The First 100 Days: 10 Priorities for a New VP of External Relations or Enrolment

Starting a new executive role in a university or college? Your first 100 days will shape more than your priorities. They will influence your relationships, your reputation, your team's confidence and your ability to deliver results.

Being appointed Vice-President of External Relations, Advancement, Marketing, Communications or Enrolment is an exciting opportunity. It is also a complicated one.

You are expected to provide strategic leadership, build relationships, understand institutional priorities, assess organizational capacity and demonstrate early momentum. Often, you are doing all of this while inheriting a team, a portfolio and a set of expectations that you did not create.

In higher education, the challenge is particularly nuanced. Universities and colleges are complex environments with distributed decision-making, established governance structures, deeply held institutional traditions and stakeholders who may have very different definitions of success.

Whether you are a new VP of External Relations, VP of Enrolment Management, VP of Marketing and Communications or another senior higher education executive, the first 100 days are an important opportunity to understand the institution before trying to change it.

Here are 10 priorities to consider as you navigate your first 100 days in a university or college leadership role.

1. Understand the institutional landscape before setting your agenda

Your first priority is to understand the institution you have joined, not just the portfolio you have been hired to lead.

Read the strategic plan, institutional budget, academic plan, enrolment plan, recent board reports, program reviews and any major institutional reviews or restructuring documents. Understand where the institution is financially, academically and reputationally.

But do not stop at the documents.

Find out what is actually happening. Which strategic priorities have traction? Which have stalled? Where are there competing interpretations of institutional direction? What commitments have been made to government, the board, donors, students or external partners?

Pay particular attention to the relationship between your portfolio and the institution's broader strategic objectives.

For example, a VP of External Relations may inherit responsibility for government relations, advancement, communications, marketing, community engagement and economic partnerships. These functions may sit together organizationally, but that does not necessarily mean they are working toward a shared set of priorities.

Your first 100 days should help you distinguish between what the institution says it wants to achieve and what it is actually organized to deliver.

2. Build relationships with the people who influence institutional decisions

In higher education, your organizational chart will tell you who reports to whom. It will not necessarily tell you who influences decisions.

Relationship-building should be a deliberate part of your executive onboarding strategy.

Schedule introductory conversations with:

• The President and Provost, to understand institutional direction and executive expectations.
• Deans and academic leaders, to understand faculty priorities, enrolment pressures and research ambitions.
• Board members and senior governance representatives, where appropriate.
• Student leaders and student-facing teams, to understand the student experience.
• Your direct reports and key operational leaders.
• Government, industry, community and institutional partners.
• Advancement, alumni and research leaders, particularly where your portfolio intersects with their work.

Ask good questions and listen carefully.

What do people believe the institution does well? Where do they see opportunities? What frustrates them? What do they need from your portfolio that they are not currently getting?

Also ask what they hope you will accomplish in your first year.

You may discover that different stakeholders have very different expectations of your role. Identifying those differences early is much easier than trying to reconcile them after you have announced your priorities.

3. Assess your organizational structure, mandate and decision-making authority

One of the biggest challenges for a new VP in higher education is understanding whether the organizational structure supports the mandate. A portfolio may be centralized, decentralized or operate through a hybrid model. Each has advantages and challenges.

In a centralized model, functions such as marketing, communications, digital engagement and recruitment may be coordinated through a central team. This can improve consistency, strategic alignment and institutional brand management.

In a decentralized model, faculties, schools and individual departments may retain considerable control over their own marketing, communications and recruitment activities. This can support local responsiveness but may create duplication, inconsistent messaging and competing priorities.

Hybrid models attempt to balance institutional coordination with faculty-level autonomy, but require clear governance, defined responsibilities and effective working relationships.

As a new VP, consider:

• Are reporting relationships clear?
• Who owns institutional strategy and who is responsible for execution?
• Where does decision-making authority sit?
• Are faculties and departments aligned with central priorities?
• Are there gaps, duplication or unnecessary layers of approval?
• Does the current structure reflect the institution's strategic needs?

Resist the temptation to restructure immediately. First understand why the organization is structured as it is, what has been tried before and where the real barriers to performance exist.

