76: Brigitte Madrian: The "Insider" Comes Home

A peer to peer discussion with the Dean of the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University (BYU).

🎙️ What if you had the opportunity to take on a leadership role you never saw yourself doing? In this episode, Dean Madrian discusses her transition into leadership and her return to her "childhood home." Despite entering the role with limited prior experience in academic administration, Madrian has enjoyed key successes and shares the critical advice that helped her navigate early challenges. She further outlines the strategic initiatives that have defined her tenure, most notably a 60% increase in undergraduate business enrollment over the last six years.

However, Madrian is quick to deflect sole credit, portraying herself as an active learner who leveraged every available resource to come up to speed. She candidly discusses hiring a leadership coach to navigate the shift from professor to administrator and the "critical piece of advice" from her assistant that helped her calibrate the pace of organizational change.

For Madrian, this growth did not come at the expense of values. She describes her inspiration behind creating a new mission, vision, and values framework, and explains how embedding these core statements into physical and curricular touchpoints has fostered deep institutional alignment.

“This is a business school, so we're trying to teach students not just how to be good accountants or good investment bankers but how to be organizational leaders, and it's great for them to have a model of how to do that effectively, and how to drive change in their organization, and how to help people in an organization coalesce around a larger purpose,” Madrian says.

Beyond organizational growth, Madrian discusses the strategies employed to maintain the Accounting program’s top-five national ranking and explores the unconventional responsibilities inherent in the deanship that often go overlooked by new leaders.

For new and seasoned deans and leaders, Madrian offers a positive and pragmatic take on the professional pathway of deanship. #DeansCounsel #deanship #byumarriottlife 

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Photos courtesy of University of BYU

Read more about Dean Brigitte Madrian here.