MEL #001 | Success Through Seizing Opportunities with Dr. Matthew Mench

✨Note: This transcript is AI-generated and may contain minor inaccuracies; refer to the audio for complete details.

---

MENCH: The one thing I always do is I never say no to any open door. The door opens, and then you knock it the heck down, and you earn it, and you work your butt off for the next opportunity and learn as much as you can.

ADAMS: In this episode, I speak with Dr. Matthew Mench, Dean of the Tickle College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee. 

Dr. Mench shares how he went from building with Legos (and blowing them up with fireworks) to becoming the Dean through seizing opportunities that came his way and working hard to earn his way to the next opportunity.

In our leadership segment, Matthew discusses the challenges he faced while advocating for establishing an independent biomedical engineering department. 

He talks about how his perspectives on the initiative changed as he ascended leadership levels from a faculty member to department head to Dean. 

He was ultimately successful, and his takeaway is the importance of strategic alignment within organizations, the value of benchmarking, and the right timing for implementing large strategic initiatives.

Finally, Dean Mench provides a wealth of advice to aspiring leaders. One point we talked about in depth was the importance of prioritizing your time so that you can work on the highest-impact initiatives that only you as the leader can achieve. And he gave us insights into how he does it through protecting his calendar and delegating.   

Dean Mench also provided us with 6 leadership books he recommends. I summarized those in the show notes, so make sure you grab a copy. Without further delay, here’s my conversation with Dr. Matthew Mench.

ADAMS: Hi, Matthew. Welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership. Thanks very much, Angelique. It’s great to be here.

Can you start by telling us how you got into engineering as a career path? 

MENCH: Well, yeah, it wasn’t an intentional path from age six or anything like that. I think it’s similar to kind of many engineers’ experiences is I built a lot of Legos and I used firecrackers and blew up a lot of Legos and did those kind of things in a household with two heavy liberal arts parents, I didn’t have an engineering example. You know, my parents, my mother had been a math teacher, so she was very STEM-ish. You know, she got a degree in math at Oberlin and my father, an econo,mics guy, but he ended up actually in academic administration as well, in an ironic twist. 

He was a Dean of admissions at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. But they were both very heavy liberal arts folks. I didn’t have any tools in the garage. I didn’t know what a pipe wrench was until I started working in a lab. And so I came, you know, with a deficit kind of in terms of in terms of that practical stuff. But I did, you know, I was a builder. I did, you know, see buildings and then, you know, build them with Legos later and things like that. And I think my parents, you know, were pretty wise in that they saw that, okay, you know, maybe his brain works differently than ours. well, he likes, you know, maybe engineering would be a good career choice for you, you know, kind of. And I did have an uncle that was an electrical engineer and talked to him and I kind of started in electrical engineering. 

That was the first thing, but. you know, immediately in school, I took the first class and realized that that isn’t what excites me. And I actually, this is something I tell students a lot when you’re debating on what field they want to go to, is I went to the bookstore, the college bookstore, and on the, you know, in the top level was kind of the senior level classes. 

And, you know, it was in no offense to any other major, but the stuff that really excited me was rocket propulsion fluid mechanics or gas turbines, things like that. Those books I wanted to read right away, you know, as a freshman. And so then I switched into mechanical engineering and went through there. Now, again, we run into a twist in the road, you know, for a couple of years, really. I probably wasn’t mature enough to excel in the classroom. I had excelled in high school. 

In fact,my senior year of high school was actually my freshman year of college, I went a year early. And I probably wasn’t mature enough and definitely didn’t put in the effort. But I was getting C’s and B’s and kind of convincing myself that, these people are really smart, this is a good school. And letting the excuse, believing the excuse really. And then after the sophomore year.

I was sitting in a summer class that I dropped actually, because it was too hard. I dropped faster than regular spring. And I was sitting next to a kid that, you know, they would pass back the exams and they had a score on top of them. And I’d see his score. He’s getting like a 97, I’m getting like a 65, 67. And I asked like, what do you do? It turns out he was in high school.