Sometimes the problem is organizational design. Sometimes it is unclear accountability, insufficient capacity or a lack of shared direction. Those require very different solutions.

4. Get to know your team before making changes

Your direct reports are among your most important sources of institutional knowledge.

They also have their own expectations about your appointment. Some may be excited about new leadership. Others may be uncertain about what it means for their roles, responsibilities or future.

Start with individual conversations. Understand their professional strengths, current responsibilities, challenges and ambitions.

Ask:

• What is working particularly well?
• What is getting in the way of your team's success?
• What would you change if you could?
• Where are we under-resourced or overextended?
• What decisions are you waiting for?
• What should I know that might not be obvious from the outside?

Look beyond the senior leadership team. Spend time with the people doing the work.

In marketing, communications and enrolment, operational teams often have a much clearer understanding of where institutional processes break down than the people overseeing them.

You may find that the team is highly capable but lacks strategic direction, that talented people are spending too much time on low-value requests, or that the institution has significant capability gaps.

Your job is not simply to evaluate performance. It is to understand what your people need to perform at their best.

5. Establish a baseline: Know what success looks like today

You cannot establish meaningful priorities without understanding current performance.

For a new VP of Enrolment, this means going beyond application numbers. Examine the entire recruitment and student lifecycle, including:

• Applications, offers, confirmations and registrations.
• Conversion rates by program, region and student segment.
• Domestic and international enrolment trends.
• Student recruitment costs and return on investment.
• Retention, persistence and student progression.
• Program capacity and demand.
• Recruitment marketing performance and channel effectiveness.

For a VP of External Relations or Marketing and Communications, consider:

• Institutional reputation and brand awareness.
• Media visibility, sentiment and share of voice.
• Government and community relationships.
• Advancement and fundraising performance.
• Alumni engagement.
• Marketing and communications effectiveness.
• Digital engagement and audience behaviour.
• Internal communications and stakeholder confidence.

Importantly, look at trends rather than isolated results. What has changed over the past three to five years? Where is the institution gaining ground? Where is it losing relevance? What external factors are influencing performance? Establishing a baseline also helps you distinguish between performance issues that your team can influence and broader institutional or market conditions that require a different response.

6. Understand the external environment and what people are saying about your institution

Your institution does not exist in isolation. It operates within a changing environment shaped by demographic shifts, public policy, government funding, labour market needs, regional competition, public perceptions and changing expectations of post-secondary education.

For a new VP, understanding this environment is essential. Look at what prospective students, parents, employers, alumni, government representatives, community members and the broader public are saying about your institution and its competitors. Do not rely exclusively on internal research or the institution's own perception of its reputation.

Consider:

• How is the institution perceived compared with its competitors?
• What are people saying about its programs and graduate outcomes?
• Are there emerging reputational risks?
• What is changing in the regional and national higher education landscape?
• Are institutional messages resonating with the audiences they are intended to reach?
• Where is there a gap between institutional positioning and public perception?

This is where social listening, reputation research and social sensing can provide a valuable perspective. Understanding the conversation around your institution can reveal emerging issues and opportunities that traditional institutional reporting may not capture. It can also help you identify where the institution needs to change its communications, its strategy or potentially the underlying experience it is delivering.

7. Identify the institutional priorities that need attention now

Not everything can be a priority. By this point, you should be developing a clearer picture of what needs immediate attention, what requires longer-term planning and what may not need to change at all.

For a VP of Enrolment, immediate priorities might include addressing an application conversion problem, responding to changes in international student recruitment, improving regional student attraction or strengthening collaboration between recruitment and academic units.

For a VP of External Relations, they might include rebuilding government relationships, addressing reputational challenges, improving institutional communications or aligning marketing and advancement activities around shared strategic objectives.

Separate your findings into three categories:

Immediate priorities: Issues that present a significant operational, reputational or strategic risk and require action now.

Strategic opportunities: Areas where better alignment, investment or leadership could deliver meaningful institutional value over the next 12 to 24 months.

Longer-term transformation: Structural, cultural or organizational changes that require consultation, evidence and sustained leadership.

The objective is not to arrive with a fully developed transformation agenda. It is to demonstrate that you understand what matters, why it matters and how your portfolio can contribute to institutional success.

