Perceived authority with minimal accountability is often what makes management roles in academia challenging. The department chair, or head of school, is at the coalface of managing faculty in this imponderable governance set-up. The role entails annual appraisals; managing workloads among teaching, research and service; assigning funds for graduate student support through teaching assistants; and managing relationships among students, faculty and staff. All this needs to be done with close attention to budget allocations and preventing deficits on departmental accounts.
The task is emotionally challenging because you are managing colleagues and friends knowing that you will be returning to their fold after working on “the dark side”, as they often perceive it.
- Spotlight guide: Should I become a university administrator?
- Are you ready to manage?
- Streamlining a move from a faculty position to a leadership role
This tension is further accentuated on unionised campuses. As a faculty member, you can be part of the bargaining unit but, as chair, you move to the other side of the fence as an administrator.
In most organisations, authority is the ability to exercise power for behavioural change. However, in academia, most authority comes with highly constrained power. This key distinction is my starting point for the following six recommendations for surviving the years as a department leader.
1. Make sure protocols for decision-making are clear
The first task of a chair on assuming office should be to carefully review the department by-laws that will govern decision-making. These will follow some sort of central faculty handbook or guidance document. Ensure that your by-laws clearly articulate what decisions will be made by consensus or vote, and where executive decisions are permissible. Being clear on protocols will avoid delays and disputes. For example, appointing affiliate or adjunct positions usually requires a faculty vote, while finding a temporary instructor to fill in for a course because of a faculty absence should be an executive authority decision to ensure smooth teaching transitions.
2. Show strength through vulnerability
Even though you are the captain, you and the faculty are on the same team playing the same ball game. If the team loses, you all lose (and the captain gets more of the heat for a loss). Showing that you are just as vulnerable as other members of the department will give you strength.
Share with faculty that the chair has far more vulnerability in that role than a tenured faculty member. The dean can fire the chair in their leadership role and return them to a regular faculty position without any process in most cases, whereas even a pre-tenure faculty member cannot be fired without a protracted human resource process. And the situation for tenured faculty is, of course, immeasurably more secure than the executive role of a chair.
Be upfront about the process for complaining to senior administrators about your own performance.
3. Make students your champions
Establishing personal rapport with students is essential for any chair since your primary “clients” as well as your “products” for educational posterity are the students. Sharing your own experiences as a graduate student and ensuring they know that while they might not agree with all your decisions, they should never doubt your support for them in the long run is a good way to build empathy. For example, decisions on departmental financial support for graduate students who are languishing with delays can be highly contentious. Make it clear to students that your role is to ensure that neither the adviser takes advantage of them nor that they take undue advantage of the adviser.
4. Professional inclusion beyond personal friendship
Chairs may have personal friendships with faculty and greater understanding and camaraderie with some colleagues than with others. This could lead to perceptions of bias, and it is incumbent on the chair to ensure that personal friendships do not interfere with professional inclusion. Make sure you have inclusive social events where all feel welcome and spend equal time – so far as possible – interacting with all faculty members. This can be easier said than done.
Similarly, be wary of any political bias in your humour at public gatherings. Often the mood of the moment might put you at ease, but never underestimate the urge for faculty and students to judge your every statement – even in an informal setting.
5. Mentor junior staff
Work with the dean to ensure you have a good trajectory for continuing your legacy; training of other faculty as future chairs should also be part of a broader administrative plan. Mentoring is more art than science, and it can only be effective if the mentee is willing to take advice. Setting up a relationship between mentors and mentees often requires the chair to play a mediating and matchmaking role.
Department leaders can informally help with mentoring but it is best if peer faculty who are not in leadership roles perform the mentoring duties to avoid perceived conflicts of interest. A mentoring plan and inclusion of feedback from mentors at annual appraisal of junior faculty can also ensure there is a broader accountability net for junior faculty while supporting them through challenges.
6. Documenting successes and lessons learned as a team
Ultimately, you want your time in chair to be remembered for accomplishments in moving the department forward. Carefully document your accomplishments every year and share the successes with faculty, because they might not be aware of what you have done behind the scenes to make their lives better. For example, in my first year as chair, I worked in getting our department classified as a “science discipline” with the US government, which resulted in international students being eligible for an additional year of occupational training after their graduation. This helped a lot of students and faculty who were recruiting postdocs. If I had not sent an email to communicate this achievement more broadly, many would not have known that it took an involved process to make this happen. While some may criticise you for being a self-promoter, you can use wording that couches these achievements as a collective effort. The whole team is winning, not just you.
At the end of the day, the chair’s role in academia is often a stepping stone to future administrative roles in the academy, but it is important that faculty see you working towards a legacy irrespective of any career advancement. Chairs are in many ways the touchstone tests of the tenure system in academia. As Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, once noted: “Tenure, at its best, protects academic freedom; at its worst, it can entrench complacency and resistance to change.” The role of department leaders is at the forefront of this tension between holding faculty to account for their performance while respecting the values of “shared governance” that are the hallmark of the academy.
Saleem H. Ali is chair of the department of geography and spatial sciences and Blue and Gold distinguished professor of energy and the environment at the University of Delaware.
If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.
comment