The last college I worked at had a scarcity mindset that affected every decision large or small as mindsets do. It was the result of a pretty severe financial crisis from years before and the drastic emergency measures put in place to offset the losses.
Whenever someone wanted to oppose an idea (or impose another draconian cut), the budget was the go-to argument. There was no arguing with the budget.
The truth was that there were real financial limitations at that college. It didn’t help that it was seated in one of the most chronically disadvantaged regions of the country. It’s very location was a source of its scarcity mindset.
The other more poignant truth was that the college’s scarcity mentality suited the institution’s powers-that-be, from the president on down. Scarcity meant that they could keep salaries appallingly low, workloads appallingly high, and “no” as the ready answer on their lips. When I first arrived there as a VP, I told the president that it seemed we were ready to turn a corner, that the patient could now leave the ICU and start on the road to full recovery. The president seemed pleased at my assessment, but in reality telling her that truth turned out to be a threat to the status quo in which she had happily mired herself.
How deep was that status quo quagmire?
Here is just one example. The school had a large and vital athletic program. At one point we brought in consultants to help strategize the future of athletics there. Toward the end of their work, they convened a meeting of VPs and other administrators in a classroom to preview their final report. The president was not present. I sat next to a vice president who could fairly be called the President’s Favorite. Some on campus referred to her as the “shadow president” who really ran the college.
The consultants started their presentation with findings that echoed my observations. They argued that the college was not on such a dire financial footing as we pretended and that we should abandon our “starvation mode.” In other words, we suffered less from budgetary shortfalls and more from a scarcity mentality.
The President’s Favorite began acting bizarrely when they made that statement. At first I thought she was having a medical emergency. As she stared straight forward, teeth gritting, she took rapid and rasping breaths. Most alarming was her face, which had turned a bizarre shade of red. Her hands, also red, gripped the edge of her school desk violently.
It took a few seconds for me to realize that this was her version of extreme anger. I saw it several times after, usually when she heard something (a name, an idea, a proposal) that did not please her or when she was caught in a falsehood. Most striking about this behavior though was not her rank unprofessionalism or whatever underlying mental duress it revealed. It was the fact that the consultants’ relatively rosy observation would set her off so. Her devotion to the scarcity mindset was such that she met any challenge with blind fury.
Here is a generous interpretation. For the President’s Favorite, the president, and a few other top administrators, the budgetary trauma of years before was still emotionally raw. You could say that their trauma put the “scar” in “scarcity.” Here is the thing with scars, though. While they remind us of past wounds, scars are, in fact, the site of healing.
Less generously, it was also true that the college’s scarcity mentality had become the primary source of the administration’s dominance over the institution. It secured their power. It bolstered their risk aversion and adherence to the status quo. It warranted their bad behavior and concealed their many failures.
Again, to be fair, that budget shortfall of years before had been real and threatened the very existence of the college. What’s more, even though it was on the road to recovery, the college’s budget was far from flush.
But a mindset is more about attitude and belief than facts on the ground, and a scarcity mindset will keep you mired in scarcity while an abundance mindset will help pull you out.
The president and most of her team loved the entitlement scarcity granted them, and she assembled a board of trustees that embraced scarcity as well. Anyone preaching that we adopt a different mindset, such as those athletic consultants, would be shown the door.
The other takeaway here has to do with the falsity of perpetual crisis, which I have written about before.
Mindsets on a Continuum
Mindsets are deeply held assumptions and attitudes. In education we know that if you have a growth mindset, you will tend to increase your intelligence while a fixed mindset will hold you back or worse. Scarcity and abundance mindsets are much the same.
I feel like I talk a lot about stark binary choices, such as the scarcity and abundance mindset, as establishing two poles on a continuum, but so do most conceptual choices. We never are, and should never be, entirely at one end of the continuum or the other although I fear that college I worked for was pretty close.
Their severe scarcity mindset continues to hinder progress while an abundance mindset would move them forward. Neither mindset is entirely based on an actual financial position. You can be impoverished and have an abundance mindset. In fact it is your best hope of changing your circumstances.
At the same time, as with that college, you can have means yet maintain a scarcity mindset. I will bet that you can name organizations and even individuals you know who are better off than they claim but never seem to get ahead. This scarcity mindset infects many higher ed institutions as well as businesses and nonprofit organizations.
The result is that such organizations remain under-resourced and understaffed while the underpaid workers are overworked. Surprise! People leave. New people must replace them. In stupider organizations they don’t replace the people who have left, and then they dump the excess work on the most loyal or most desperate-for-work ones who remain. Dumping work, even on the hardest working, most dependable, and most capable worker, will certainly hamper their productivity. Lowered productivity makes the organization less effective. Alternately, constantly having to hire and train replacements drains limited resources, further lowering productivity. Best to keep people content with their work.
And, to be clear, the way out of a scarcity mindset is not to work harder, particularly if you continue to do the same old things. Few work harder than the leadership at that college, but much of their work was unproductive and even counterproductive. Still they remained convinced that the way out of the scarcity rut was to stay the course while stomping harder on the gas pedal.
The scarcity mindset is the heart of the problem. It’s rarely poor resources or bad workers or even a lack of money or effort. It’s lousy leaders who are set in their ways.
I am willing to bet that someone out there has been worked up into a tight ball of self-righteous indignation and is angrily thinking at me, “You don’t have an appreciation for our true situation! You don’t understand how our budget works. You just don’t get it!” I’ve heard it all before.
If that is what you are thinking, you are right. I don’t know all the details, but it is not about the details or even the big picture view of the budget.
It’s time to come clean with yourself. Find a mirror. Look yourself in the eye, and repeat those same statements verbatim: “You don’t have an appreciation for our true situation! You don’t understand how our budget works. You just don’t get it!” Own your scarcity mindset. Now ask why it is so important to you.
And for the love of progress, let it go!
Do you or your business culture have a scarcity or abundance mindset? How do you know? What are the results?
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