And I was, you I was a sophomore at this point and he was in high school and he had taken like 70 credits. And I said, well, what the heck did do? And he says, well, I treat you like a job. I wake up in the morning and I study and then I have plenty of fun at night. kind of my ego was offended that this guy was getting 97 and I was getting the sixties. And I thought this guy’s not smarter than me.

Why is he doing that? And it was, know, study habits, attitude and everything. And I course corrected like many engineers do, like, you know, many students do in general, you know. And so then after that, I really started doing well. I started embracing things, really, really enjoying, you know, the academic side of things, learning things. I always loved learning things, but I wasn’t fighting it anymore. I was really getting in there and putting the time in and learning what it took to really master the material, right? And so anyway, I still wasn’t named at grad school or anything like this. 

The big break that came for me, again, in a twist of fate, the divine intervention or however you wanna define it, my roommate’s girlfriend, she’s an electrical engineer, her father, was this really famous professor in mechanical engineering that nobody in the undergrad had ever known because he only taught graduate classes, right? Super famous, super famous guy in combustion, And she asked, she was over in my dorm and asked, hey, know, are you looking for a job? And in undergrad, said, you know, the one thing I always do is I never say no to any open door.

And it’s one thing I’ve been good at my whole life. And I said, yeah, even though I had a current job, I was working at a laundromat. 

ADAMS: wow. 

MENCH: I had a current job. Said, yes, I’m looking for a job because I knew that laundromat wasn’t my career destination. and my GPA at that point wouldn’t qualify me for much else. I got an interview with a guy. He did ask about my GPA and I said, it’s OK.

And, well, anyway, I got the job and what a fantastic environment. worked in an undergraduate research lab. I was lucky. I didn’t realize, you know, this guy was a world famous guy in the area. He a large lab, lot of great talent, lot of great engineers. was an experimental lab. That’s, you know, going back to the pipe wrench. Somebody asked me to go get a pipe wrench. I had no idea what he was talking about. And, but, but it was a great, fantastic experience. I took a look at that and said, yeah, I think I want to get a master’s degree.

I was lucky because I had the opportunity, but when I got the opportunity, I earned it. I worked my butt off there and he gave me an offer for a master’s degree. Didn’t think I wanted a PhD, got the master’s degree there. And by the end of the master’s degree, I’d really fallen in love with research. I’d really fallen in love with it. And the final sticking point, to where I ended up was I hated talking in front of people. You know, they say that the number one fear is public speaking. Number two fear is dying. So you’d rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy, right? So so I wouldn’t suggest anybody do this, but I did this on just a complete flyer. I wrote an email to the department head.

Sometime in probably May or something like this. But hey, is there any classes that you need to teach this summer? And I was at Penn State, it’s large school, so there’s a lot of summer classes in mechanical engineering and everything. Now the department head at the time, who is now the president of UT Dallas, or chancellor, president or chancellor, whatever the designation is there, he didn’t know me at all. He’d never met me.

My lab was off campus, right? So I’d never seen this guy. I just wrote him an email. And again, in a twist of fate or divine intervention, whatever one it is, he wrote back. had just had the professor who was gonna teach fluid mechanics say he’s not gonna do it this summer. And I solved the problem. The email came in at the right time and he said, yes. I was actually kind of shocked and thought, gosh, I hope he checked on me. I mean, it’s kind of scary if he didn’t. But anyway.

Got to teach that class and, you know, kind of overcome the fear of being in front of folks. And, you know, it wasn’t instantaneous. It took three weeks of, you know, I’d have headaches every day and grind my teeth when I slept because of the stress of it. But after three weeks, man, really, this is really fun. I enjoy teaching and I already knew I loved doing the research. So there you go. How do you combine that? And,

So then I dug in and went for the PhD. That just gets me to the PhD and then ended up taking a postdoc, got me into kind of a different research area that was really popular at the time and there’s a lot of funding in it and everything in terms of electrochemical power conversion and did well on that postdoc.

And then started looking for faculty jobs. It was a hot area. I had done really well. And took the faculty job and kind of, you know, progressed. Did well at that, which kind of set up everything else. And then when the leadership opportunities emerged, you know, I had to ask, this the time or not? then, you know, went for it. So that’s my path.

