The Southwest Way to Success

This chapter addresses the relationship between organizational culture and student success. It chronicles the experiences of a first-time president of a mid-size urban community college, detailing how she engaged the campus community to bring together a siloed culture, still dealing with the impacts of a controversial merger that occurred 15 years earlier. The student success issues she inherited, low enrollment, retention, and graduation, were symptomatic of a more significant problem. What manifested as broken student processes were, in essence, a result of a fractured culture, still holding on to wounds from the past. The president realized that to improve student success, she had to find a way to address the cultural issues that threatened the institution's success and damaged critical relationships in the community. This chapter demonstrates how using an institutional capacity framework and applying leadership theories effectively changed the organizational culture, resulting in remarkable improvements in student success at Southwest Tennessee Community College.