Michael Grajek, vice president and dean of the college at Hiram College, speaks during the Division/Department Chair Workshop in Cleveland, Ohio, on “Working with Chief Academic Officers and Other Administrators.”

Nearly 250 department/division chairs representing 102 CIC member and nonmember colleges and universities participated this spring in a new series of regional workshops that explored the distinctive challenges of department leadership in small and medium-sized independent institutions.
    The theme of the workshops was "Strengthening Academic Leadership in Independent Colleges and Universities." During the interactive sessions, participants discussed issues such as recruiting and orienting new faculty, leading academic change, motivating and rewarding faculty performance, developing departmental goals in alignment with the institutional mission, the role of the department chair in faculty development, and working with administrators, among other topics.
    Department and division chairs in an opening session in Cleveland agreed that the most essential aspects of a chair's position include:

• good leadership skills
• a special responsibility to mentor new and junior faculty members
• obtaining faculty agreement or "buy-in" to departmental goals
  
• "selling" the department's needs to the deans
  
• good human relations and management skills
• a honed ability to recruit and hire excellent faculty
• finding a balance between faculty interests and departmental needs

    Ann Lucas, professor emeritus of organizational development at Fairleigh Dickinson University (NJ) and author of Strengthening Departmental Leadership: A Team-Building Guide for Chairs in Colleges and Universities and Leading Academic Change: Essential Roles for Department Chairs, spoke at the San Francisco workshop on leadership and how to create effective department teams. She said department leaders must "develop shared goals with faculty members, create a climate of trust, use participative decision-making when commitment and diversity of views are needed, have good facilitation skills, manage conflict effectively, and work continuously on leadership skill development," among other team-building skills. Goal-setting is particularly important to guide and direct behavior, provide challenges and standards against which performance can be assessed, and serve as an organizing function, Lucas said. She stressed that goals should be "specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic, and timely" and that chairs should "listen actively, help faculty members set goals, follow-up on goal-setting with new faculty or those who have set goals too high, and help faculty members celebrate successes or tolerate failures when they take risks."
    Four current chief academic officers, Virginia McKinley of Warren Wilson College (NC), Michael A. Grajek of Hiram College (OH), Terry B. Smith of Columbia College (MO), and Susan D. Gotsch of Hartwick College (NY) were among the workshop presenters.
    Other presenters included Kent M. Weeks, Senior Attorney with the law association of Weeks, Anderson, and Baker, and author of Managing Departments: Chairpersons and the Law; Howard Altman, professor of modern languages and linguistics, University of Louisville, and author and speaker on faculty and chair development; Dan Wheeler, professor and coordinator, Office of Professional and Organizational Development, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and co-author of The Department Chair: New Roles, Responsibilities and Challenges; and Maggie Schramm, professor of English and co-director of the Hartwick College Honors Program.
    Participants at most of the workshops also role-played several case studies, including one in which a chair advising a faculty member on his ineffective teaching methods (mostly lecture, with little interactivity) was observed and critiqued. Following the role-playing, participants concluded that chairs in that situation need to ask questions such as: What were the goals of the lecture? How are you assessing whether those goals were met? How are you helping students with different learning styles? In addition, participants suggested that the chair recommend small, incremental changes in teaching style, such as interactive additions to the lecture, and allow the faculty member to be an observer in the chair's classroom.
    During concluding sessions, participants discussed how to use what they learned at the workshop on campus. They said they would share information from the workshop with chief academic officers and faculty members, discuss with the admissions office the strengths of their departments to improve the effectiveness of admissions in recruiting new students, and hold divisional workshops to encourage closer working relations and more information sharing within the division.
    Many participants evaluating the workshop said that the experience helped them gain perspective by hearing about the challenges faced by other division and department chairs. A participant said the workshop also helped to "develop a concrete understanding of how institutional mission drives departmental mission, gain insights into common problems, work collaboratively on solutions, and better understand the legal obligations and issues for the chair."
    The workshops were held in the San Francisco area, CA (April 12-13); Charlotte, NC (May 29-31); Cleveland, OH and St. Louis, MO (June 4-6); and Albany, NY (June 11-13).
    A new series of Division/Department Chair Workshops focused primarily on
a single issue are being planned for Spring 2003.

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Last updated: July 10, 2002
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