ADAMS: Well, one of the things that really resonated with me about what you said was this idea of, you you called it divine intervention, but there were a couple of different times when, opportunities seemed to present themselves to you and you went after them. I do think there are a lot of our students who feel like they need to have this well-defined path. Like everything needs to be mapped out. And if they don’t do exactly what they had planned, you know, they get a little, they start to get nervous.

Now there is some value to planning for sure. I’m not saying don’t plan. I’m not saying don’t put goals and objectives down. I’m not saying that, but I am saying that this openness to new opportunities is something that’s also important. Do you know where that came from, from you?

MENCH: Yeah, that’s one thing. If I look back, I feel like I have done well is that when there has been an opportunity to make a pivot, I’ve seized it. And then, know, a lot of times the tendency when you’re going for something and you get it, and is to relax after that. And that’s the wrong, wrong outcome. I get that opportunity, luckily, to work in this fantastic world-class lab as an undergraduate that had a mediocre GPA. I wasn’t failing.

I was getting C’s and B’s, it was okay. But realistically, there were a lot of students who were performing better than me at the time that he could have hired, And I kind of got lucky through knowing his daughter. But I’ll tell you what, when I got that opportunity, the door opens and then you knock it the heck down and you earn it and you work your butt off for the next opportunity and learn as much as you can.

You know, another example that is, you know, I graduated the PhD, it was in combustion. And at my, I’ll tell you what happened in my PhD defense. This is an interesting story. So I come into my PhD defense and I have a beeper on me. This is how long ago it I have a beeper on me because my wife was pregnant with baby number one. Okay. And the,

Baby was due the following day, which is why I sketched my PhD defense on the day before. So I walk in and give my PhD defense. It goes well. Everybody’s shaking my hand. In the middle of it, one of the PhD, one of my committee members says, hey, would you be, he was a computational guy and I was an experimental guy. And he had just gotten a project on experimental stuff. And he says, you know, hey, would you be interested in a postdoc?

And I’ll tell you what, at that moment, the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do was remain there for a postdoc, especially in an area that I had no clue, it was the fuel cells, I had no idea anything about it. And then I’m shaking his hand and then the beeper goes off. And I call and it’s baby time. So in one day, within the course of like three hours, I defend my PhD.

I get offered a job that I eventually took and completely changed the course of my future. There were no jobs for faculty in combustion doing what I did at that time. It wasn’t gonna happen. I was gonna take an industrial job. So I wouldn’t have been in academia at all at that point. And the third thing, which was the most important thing that happened that day was my first child, right? So.

Imagine you have a day like that and your PhD defense, your successful PhD defense is the third best thing that happened to you that day. I’ve been chasing that day ever since. But back to your original point, I think looking back, I had an experience similar to actually what my mother described to me is there was a point in her life where she looked back and all the dots connected and she realized, okay, this wasn’t a straight path. This wasn’t A to B. This wasn’t what I planned.

But there was kind of a reason for all of this. And I have a similar experience, is that I don’t know that I intentionally pushed in one direction or another, but I was able to sense when there was an opportunity that was a good one, even if it involves some change or some risk or something like this, even when I had another path to go, that I opened that door.

And then your responsibility is to knock it down and earn your spot there. And there’s another aspect to that that I share with folks. Yeah, everybody’s path is kind of crooked and up and down and everything like this. If you’re a positive person and you work hard, you’re going to earn success. going to earn. I may not be chancellor of MIT at any time, right?

I will earn my way forward. And then if I’m a positive person, I won’t look back and think, that opportunity I didn’t take could have given me this or that. I’m sure there are opportunities that I didn’t take that I could have been a millionaire or whatever, but I don’t know about them and ignorance is bliss, right? If I’m a positive person, I’m sitting here right now and I look back at all the things that I got that I wanted and that I didn’t get that I wanted. And I’m grateful for all of them because it puts me here.

And as a mentor of mine once said, life is short and you fix mistakes. You take a chance, you do it, you can vector off again if you want.

It’s not supposed to be a straight line. It wouldn’t be fun if it was.

