University staff are invited to nominate themselves to join University Executive Board (UEB) committees, so that leadership is more distributed and benefits from a greater variety of the expertise, ideas and views from across our community.

The announcement is the second of two initiatives delivered from the Vice-Chancellor’s June ‘staff covenant’ blog today, alongside the appointment of the first Pro-Vice Chancellor for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Professor Sarah Sharples.

UEB committees will be reconstituted in the new academic year to include members of staff at different career stages as well as students, representing diversity in all its forms – from gender and ethnicity to roles, experience and expertise.

Further information is published at Committee Member Selection where staff can submit a short online nomination to join a UEB committee, setting out their interest in the role and the skills and experience that they would bring.

Initial selection for committee places will commence in September, and a further nomination and selection round will take place during the autumn term. Full training will be provided for successful candidates across October and November.

Places are available on all UEB committees including: Research; Education and Student Experience; Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; Global Exchange; Knowledge Exchange; People and Human Resources; Planning and Resources; Civic and Regional; Digital Strategy; Estates and Infrastructure; and also Reputation and Recruitment.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Shearer West said:

“Effective governance and decision-making is critical to our continued success as an institution and that requires a distributed leadership model which embraces the expertise which is found across our community at all grades, professions and career stages.

“During the last academic year, the work of such groups on the organisational effectiveness of student support, timetabling, and equality issues have demonstrated just how powerful and creative diverse groups can be in solving our institutional problems.

“I invite all members of our University community to consider how they might contribute to this work and help to deliver more delegated decision-making, a more inclusive environment, and to apply their expertise to address the challenges we face as an institution.”

Further developments from the ‘staff covenant’ blog will take place across the autumn term to delegate further decision-making, reduce duplication and increase joined-up thinking.

This will include a refined governance model to ensure that decisions are made at the right level – whether that is by School, Faculty or UEB — as well as increased use of dedicated ‘task and finish’ groups to improve the pace and quality of decision-making on specific challenges and issues.