Tim Tai, Photographer Editor

As the Emerge program finishes its first cycle, administrators have learned new lessons about managing — and are considering changes to the University’s managerial training program.

The Emerge program, which finished its first cycle on Oct. 27 with 19 participants in its first cohort, is part of a University push to increase diversity in its highest ranks. Through the Emerge program, nominated staff members from historically marginalized backgrounds are trained as University leaders. The goal is to promote these individuals to positions of higher rank or responsibility.

While the program’s second cohort — slated to finish in June 2023 with 22 staff members — began Oct. 20, administrators are still examining results from the first session.  Senior staff noted that based on the program’s results, they would consider making changes to how managers across all departments at the University are trained. 

“The important principle is that staff own a large responsibility for driving their own development, but their manager is a key support partner,” Jane Savage,  associate vice president of union-management and strategic initiatives, wrote in an email to the News.

In a joint statement to the News, Savage and Deborah Stanley-McAulay, who serves as chief diversity officer and senior director for human resources at Yale said that they will “consider strengthening” their managerial training program after learning that managers of Emerge participants were “eager” to learn how to engage in development discussions with the people who report to them.

Development discussions, according to Savage, are those in which a staff member and manager agree on certain action steps that help support a staff member’s development over time. Some examples include assigning tasks which strengthen certain skills, offering networking opportunities and introducing career opportunities.

Savage told the News that while the program’s managers do not yet have “specific plans” for what changes will be made to the managerial training program, they would be “sorting that out” in the coming months.

One management training program for staff at Yale, Extraordinary Leader, according to Savage, is intended to help “leaders see how others see them and to focus their own leadership development and support.” Another core program, Managing at Yale, is offered, but not required, for all staff managers across Yale. The program, which is packed into one to three hour training modules over Zoom, takes approximately six to eight weeks to complete.

However, she noted that they had already been planning a review of the manager training program in order to provide guidance on future program content and that feedback from Emerge would be “factored into” future modifications to the program.

Savage mentioned several ideas, one of which included modifying and supplementing existing training material based on Emerge program feedback and providing all managers, whether or not they are enrolled in Managing at Yale, access to the material. Another idea, she told the News, was to make a shortened management training based on the feedback module on how to have development discussions available to all managers.

“These are just a couple of ideas and much more thought needs to be given to this, in the context of many other things we are trying to do with both Emerge and Yale’s other management and leadership development programs,” Savage wrote.

University President Peter Salovey told the News he believed that Yale Human Resources has “successfully piloted” a program to strengthen staff members’ management skills.

“EMERGE will enhance the retention and excellence of staff members at Yale, who work wholeheartedly to support faculty and students and the mission of the university,” Salovey wrote in an email to the News.

Salovey first announced the Emerge initiative in October 2020 in a push to increase diversity in the top ranks of University leadership. He has since set issues of diversity, equity and inclusion as crucial priorities to Yale in the coming years.

According to an Oct. 2020 statement from Salovey, the percentage of managers and professionals at Yale who come from historically underrepresented minority groups has vastly increased in recent years, although he wrote that there is still “much more work to do” at the top levels of university leadership.

Salovey became president of the University in July 2013.

Correction, Nov. 14: This article has been corrected to distinguish between the Managing at Yale and Extraordinary Leader training programs.