ADAMS: All right, Matthew, what leadership situation are we going to be talking about today? 

MENCH: The decision to start an independent department for biomedical engineering.

ADAMS: OK, tell us a little bit about that. Well, anybody affiliated with the college hopefully by now knows that in fall of 2025, there’ll be an independent department for biomedical engineering.

And for years, it’s been part of mechanical aerospace and biomedical engineering. And I think the reason I chose that is, it’s an interesting study in perspectives. Because I was department head in MABE for eight years, I was also a faculty member. Moved here in 2010 as a faculty member for three years.

Different perspectives, right? I was a faculty member of mechanical engineering, department head for eight years and now dean. And it’s just an interesting path towards that. And I’ll explain what I mean is as a faculty member in mechanical engineering, none of my research was really connected to biomedical engineering. So I was sort of indifferent, know, towards should there be a separate program or not.

And then when I became a department head in the department, there’s three very different programs, mechanical and aero’s kind of linked in many places and has the most overlap. But biomedical engineering had grown out of the mechanical program years back and into its own program. And it really grew, it turned into a student population and everything. And then as a department head.

You know, it’s difficult to manage the priorities of three different programs, especially with a really growing student population in all three areas. you know, have two mechanical and aero are kind of similar and then biomedical is very different. then, I had four different deans, two interim deans and two permanent deans that I had decided, you know, we needed a separate biomedical engineering program that would provide independent leadership with the biomedical engiengineering-centricion and better suit the students and provide a better education. I was convinced of this, still am. However, as a department head, I had four different people I tried to convince, One after another. And frankly, the answer was no. And it might have been a no, not now, There’s a difference between a no and no, not now.

Maybe later kind of thing, but the answer was no. It’s an investment and now is not the time. Anyway, then I was fortunate to get the opportunity to be dean and now all of sudden everybody expected that I would just implement this. And I realized, okay, the perspective’s a little bit different now. It’s the investment coming from the college and I really have to look at this very differently than I did before.

You know, because I’m serving the interest of the college. And so whereas before my role was to go in and beg for the investment of the dean and not really think about the, you know, the overall consequences of it. Now it’s like, okay, well, I got to think about the impact of the whole organization. And now as dean, you know, even, you know, thinking about the impact on the whole university, how do we fit into the strategic plan? What are we trying to do? Where are we trying to go?

And as I progressed in my career in leadership positions, the role that we play in the whole organization has become more of a focus of what I do in the strategic vision and how we accomplish that has obviously become more of an important factor in my decision making. So then the decision is, okay, should we go ahead with this? I was convinced, but I realized that first of all, you gotta other people weren’t convinced. And I also realized I was convinced from a perspective of the department head, but not as a dean. So I needed to convince myself, you know, that this really was the best opportunity. you know, the first thing you do, do some homework, do some benchmarking. I’m continually shocked at how many people don’t bother to benchmark.

Whenever they’re making decisions and whenever they’re thinking about major changes. We don’t live in the Truman Show bubble. If you’ve seen that movie, the Truman Show, other folks have done what we’re doing and you can learn from them. So I talked to some of those that had recently gone through and thought about that. I financially took a look at what the investment would be. What’s the commitment there?

And then talk to the faculty in the department and formed a committee of faculty, not only in that department, but from all of the other departments because you form a new department in the college, it’s going to impact others across the spectrum, right? So they did a significant study that committee got together independent of me and, you know, I didn’t give them any mandate or wire or anything. said, tell me what

What would be the strengths and weaknesses of doing this? Don’t worry about the resources. That’s my job. If it ends up being a good decision, but it is a good decision for the students. Will we prepare students better? Will it be better for the college? Will it our reputation? All these kinds of things. And what would it take, right? Logistically, what would it take? In any project, probably 80 % of the success is determined by the implementation of the project. 

You know, we’re all familiar with people who dream big and can’t make it happen or people who are doers and maybe don’t articulate the vision particularly well. And so, you you got to do both. You got to communicate. You got to have the vision. And then you got to have a real reason for doing that will move your organization forward. And then you got to actually get down and do it. lot of work takes a lot of work of a lot of people.

