finding new and innovative ways as to how the university can improve its academic success rates. To do so, Dr. Corey is working on improving undergraduate academic performance by improving the quality of teaching, student engagement, and building a culture of care. Since this goal is so far-reaching, over not only the administration but the students and staff of ASU as well, Dr. Corey expects this challenge to continue over the next five years as well.

On a related note, this current problem of currently low of retention rates is also the most critical issue of his job. He is working in his managerial role to convert ASU to a university that is student-centric, with genuine care for the academic and professional well-being of the students, especially undergraduates. He is working with the colleges to ensure that the critical training of employees to advance this goal is being arranged and implemented. Again, due to the sheer size of ASU and the multiple parts needed to fix this issue, Dr. Corey expects this to be a five-year goal.

Given his rank at the university and decades of experience in different fields, Dr. Corey’s leadership style is adaptive and fluid as needed, depending on the exact issue he is working on. He strives to be transformational: not only working on the goals stated above, but interpersonally influencing all employees working under/with him to understand the value of progress and change. He strives to implement strategies that create transformation within. However, when needed, he says it is still necessary to simply tell people what needs to be done and when it needs to be implemented.

My last question was somewhat unique, as I asked him to share how his leadership roles had changed, given his long history and experience with university administration under different presidents. Dr. Corey shared that his personal role had changed quite a bit, and it depended heavily on the management styles of the university provost. He first joined ASU as an assistant professor in 1986 and held this role for over a decade. His first administrative role was in 2000, when he was appointed Dean of the College of Public Programs. While holding this position, in 2004, he became the founding director of the Schools of Letters and Sciences on the Downtown Phoenix campus and Associate Dean of University College. In 2008, he became the Dean of University College and director of Letters and Sciences at both the Downtown and the Polytechnic campus. Finally, in 2009, Provost Capaldi appointed him Vice Provost in addition to Director and Dean because she believed in the efficiencies of people holding multiple roles. In 2011, Provost Capaldi appointed Dr. Corey as interim dean of the now-Watts College as well. Dr. Corey said that Provost Capaldi’s management style was one of efficiency; she commonly appointed managers in roles that spread horizontally and vertically so that one individual had the power to implement needed change without having to go through a lot of bureaucracy. At this time (in 2011), approximately 1500 people reported indirectly reported to him, with about twenty directly reporting to him. However, this leadership style changed in 2013, when Dr. Robert Page became Provost of ASU. Provost Page did not believe in the efficiency of multiple roles held by one person, so he removed Dr. Corey from his other positions and appointed him as just Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education, and Dr. Corey has held that role ever since.

When inquiring about the financial information about the university, Dr. Corey related one story about the intersection between money and management that occurred during the financial crisis of 2008-2011. That period was a terrible time for university administration and especially Dr. Corey, since ASU had to reorganize many units and lay off many employees, many of whom had to be removed by Dr. Corey himself. He said that this was a most difficult time, where each decision had to be made with utmost clarity and compassion. Clarity was needed since an important role could not go unfilled, and compassion was crucial since each person that had to be removed was a person that needed a job during such a difficult time. This was a period where he had to personally assess where ASU was overstaffed and underserving students as quickly as possible, since there was a university-wide instruction to reduce expenditures by $10 million in only two months. For example, Dr. Corey and ASU removed the positions of Dean of Applied Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Morrison School of Business by integrating those positions in other existing schools. These were some of the ways that Dr. Corey applied his management skills to ensure that the university could function and still focus on its students during such a trying time. However, since the financial crisis ended, ASU has been able to spend more money on its projects and students. Right now, ASU enrolls over 110,000 students, has over 17,000 employees, and according to the 2018 CAFR report, had a total revenue of $322,054,000 and expenses of $252,963,000.

From this interview, I gained a much deeper understanding of the role of the Vice Provost at ASU. I learned that along with his official job of managing undergraduate education, Dr. Frederick Corey takes on other public roles for the university and directly engages with students. For example, he was one of the mentors and organizers of the ASU Regents’ Cup team, representing ASU at the competition and arranging travel and accommodations for the team. This is where I had the incredible opportunity to meet Dr. Corey and learn more about his role. Understanding his journey as a manager, hearing about the decisions that he had to make in trying times, and (as part of the ASU Regents’ Cup team) seeing first-hand his management, leadership style, and his interpersonal mentoring, has given me a deeper perspective on what it truly means to be a manager.