Watch the Full Conversation (18 min)
At its most recent annual conference, APPA set up a room for 100 senior facilities officers, and 130 to 140 showed up. They came to discuss whether facilities still has a strategic seat at the table. Lalit Agarwal, APPA's President & CEO and a longtime facilities leader at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, says the leaders who keep that seat present facilities problems as institutional risk and arrive with a solution. He also covers facilities workforce development, the supervisor skills nobody teaches, and how APPA helps facilities teams move from fear of AI to confident, everyday use.
→ Facilities leaders earned a wider role during the pandemic. The ones who kept it think about student success, health care, and budget, not only buildings.
→ Promotions often skip the training. A great tradesperson becomes a supervisor overnight and has to learn to lead people who used to be peers.
→ Facilities staff trust AI after they use it on facilities problems they already know. Generic AI training does not build that trust.
→ Institutions that keep making progress through budget cuts protect their training budgets and treat a low-cost failure as a lesson.
→ APPA rebuilt its programs and replaced every legacy platform in two years. When a new tool could not scale, it cancelled the contract and moved on.
More conversations with higher ed leaders
Explore more Bow Tie Tuesday episodes and resources on space planning, occupancy, and facilities strategy. Browse CampusIQ resources.
Aaron Benz: What do facility leaders need to know today? Welcome to another Bow Tie Tuesday. My name is Aaron Benz, and it is my pleasure to welcome Lalit to the podcast. If you don't know Lalit, he had a long tenure at the University of Nebraska and is now the President of APPA. If you don't know APPA, APPA helps over a thousand institutions now, which is pretty amazing. Their people, all in facilities, get trained. How do they know what's best practice? How do they work through new problems? How do they use AI and apply it? They're doing all sorts of amazing things. Lalit's been a hard charger. I respect him a ton for what he's done and helped reimagine, reshape, and create: a new type of energy in the ecosystem. So Lalit, welcome to Bow Tie Tuesday.
Lalit Agarwal: Hey, thanks, Aaron. I appreciate you calling me on, and I've always enjoyed our interactions. This is a different format for our interaction, but I'm looking forward to it.
Aaron Benz: Yes, sir. Well, let's start with facility leaders today. If we think about the pandemic, all of a sudden facility leaders were brought to the table in a different kind of way. Some have kept their seat, and maybe some haven't. Across the spectrum, there's more pressure than ever. There's more deferred capital renewal. There are budget pressures, always, and facilities becomes a target. What are you seeing that really separates facility leaders? The ones that are keeping their seats at the table, the ones that are still trying to earn it, and where facility leaders are maybe lacking something they need to step up with. What are the key traits where you'd say, if you want to succeed today, you should really keep these things in mind?
Lalit Agarwal: That's a really good question, and it's one we recently covered at our pre-conference workshop in DC when we hosted our annual conference. The Senior Facilities Officers Summit is our pre-conference workshop at the annual conference. It had a big hiatus because of the pandemic. We hadn't held that workshop since 2019, but it was oversubscribed when we were in DC. We had 130 or 140 people in the room, and the room only accommodated 100 people, so we had to bring in extra tables and chairs.
The engagement there was amazing, because the whole conversation was: how do facilities leaders see themselves as strategic leaders rather than just stewards of a physical infrastructure? There was a lot of conversation on how to take facilities issues and convert them into institutional risk. One of the panel discussions was about exactly this. Do we still have the seat? Is there a seat? What is going on?
It was an interesting panel, and it resonated with my general thinking. If you are a senior facilities officer and you have that growth mindset, that curiosity mindset, you got a taste of what it felt like to have that seat during the pandemic. Facilities was one of the few teams that stayed on campus. Sometimes they were put in charge of all the testing and isolation and the caretaking of campus during those times. So you got a taste that it is way bigger than just the infrastructure. This is a bigger community with a bigger need.
