Humour, fun, expertise and real life with RRU’s Cheryl Fitzpatrick

Cheryl Fitzpatrick built a career managing big changes. Working for national and multinational companies over three decades, she oversaw international consolidations and led complex operational mergers.

But when she made a big change — retiring — she found herself bored and uninspired.

Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, though, and a move from Alberta to Vancouver Island, she discovered a way engage her management skills, her vast experience, her love of learning and her passion for coaching by teaching and leading workshops.

For her work doing just that at Royal Roads University, she was recently awarded RRU’s 2023 Kelly Outstanding Teaching Award for Outstanding Workshop Facilitator.

Fitzpatrick, who teaches in Professional and Continuing Studies, designs and leads workshops on leadership, change management, managing conflict and customer service. She says doing so combines what she loved about her previous work with what she’d grown weary of.

“It was a natural progression,” she says, “doing what I love most without the business pressures.”

The Kelly nomination committee, in giving her the award, noted her ability “to connect with and build relationships with students,” and to provide “relatable, grounded and useful knowledge in a rich, real-life informed format.”

“Royal Roads has a reputation for providing learning that’s applied, that’s relevant, that’s authentic, that’s about self-learning,” Fitzpatrick says. “And that fits from a values point of view for me because you can’t teach something to someone, you can only help them learn.

“My job is just to facilitate. I just poke and prod and help them come to conclusions, and to test their own thinking about effective business practices."

"It’s coaching, it’s a lot of fun. So, I guess that’s what I bring to the learning: I bring humour, fun, expertise and real-life examples.”  

One real-life scenario she has used: What to do when an employee comes to a manager and complains about a co-worker’s body odour? The problem when presented draws nervous laughter, she says, but discussion prompts learning about management and difficult conversations.

The life experiences of workshop attendees are also valuable, Fitzpatrick says, because everyone learns from one another. 

“It’s really about leveraging the diversity in the classroom. If you leverage it, you get different perspectives, different points of view, different experience, different skills, so really, that then makes my teaching easy.

“They’re experts in their own way,” she says of students. “I think it’s my role to honour that diversity of experience and to leverage it and facilitate it. What’s the saying? The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Fitzpatrick, who also teaches at UVic, says she has a number or workshops lined up this fall at RRU, including sessions about managing people, performance and difficult situations, and  change management.

The Kelly Outstanding Teaching Awards are open to all Royal Roads University faculty members who are actively engaged in teaching for-credit or non-credit courses at RRU. A call for nominations is sent out each spring to faculty, staff, and students. Learn more about the awards and see past recipients.

Learn more about courses Fitzpatrick teaches in Professional and Continuing Studies including  Managing People and Performance and Customer Service Excellence. You can also request more information.