This is just my utterances, but the reality is to get this department to where it is now requires a lot of hours of work by a lot of people outside of me as well. So you benchmark, do the homework, did that faculty survey, the faculty were strongly in favor and the report showed some things. You gotta be open to changes and morphing as you go forward. What makes sense?

And then, you know, following that, look like it’s a great idea, right? It looks like this is, okay, now, now this is a good idea. This is a good investment. This will be better for the students. This will be better for the college. And then the next question is, well, is now the time, A lot of people don’t ask that question. There’s a lot of great ideas. It’s just not the time for them. And we can all think of examples where, you know, something was done ahead of its time and didn’t last or somebody was, you know, passed its time and now you’re hopelessly behind and another investment might be better and that kind of thing. So say, well, what indicates that now is the time for this? And the university has, as one of its strategic thrusts, health and human wellness, right? 

You know, at this time. And so the chancellor, and the vice chancellor for research have signaled that this is a major growth area for the university. So now I know that, look, if I launch this, there are other resources the university is putting together that will help ensure the support and success of this at this time. We’re not just doing this solo. This is something the whole university, and again, going back to thinking strategically about where you fit within the organization and there’s stuff that you want to do and and there’s stuff that you want to do that’s aligned with the strategic vision and the goals of the organization. And you got to pick the latter, Or convince others that strategically they should be doing something else. But that’s that journey then. 

You say, okay, and then there’s an awful lot of logistical work after that. But I think the leadership part of it to me, when I was thinking about you know, different examples of things was that, you know, I had three different perspectives of that. And, you know, it helps me frame future decisions and investments that I make because I can think about, you know, okay, if was a faculty, if I was department head, if I was interim vice chancellor for research too, so can think from that perspective and say, okay, well, is it the right decision? Have we done enough homework on it? Have we done the benchmarking? Do people support this generally?

You’re never gonna do anything without everybody supporting it. But there should be significant support for something and it should make sense. And then you ask, is the time right? What other factors are there that would indicate that, okay, this is probably gonna be successful?

ADAMS: I think this is really a great example.

MENCH: Roughly how long was the timeframe from when you as a faculty member said, no, actually you were indifferent when you were a faculty member. So maybe when you were department head and you’re like, this is actually something that I really wanna do. I think this makes a lot of sense too. Now we’re ready to implement it. I’m curious how many years that has been since that initial inception. Great question. It would have been quicker had I been better at convincing other deans, right? But they made the right decision.

I hadn’t done enough homework. It was just something that I think this is a good idea. Why? Because I think it’s a good idea because we’ve reached critical mass blah, blah, blah. I didn’t have any depth behind that, And when I started. so I learned a lot in that process about, you have kind of initial argument that is kind of your elevator speech argument, And they all sound great, And then there’s the real depth behind it and the data behind it and the benchmarking.

Behind it that says, well, what does success look like, you know, moving forward, and what are the indicators of success, and what have other folks gone through, where have they, where they had some challenges, or where has it worked, and that kind of thing. You know, I didn’t have any of that. So it’s 10 years, a decade. I started as department head in 2013, and probably by 14, 15, I was thinking, boy, this is a growing segment.

And at Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech at that time, maybe still, BME was their second largest undergraduate programs. ours was really growing. And then you think, well, okay, they need some specific leadership and everything. It all makes sense, but then you gotta have the depth behind it. And I accumulated that over time. And what I really got that was with the help of others, right? When forming that committee and having other people think about it and then.

And doing my own homework on that. And when it was my money, metaphorically, was the college’s money, it’s the university’s money. But when it was the resources that I was in charge of deciding priorities on, then it made a big difference in terms of, okay, well, I really gotta be sure on this one. So it was interesting, it was interesting journey. don’t think future journeys would take 10 years, because I’ve learned a lot on that, but that was a fun one. And I’m glad to see it into fruition here in the fall. I think they’re gonna see a lot of growth in that program and certainly hope so. 

