Close Up
Training czar relishes chance to serve
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“I think there’s been a desire for the sort of services that we’re providing for a while.”
The urge to help others has always been strong in Scott Morris.
In one of his first jobs as a Los Angeles police officer in South Central Los Angeles, he helped serve and protect residents in some of the country’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Now, as associate vice president for University Human Resources (HR) at UB, he helps university employees learn to better serve themselves, and their careers, through professional development.
As the head of the Organizational Development and Training (OD&T) unit of HR—created as part of the HR Transformation Initiative of UB 2020—Morris has grown OD&T into an office offering more than 50 instructor-led classes, and the largest eLearning library in the SUNY system. OD&T is staffed by eight employees, as well as members of the community and a core of volunteers from across the university.
“I think there’s been a desire for the sort of services that we’re providing for a while,” says Morris, who’s been in his current position about 16 months. “From early on, our goals were to create a fairly broad—and hopefully topical and interesting—catalog of classes and, coequally important, to create real organizational change.”
OD&T seeks to address the needs of a wide variety of employees from across the university. “Topics range from software and computer productivity to communication, negotiation, teamwork and conflict management. There are programs for front-line employees, as well as supervisors and managers,” he explains. For example, “The Supervisor’s Learning Forum,” a popular monthly series that attracts about 60 people per session, presents content from nationally recognized experts and features a discussion forum with a panel of UB supervisors.
“The whole heart of the program is about trying to change the dialogue between supervisors and employees,” says Morris. “You can’t take good people out of a bad environment, give them great training and put them back in that bad environment and expect things to change. You’ve also got to consider the chain of leadership and management that is critical to supporting the learning.”
Morris first came to UB in December 2004 as a consultant to President John B. Simpson on UB 2020. Co-founder and principal of AVCOR Consulting, whose clients included several University of California campuses, as well as Las Alamos National Laboratory, Morris had met Simpson while Simpson was serving as provost of UC-Santa Cruz. When Simpson became president of UB, he hired AVCOR to help craft the university’s strategic strengths concept. Morris joined UB full-time in 2006 as executive director of strategic planning.
“I really strongly believe in the ideas behind UB 2020 and in the University at Buffalo community,” says Morris. “We’re doing some great things here in Buffalo, and it’s for that reason that I chose to move 3,000 miles from Los Angeles.”
Prior to co-founding AVCOR in 2001, Morris was director of operations and training for ExecuTrain Inc., a software-training firm, and director of training and education for PeopleSupport Inc., a multinational provider of online customer service.
“I loved [policing] and I miss it, but ultimately it wasn’t very entrepreneurial,” Morris says of his career switch in 1996. “I had multiple desires all at once—the desire for public service, which was part of being a cop, but also the desire to be a businessman and entrepreneur.”
On a certain level, he says OD&T restored that chance to serve by providing the opportunity to teach people to excel in their professional—as well as personal—lives through training and development programs.
“Being able to put somebody into a program and help them come out on the other side thinking, I can use this—I can do something in my life that I couldn’t do before, that’s pretty exciting,” he says. “Not all jobs give you a chance to see that.”
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