Translucent Academic Leadership in 3 Steps
At a college meeting I once attended, one of the department chairs accused the dean of not being transparent enough in the way she made decisions. The dean answered that it wasn’t that simple. Confidential matters were sometimes involved. She couldn’t violate the trust of people who had shared certain...
When Academic Leaders Anger Their Stakeholders
Make no mistake about it: any job that requires you to say “No” to people from time to time will cause you to meet resistance. We sometimes end up angering individual stakeholders because we feel obliged to turn them down for a promotion, oppose them on an issue they care...
Fostering Strategic Autonomy
In geopolitical terms, the phrase strategic autonomy is often used to describe the desire of countries such as India and Turkey to negotiate treaties and engage in military activities without regard for the dictates of a stronger ally or superpower. In corporate or academic terms, strategic autonomy (along with its less mellifluous...
How an Academic Leader Changes a Lightbulb
The very first house I bought was a condominium, and the purchase price included 10 hours of service by an electrician. The idea was that each owner would want to customize the unit with special lighting fixtures and built-in appliances, and covering the cost of the electrician was intended to...
Checklists: An Academic Leadership Tool
There are probably few tools we can use in academic leadership that seem less interesting than a checklist. But as Atul Gawande argued in The Checklist Manifesto (2010), checklists aren’t an excuse for mindlessness; they’re a recognition of how complex our lives have become. It’s the humble checklist that keeps us safe...
Best Practices in Preparing Academic Leaders
It's increasingly common for colleges and universities to offer programs designed to help chairs, deans, and other academic leaders become more effective. Sometimes falling under a center for teaching and learning, at other times existing as an independent office for leadership and professional development, these programs reflect the recognition that...
Getting Organized: Tips for Academic Leaders
Many people want to get organized but don’t know where to begin. Or, they make a major effort to reduce the clutter in their offices but can’t stay organized, and their desks soon become as messy as they were before their last attempt to purge the papers from their offices. So, how...
Succession Planning for Academic Leaders
Every academic leader should have a succession plan. A good leadership succession plan provides a way for the college or university to reconsider how it performs core functions and maintains suitable progress while taking the steps necessary to secure its long-term future.
Take a Vacation – Please! Maintaining Work-Life Balance
Although workshops on academic leadership frequently devote sessions to the topic of “work-life balance,” that phrase is really misleading. It seems to imply that we’re either working or living but never doing both at the same time.
When Academic Leadership Comes with Baggage
The baggage we bring to work with us can take a variety of forms. It could occur because we applied for our positions as internal candidates and suddenly find ourselves as bosses of the very people who only a short time ago we regarded as close friends. It could occur...