ADAMS: Yeah, and I do wanna say, I agree 100 % on this, the idea of benchmarking. It is shocking to me as well how little homework people do to kind of assert their ideas and absolutely doing a good assessment, benchmarking. Not only will it help you to understand what needs to be done, yeah, nobody needs to reinvent the wheel and there are very few wheels that have not been invented already. So it can also be faster and cheaper as well. And then as you mentioned, but being open to the analysis itself and being willing to morph or even scrap the idea if it turns out that the assessment and the benchmarking doesn’t support it. And the other thing I really liked about what you said is about the timing. I liked the criteria that you mentioned, if it’s the right time for the university, then I know there are some other strategic initiatives going on, which means that you’re going to have support of this entire organization.

So that you can pull upon to move this forward. You’re not a lone wolf just trying to do everything on your own. That really taxes your both financial, talent, all of these resources. But if you’ve got a much, much larger entity, the university as a whole, bolstering these efforts then, then that makes the timing question a strong yes.

ADAMS: Matthew, what advice would you give to engineers who want to move into leadership roles?

MENCH: That’s great question. It takes some courage. one of things that the Chancellor Plowman has said to me is, you know, we don’t hire leaders to keep things the same. And she’s absolutely right.

You have to advance whatever you’re leading, you have to advance it forward, And certain things you’re a fast follower on of others and certain things you have to choose, what are my priorities that I wanna lead on? And other people won’t necessarily agree with you on that. And you will have to work hard to communicate, make things happen, to get the resources for it. And it’s a very complex situation. I love complexity. 

When I was thinking about leadership, the first time as a department head, I called my dad and he had been in academic leadership and he said, son, you’re gonna love it. And I didn’t hear that from a lot of people. A lot of people think department has like the worst job you can ever have. I loved it.

I love this job, and what he said is you’re gonna love it because it’s complex. There are different things every day that come into your office that you would have never read in a book, you would have never seen the script for, and there’s no solution for it. You’re dealing with incomplete information all the time, and you have to make decisions based on incomplete information and a confluence of political, financial, things, right? And strategic things, all of these things come together and you have to make the best possible decision based on that and move forward. And he’s right, it’s complex, it’s challenging at times, it can be painful when things don’t go well, but it takes some amount of courage to say, believe this is the way we should go, I’ve done my homework and

I’m convinced that this is a decision we need to make and to move forward with it. But it’s also incredibly rewarding because you get to have a high impact on what you’re doing. You get to work with fantastic people that help enable that as well. It’s a tremendous, I love it. It’s a tremendous opportunity to lead in any organization, I think.

I, some other, some other tips, think I mentioned it before, but you always benchmark, always do your homework, always be prepared for meetings, always think about the information you need to learn. It gets very complex and so you get very busy and you have to prioritize everything and you have to prioritize even the information that you want to learn so that you can be prepared for things and who you need to talk to and how you do your time. 

You know, you need to learn to communicate with folks that they say two levels up, two levels down, right? And in your job, but in terms of that, I’ll go a step further, I think so much of our life is spent talking with folks and getting to know folks and everything. I think you need to embrace it. And I think you need to embrace it for a couple reasons. 

One is, it helps you on your job to know people and understand what people are thinking and where they’re coming from. I always have an assumption that they’re coming from a rational position. have their own, and listen. People have a lot of great ideas and a lot of great comments you can really learn from. And by no means do I have a corner of the market on good ideas. And a lot of times we’re making bad bad decisions, gotta find out about it from other people, right? You learn about it from other people. always gotta embrace those relationships, not only for that, for work. 

A lot of people used to talk about it when I was going through school about networking, you gotta network and know everybody. That’s kind of self-serving. I think you wanna just, you wanna know people and have great relationships with people. Not only will it help your job to understand where people come from, but also it enhances your life.

You know, lot of our waking hours are here at work. I prefer to be at a place where I like the people I’m with and I care about the people I’m with. And so I go further than learn how to communicate, learn how to embrace relationships and other people and, you know, all they bring and the experiences they bring. I think you need to learn how to negotiate. Everything we do in life is negotiating. And but they’re very different negotiations.