If you went through that cycle and came out the other side, and you had a different mindset, you may have gone back to your day job and said, all right, I'm going back to worrying about the infrastructure only. But if you had that growth mindset and wanted to do more, you started thinking: now I see that when the President asks for budget, it is bigger than just my infrastructure. If you are in that mindset and you keep moving it forward even now, you bring solutions to your President, your Provost, and your Chancellor before they even ask. And it's not just solving an infrastructure problem. It's also solving a student experience problem, a student success problem, or health care on your campus if you happen to have a hospital. That's where you not only get to keep the seat, you get glued to that seat, because they don't want you to leave it. You are helping them solve the big problems on campus.
Aaron Benz: I love that. I'm not just here to bring you problems. I'm here to create solutions, and I can see beyond my own problems to the bigger vision of the university.
Lalit Agarwal: Exactly.
Aaron Benz: Tell me about workforce. There are a lot of people in higher ed today who are getting close to retirement, and lots of new technology is arriving, whether it's robotics, AI, or other things. If you could encapsulate the skill sets a facility leader should embrace, or upskill themselves in, to be successful as a modern-day facility leader, what would those traits be?
Lalit Agarwal: We take the assumption that you are good at what you do. Your trade, the skill you bring, you're already good at that. But do you have the right skills to be a good leader? Do you have the right skills to be a technologist? Because trust me, whether we like it or not, technology is an enabler for us to be successful as we move things forward. Have that growth mindset, that curiosity mindset, and when you do get new solutions, make sure you fully implement them and fully use them. If you have the ability to see through the noise and go for the signal, that's where you're going to be a successful facilities leader.
APPA is very proud to have professional development offerings for every stage of your career, from individual contributor all the way to senior facilities officer, with supervisors and managers in between. Take our Supervisor's Toolkit as an example. Let me ask you, Aaron: who typically becomes the supervisor of the plumbing team?
Aaron Benz: Somebody who was a plumber, I'd imagine. Odds are they were the best plumber or the best electrician, and they become the supervisor.
Lalit Agarwal: Most teams promote them, but they don't give them the tools to be successful as an effective supervisor. That's where APPA saw the gap. In the early 2000s, we created the Supervisor's Toolkit program. It teaches upcoming supervisors, or supervisors new to their role, how to hang your tool belt at the door and start acting and thinking like a supervisor. How do you suddenly shift gears from being somebody you had an adult beverage with last night to being their boss? They're no longer necessarily your buddies. They see you as a boss. A lot of those skills are not intuitive, and a lot of people struggle with them. I struggled with it early in my career when I started supervising people. Those are the kinds of tools you need, and APPA is very proud to have a robust set of professional development offerings that let you grow into that career.
Skills development is never ending. Nobody knew five years ago that AI was going to take us by storm the way we are seeing it now. Aaron was actually at one of our workshops in February, where we brought together AI enthusiasts and early adopters from facilities, and we talked about how early adopters are implementing it. But what we heard there was: that's all good, there are these experiments and trials going on, but I am scared of AI. I'm not even sure AI is going to give me the right answers. Maybe I'll do something with AI, take it to my boss, and it will be wrong. That fear existed, rightfully so. If you haven't done it, you don't know how to trust it.
So in April, APPA launched a new program called AI for Facilities 101: From Curious to Confident. More than 100 people have gone through that program, and the feedback has been high. Everybody has said, yes, I am more confident now in how I can use it. The big difference is that it's not generic AI training. We use specific facilities examples that these people deal with on a regular basis. What was the Wayne Gretzky saying? Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is right now. That's where APPA is. We are learning from our members and delivering the programs they told us they would find value in.
Aaron Benz: That's awesome. It's the love of learning, at the end of the day. Everything can change your circumstances, especially in higher ed. The pressures change and get more severe. Maybe there are windows of opportunity. Regardless of the situation, how are you and your people prepared for the moment? One of the ways I think about that training, and about the next generation of not just facility leaders but any employee, is that it's not only adopting technology. It's programs that aren't just for the frontier, where I might personally be one of the crazy people at the very edge pushing forward, but that raise the floor. How do we change individuals so they can reimagine what the future will be like, and empower them? When you think about universities that do this really well and have a positive vision of the future, what do you see them emphasize? If an institution wasn't doing it, what would you say is a first-principle, cultural thing they need to embrace?
