Dr. Kelly and his New Podcast “Off The Cuff”

Maria Martinez

The President of UWG, Dr. Brendan Kelly, released his new podcast “Off The Cuff” on March 22to talk about topics about leadership and performance. With every monthly episode release, the guests will be executive leaders or high performers from any industry. Dr. Kelly is certain that leadership and performance are aspects of UWG education that students need to know about.

“When you go and tap in to other leaders and other environments we get to have a conversation in subjects that I think create great use to students, because we don’t have enough formal conversations about leadership,” said Dr. Kelly. “We have a lot of formal education in leadership, but the way people experience it and being able to hear about those details matters.”

According to Dr. Kelly, the difference between leadership and performance is that leadership is about taking action, while performance is more about the way you take action to achieve the goals in mind.

“I think being in a position of a leader means that you have a title of some sort that positions you,” said Dr. Kelly. “Performance is more about what impact have you actually made? How well are you doing at maximizing the opportunities that come along with that leadership position? If you are performing at a high level, then are you engineering your leadership to get those results?”

The second reason why Dr. Kelly and the department of University Communications & Marketing (UCM) worked on the podcast to bring students closer to speakers that they would not usually interact with.

“Sometimes you bring in some great speakers, but if you were not here to see it, then you do not get a chance to experience it,” said Dr. Kelly. “The podcast is a way of leveraging conversations with fascinating people and providing that to students.”

The third reason for producing the online content is to elevate UWG’s brand, a tendency that has been ongoing among most universities across the world. Moreover, Dr. Kelly wants to make the university relevant for the public sphere and to be recognized by listeners as an interesting place full of fascinating people. With this strategy, more people would be interested in attending the university.

Colton Campbell, the Director of Internal Communications and Strategic Initiatives in UCM, named the podcast with two latent meanings.

“I wear cufflinks seven days a week,” said Dr. Kelly. “I think that the cufflinks, for the team who was helping to put the podcast together, are a defining feature about me and that’s why you see in the logo on the podcast, the sleeve with the logo of UWG with a shield cufflink.”

“‘Off the Cuff’ is also a statement that infers conversation that has no predetermined content about that podcast,” continued Dr. Kelly. “It is like speaking casually and conversationally.” 

Even though the main audience are UWG students and staff, the podcast is accessible through Spotify and Apple Podcast to be listened by anybody that finds leadership and performance interesting.