Some people want to win everything all the time at all costs and that’s their ego talking. And even you learn how to lose strategically. There are certain negotiations that you’re better off losing this one because it’s connected to the future. Say that, learn body language, learn what you’re projecting to other folks. I think these are things that people can, and learn how to read other folks.

You know, when is somebody stressed out? When is somebody not telling you that they disagree with you, but they disagree with you? You know, all of these things, 60 % of communication is nonverbal, And you can learn a lot from body language that you can use. I think for me, one of the things that’s taken a while to develop and I’m still developing is the ability to communicate vision, right? Okay. You know, which is different than…

You know, not being in leadership. When you’re leadership, you’re responsible for the vision. You’re responsible to tell, this is where we’re going. And people want to hear that, right? You know, where the heck, why are we doing this? What’s the benefit? And that’s, know, when you get into leadership, that’s new. You have to articulate that well for different audiences and have really strong reasons for why you want to go there. I think we mentioned this, listen to your feedback and…

Get out of your office and listen to feedback from different constituencies, different stakeholders and everything. And don’t let your ego make decisions. Don’t let your ego prevent you from hearing feedback you need to hear. Ego makes lousy decisions. My ego at least makes lousy decisions. And I’m not immune from it. I’ve done it. But it’s never worked out. I’ll put it that way. Good decisions are more complex than that.

I think one of the things my father always used to tell me and he was a liberal arts guy, know, reframe, reframe, reframe. And I didn’t understand what the heck he was talking about completely until the last few years. you know, what he’s the only person I’ve ever talked to where if as a 17 year old, I could go to him and ask for advice and he would give me the advice that was appropriate, not for him. Right. 

But reframe from my position, Okay, as a 17-year-old with these things you’re facing with these things, he was reframing and putting himself in my shoes and saying, okay, these are your options and then letting me make a decision and really training me how to make good decisions, So the ability to reframe and think from a financial perspective, think from a faculty perspective, think from a leadership perspective, from a chancellor’s perspective, try and just understand from a business perspective.

Student perspective, what does this decision look like from their perspectives? You know, and I always think at the end of the day, I don’t want to make a decision. The question I ask, is this a decision that I can explain to all of these constituencies? They may not agree with me, but I sure as heck better be able to explain it in a way where I have some concrete reasons why I went in that direction. So you got to reframe.

I talked about embracing things. It’s something I learned from Inky Johnson, He’s a motivational speaker now and used to be a football player here. And one of the things he says is when you wake up in the morning and you take a look at your job and what you need to do, it’s what you get to do, not what you have to do,

And a lot of times when I fall into the negative with this and I’m thinking about, gotta do this, I gotta have this meeting or that meeting, I think about that, right? And it’s what you get to do. I get to do some awesome stuff on this job. And so when I wake up in the morning, I’m stressed out about, I gotta do this or whatever, I get to do this. This is a fantastic job, this is part of it, And I can’t convince myself that for everything,

But for a lot of things, it’s really about your perspective of, gosh, a perfect example of this is any of these recruiting visits or something like this. You’re like, OK, I got to come on Saturday, or I got to meet with somebody for dinner on Thursday night. I got my kid. And well, I have to do this. No, no, this is a great opportunity. This is something that comes with You get to meet these folks. You get to do this. You get to, you know, make an impact on the college through this. So it’s get to versus have to. I think another piece of advice I’d say is take action. You can’t wait forever to make decisions. And if something’s stressing you out, one of the things you will find is as soon as you start to craft a response, as soon as you start to take action to fix the problem, that’s when your stress goes down.

It’s not when after it’s done, it’s when you start to take action. So when you’re paralyzed and you’re unable to take action and it’s just stressing you out, well, that’s when the stress builds up. So it’s actually cathartic to start working on problems. But actually the organization needs to move with some alacrity too. So you can’t be paused on a bunch of things. You’ve got to make decisions and move forward and fix them if it doesn’t, if it’s not, you know, it ends up not being the right choice.

