Distinguished Staff Awards are given to staff who have made outstanding contributions to the mission of their unit or the University. They respond creatively to challenges, maintain the highest standards in their work, establish productive working relationships, and promote a respectful and supportive workplace. Awardees receive $5,000.

Kellus Stone - Industrial Engineering

Kellus Stone hasn't been an activist all her life — just since the age of 8, when she pushed for her Iowa hometown to start a softball league for girls.

She went on to become a rural community organizer, animal rights campaigner and president of the UW's largest staff union.

Moving to a new post last year in Industrial Engineering after a decade in the School of Communications, Stone wasn't sure she'd fit in among what she pictured as more conservative, pocket-protector types.

"I've come to view it," she jokes, "as a cultural exchange mission."

Kellus Stone

All exchanges should turn out like this. Stone's success in energizing Industrial Engineering has earned her a Distinguished Staff Award.

Within a year of becoming IE's administrator, Stone had helped activate a long-sought Visiting Committee of industry leaders, forged consensus on a strategic plan, cut thousands of dollars of needless expenses, launched a student advisory group, created user-friendly budget forms, reached out to alumni and dramatically boosted morale.

"Kellus has a drive that is noticeable in every project she pursues," wrote Professor Tony Woo, acting department director, in a glowing nomination letter. "It is her thoughtfulness and inventiveness that result in her projects being successful."

Stone's cultural exchange had good timing. Dean Denice Denton was already restructuring the College of Engineering, with an emphasis on strategic planning, student learning and customer service.

"I've always been interested in organizational change," Stone said.

But the small Industrial Engineering department desperately needed Stone's touch, according to a nomination letter signed by all three of her staff colleagues. Stone had been warned that the staff was dysfunctional. People communicated by e-mail rather than face-to-face.

Stone began by listening, and often implementing, staffers' ideas. She reorganized offices for efficiency. She encouraged her colleagues to sign up for training to develop their skills. The atmosphere improved.

Not bad for someone who'd never intended to be a supervisor. Stone had come to the UW 11 years ago as a receptionist — a major salary upgrade from her previous job as a community organizer in Appalachia.

Stone gradually moved up the staff ladder in the School of Communications, and former Director Don Pember remembers her playing a critical role in saving the school from proposed closure in 1995.

"She helped us organize and carry out massive data gathering, and worked side-by-side with faculty in developing our defense plans," Pember wrote in his nomination letter. "She valiantly held together the members of a very skittish staff."

When Professor Tony Giffard became director soon afterwards, he asked Stone to become his assistant and oversee the entire office staff. She immediately helped investigate and erase a series of budget deficits.

And while handling all those challenges, Stone found time to indulge her passion of dogsledding in the Methow Valley and rise to prominence in the Classified Staff Association-925, serving as president from 1995 to 1998. During her nine years with the union, membership rose from less than a third of eligible employees to more than 80 percent, she said, and UW employees made progress toward the kind of collective bargaining rights enjoyed in the private sector.

"She was instrumental in providing a more collaborative energy to the problem-solving process between management and the union," wrote Jessie Garcia, a specialist in the UW Training and Development office, to the staff awards committee.

And although no longer a union leader, Stone serves on the President's Advisory Committee on Women, where she focuses on classified staff issues.

Her next goal for Industrial Engineering, she said, is to deepen contact with alumni through a newsletter and other outreach efforts.

"We're trying," Stone said, "to create a sense of community."

Garcia, who sometimes invites Stone to speak to supervisor-training classes, praised her ability to balance advocacy of workers with her duties as a supervisor. Stone said it's a matter of focusing on what's practical and treating people with dignity.

"You can do both well," she said confidently.

Still, when she got a call from President Richard L. McCormick last month, the veteran activist and union leader momentarily felt as though she were being summoned to the principal's office. Instead, the president told her she'd earned a Distinguished Staff Award.

"She is the kind of person," said Pember, "that this award was designed to honor."

Steve Goldsmith, News & Information

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