Lalit Agarwal: You just used the key word: culture. It's something you have to make part of your organizational culture. First, you're okay with failing, as long as you fail fast and learn from it, especially when the cost of a failure is low. But if you are not curious, if you don't accept that change is coming, and you keep your head in the sand thinking this will blow over, it's not going to happen. So that culture becomes very important, and so does a culture of learning. We are educational institutions. We propagate education. Sometimes it is sad to see facilities organizations that don't embrace it themselves and don't build their own skill sets.
But there are definitely many institutions that are very active, with APPA and outside of APPA. I have seen institutions really engage: what is the best practice out there? We're going to learn from it, and if it makes sense for us, we'll implement it in our own way on our campus. The advantage is that you learn from others not just what to do, but what not to do. If something was tried and failed somewhere, don't assume it will fail for you. Learn what the failure was and why it happened. Does it still make sense for you, and what can you do to avoid that failure and turn it into a success? That culture keeps curiosity at the forefront of everybody's mind, and that's where we see institutions being very successful. Their budgets have been slashed, and they are still making progress toward their goals and improving the value they bring to the institution.
Aaron Benz: I'll tell you, from a lot of the institutions I deal with or speak to, it's always so clear. You meet institutions that say, I will cut everything except my training and education budget, and I'll continue to reinvest in my people. As we talked about before, there's that CEO and CFO question. The CFO says, what if we train them and they leave? And the CEO says, what if we don't train them and they stay? In a world where things are changing so fast, it feels even more important.
Let me ask you a different question. You've been CEO of APPA for a couple of years now. I think it's two years and some change?
Lalit Agarwal: Two years and four weeks. Not that I'm counting.
Aaron Benz: What's been something unexpected, something delightful, or something that changed your worldview as you stepped into this role?
Lalit Agarwal: I was a practitioner of facilities. I was a member of APPA for many years. I went through their programs as a student, and I also facilitated some teaching programs at APPA while I was still at the university. It looks easy from the outside, but there is a lot more to running an organization like APPA, especially with the diversity of programs APPA offers. So it has been a little humbling from many perspectives.
It's a 112-year-old organization. Two years ago, when I joined the team and we started looking at everything we were offering, it was very clear that it needed some reimagination and some revamping. We started working on that, and we started treating the 112-year-old organization more like a startup, because we needed that startup mindset to move fast and sometimes fail fast. We are embracing that same principle ourselves: if we have to fail, let's fail fast.
In fact, we have completely redone all the technology platforms APPA had. The last one will most likely be done next week, so none of the legacy platforms will continue forward. While we were revamping, we picked a couple of solutions where, after licensing, it was clear they would not scale for what we were trying to do. And guess what? We said, fine, let's cancel that agreement. Some places we were not able to get any refund, which was part of the deal, and some places were generous and gave us a prorated refund for unused services. Again, if you're going to fail, fail fast, but don't let the fear of failure be a blocker to progress. That has paid off for us. We have been able to move fast and still deliver a lot of value for our members.
Aaron Benz: That's awesome. To close, what are you looking forward to most in this next year, your third year of leading APPA?
Lalit Agarwal: So far, everything we have done has been reimagining, rebuilding, and revamping the programs APPA has had for many, many years. The AI course I talked about is one of the first things we are doing that is brand new. We have a few more ideas for new programs. Unfortunately, I'm unable to reveal those on this podcast right now.
Aaron Benz: You can't give us any secrets?
Lalit Agarwal: No, unfortunately not, because they're not baked yet and they may not come true. And if I'm going to fail, I also want to fail silently. We are excited about where we are headed. We have done this mostly by listening and observing. We are not just assuming what people are thinking. We are asking them: what are you thinking? How can this be better? We use the feedback we get from everybody to make strategic decisions. We have an amazing board of directors that is very supportive of the progress we have made. So thanks to them, and thanks to the amazing APPA team, we have made some really good progress.
Aaron Benz: Awesome. It's great catching up with you. Hopefully we can have you on another Bow Tie Tuesday in the future and see how those undisclosed programs panned out, whatever they may be. Great having you on this Bow Tie Tuesday.
Lalit Agarwal: All right. Thanks, Aaron. Have a good rest of your day.