I, here’s a big one, In any time a leadership positions is, you know, there’s so much that we all have to do in our jobs every day that takes up so much time and there’s so much perfunctory, so many perfunctory meetings and emails and all of this stuff that we need to preserve the time to actually do the big high priority things that will have an impact. So one of the things I asked, you know, my cabinet members and everything is, okay, what are the, it’s really only one or two things. What are the one or two things, maybe three, whatever, somebody’s superhero, maybe Elon Musk has a hundred of these, but what, what are the few things that you, that only happened that are high impact because you worked on them, because you put the time in them, because you pushed them, Because it goes back to one of my favorite books, fake work.

Is we’re all busy. Everybody’s busy. And actually one of my favorite poems by Thoreau is about ants. Like it isn’t a question of being busy. Even ants are busy. What are you busy at? you know, you need to preserve time for those big things. And you need to think about what are those big things gonna be? Because the reality is every day we come in, everybody today in an office setting.

Right? It comes in and then read emails and they do things and you will be busy. You will go home at night tired. And what did you spend your time on? You know, so, so the question is, okay, what are the couple things that I want to do that I need to preserve time for that are going to have a high impact and are only going to happen because because of me and, you know, preserve time, think about what those things are going to be. Cause if you don’t, they won’t happen.

They just won’t. You go through a year, maybe you get a good performance review, whatever things are going, but you haven’t really done anything that wasn’t attributable to what would have happened had somebody else been in there anyway, right? And it’s hard to carve out the time for that. It’s hard to conceive of those things. It takes the courage to implement those things sometimes. That’s to me, at the end of the day, that’s the impact that we can have in leadership that you can at the end of the career, you look back and be, okay, I’m proud of that one. Those are the things that I’m really proud of. Everything else would have happened and would have taken up my time. Those are the cool things.

ADAMS: Can you talk a little bit tactically about how you do that? Because I’m in the Dean suite, so I get to see you moving around. I’ve been in a few meetings with you and I have seen your executive assistant sometimes literally move you from one place to the other because you are so..

MENCH:  She’s going to knock on the door here in a couple of minutes. 

ADAMS: Yeah, so we actually have six minutes before she comes in here and yells at us. But I’m just curious, where do you put that time to reflect? 

MENCH: That’s a great question. So I get up.I’m usually not on the email sometimes a fire off email, but I get I tend to get up early right and and I tend to tend to do some things like that early in the morning and My schedule is very intentional. So so, know, my assistant is very brutal with adhering to my scheduling standards, but that’s that’s part of the design and And part of my schedule has time carved out in it for those things. Sometimes something from the provost or chancellor come in and okay, I gotta lose that time. But I always have that time. So one of the things in the morning, I always have that time in the morning and I carve out and I won’t describe it for you here because people come invade that time. But I do carve out. 

ADAMS: It’s secret, I’m not gonna tell anybody,

MENCH:  yes. Don’t tell them, but it is critical time. It’s where I’m working on things that are those impact things, those high priority things And you know, you got to delegate, There’s certain things you realize that somebody else could do and it’s taken up a bunch of your time and you could delegate and it’s always a balance, When you delegate stuff, you know what I had a, yeah, I had to learn. I had to learn that. I had to learn how to delegate.

there were certain things that were not high priority that I was doing that I needed to delegate. When I delegate, I knew it wouldn’t be exactly what I wanted, And, but however, it was lower priority. So I learned how to delegate that. you always, everybody around them has people that, you know, are really good at stuff and maybe not good at some other stuff.

It’s this combination that makes a great team. And I learned how to delegate some stuff off of the people who are already overburdened, And to maybe somebody who’s that’s a learning experience for them that maybe can mentor them up and help them out. Or maybe, you know, and interestingly, when I did that, what I found is I got a lot more time. And another thing is people have great ideas and some people maybe I didn’t give credit for.

Okay, it’s not gonna come back as well as I would. Well, it’s better. What do you know? Congratulations, right? My ego took over again. It came back better than I thought. Better than I would have done.

ADAMS: All right. Well, thank you for that. I know that you have several books that you recommend, so we will add your recommended reading list to the show notes. Matthew, thank you very much for sharing your insights with us. 

MENCH: Hey, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for doing this and for the opportunity. Hope it’s helpful to some.

ADAMS: I’m sure it will be.