8. Establish a shared vision and clear expectations for your portfolio

A new VP needs to establish what their portfolio is there to accomplish. This sounds obvious, but many higher education portfolios have evolved over time through reorganizations, leadership changes and the addition of new responsibilities. The result can be a collection of functions rather than a cohesive strategic portfolio.

Work with your leadership team to define:

• The purpose and mandate of the portfolio.
• Its contribution to the institutional strategic plan.
• The outcomes it is accountable for delivering.
• How success will be measured.
• How it works with other portfolios, faculties and academic units.
• Where responsibilities and decision-making authority need clarification.

For example, is marketing primarily responsible for promoting programs, or does it have a role in shaping institutional positioning and reputation? Is enrolment management simply responsible for recruitment targets, or does it influence program mix, student experience, retention and institutional sustainability? Is external relations a collection of communications and partnership functions, or does it provide an integrated approach to how the institution engages with the world around it? These distinctions matter. They shape how your portfolio operates, how it is resourced and how its contribution is understood by the rest of the institution.

9. Find a few early wins without confusing activity with progress

New executives are often under pressure to demonstrate results quickly. There is nothing wrong with identifying early wins. In fact, they can build confidence, establish credibility and create momentum. But be careful not to mistake visible activity for meaningful progress. An early win should address a real problem, demonstrate your understanding of the institution and create value beyond the immediate outcome. Examples might include:

• Resolving a long-standing decision-making bottleneck.
• Improving coordination between central marketing and faculty teams.
• Establishing a shared enrolment performance dashboard.
• Addressing an emerging reputational issue.
• Strengthening a key government or community relationship.
• Improving communication between recruitment and academic leadership.
• Clarifying accountability for a major institutional initiative.

Choose opportunities that are achievable without distracting your team from more important work. And be generous in recognizing the people who helped make them happen.

Your first 100 days are not an opportunity to demonstrate how much you can personally accomplish. They are an opportunity to show what your team and institution can accomplish under your leadership.

10. Develop your first-year leadership plan

Your first 100 days should culminate in a clear plan for what comes next. You do not need a fully developed five-year strategy. You do need a credible direction, a set of priorities and a way to measure progress. Your first-year leadership plan should include:

1. What you have learned: Key findings from your institutional assessment, stakeholder conversations and performance review.
2. What needs attention: The most significant risks, challenges and opportunities.
3. Your strategic priorities: Three to five areas where your portfolio can make the greatest contribution.
4. What will change: Specific actions, improvements or initiatives.
5. What needs investment: Resources, capabilities, organizational changes or additional expertise.
6. How success will be measured: A manageable set of performance indicators and milestones.
7. How you will lead: Your approach to communication, collaboration, decision-making and team development.

Share your plan with the President, Provost, direct reports and relevant institutional stakeholders. Invite feedback. Make adjustments. Establish regular opportunities to report on progress.

Most importantly, make sure your priorities are connected to the institution's broader ambitions rather than becoming a standalone agenda for your portfolio.

The most important thing to remember about your first 100 days

There is a temptation to arrive in a new executive role with a plan to make your mark. But the strongest leaders understand that credibility comes before change.

Your first 100 days should be about building the knowledge, relationships and organizational understanding that allow you to make better decisions.

You are learning an institution while simultaneously helping it move forward. You are building trust with people who may have very different expectations of your leadership. And you are trying to identify where your experience can make the greatest difference.

You do not have to figure everything out alone. In fact, one of the most valuable things a new executive can do is find someone outside the immediate institutional environment who can provide perspective, challenge assumptions and help make sense of what they are experiencing. That is often where the real work of leadership begins.

TINCT's Thinking Partner program connects higher education leaders with deeply experienced executives, strategists and specialists who have been in the roles, navigated the challenges and understand the realities of institutional leadership. This is not traditional executive coaching or generic mentorship. It is an opportunity to work with someone who can help you see what you might not see when you are in it.

Whether you need a sounding board for a difficult decision, perspective on organizational design, help navigating institutional politics, a second opinion on your strategic priorities or support developing your first-year leadership plan, we bring the experience and outside perspective to help you think differently.