Een winterfoto op de campus met het Berchmanianum in de achtergrond.
Een winterfoto op de campus met het Berchmanianum in de achtergrond.

Changes in management team Radboud Services: ‘Especially now important to keep direction’

You probably have noticed already: the Human Resources (HR), Information & Library Services (ILS) and Marketing & Communications divisions have new, temporary directors. Gerben Smit, general director of Radboud Services, explains the developments. ‘To bridge the gap, we are now deliberately choosing continuity in management.’

It has been a coming and going in Radboud Services' management team in recent months. ‘Actually, it started with myself,’ Gerben says with a quip. Indeed, at the beginning of this year, he personally triggered the changes by swapping the directorship at Campus & Facilities for the position of general director Radboud Services. It then took several months before his successor started at Campus & Facilities on 1 July: Suzanne Vahl - van Oostveen. Just when in the summer the management team seemed to be complete again, HR director Patricia Gielis and ILS director Iwan Holleman announced their departure, and at the end of summer Marketing & Communications director Pim van Zanen also announced that he had found a new job. From 1 November, head of the Radboud Services Management Support office Yvonne van Berlo will start working as operations director a.i. at the NOLAI programme within our university.

Necessary changes

‘Because of all the developments, we had to move quickly,’ Gerben looks back. Patricia and Iwan announced that they were leaving our university. Pim stayed on as a project manager for our organisation. In this role, he focuses on the necessary changes we need to make as a university to save costs due to the new government policy. We as Radboud Services also need to make an important contribution to this. Hence, it is precisely now that steering is needed. We immediately started looking for directors who can help flesh out this task'.

These new directors have now been found. For instance, Maaike Blom has been appointed as interim director HR and Charo Narvaez as interim director ILS. ‘Both come from outside the organisation,’ Gerben explains. ‘In her previous job, Maaike was HR director at Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem and brings a lot of HR knowledge and experience with her. In her previous interim assignments, Charo gained a lot of experience and affinity with information security, an important topic within ILS. The new, temporary director of Marketing & Communications also comes from outside the organisation, but was already active within the university. This is Paul Heere, who has been deployed as the university's spokesperson in recent months. With him, we have someone who has extensive experience in managing marketing and communications teams.' Roelie Schuring will fill the position as head of the Radboud Services Management Support office for the time being.

Time to bridge the gap

According to Gerben, it is a conscious decision to appoint interim directors. 'My experience is that a careful process to permanently fill a director position takes about six to seven months. So we have a time to bridge, which is why we opted to use interim directors. Meanwhile, the recruitment of the new HR and ILS directors is already under way. Recruitment for the most recently vacant director position, that at Marketing & Communications, is expected to start in the new year. My impressions of the interim directors so far are positive. In these turbulent times, with them we are deliberately choosing continuity in management and fresh energy to bridge the gap. Precisely because all three come from outside the university, they bring new insights and ideas that can be useful to our employees. Together with the other members of our management team, we now have a good mix of outside and inside experience'.

Still, Gerben can imagine that choosing interim directors raises questions. After all, how do the hiring costs of these directors compare with the task of making savings? 'You can see those costs as an investment in new insights and new energy. In the long run, we benefit from that. So we are now investing in the future of Radboud Services and the operations of Radboud University.'

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