Departmental Leadership in Higher Education
Leadership in higher education comes with unique challenges. While academic training hones specialized expertise, it often doesn't fully prepare individuals to become department chairs and engage the complex skills needed to drive a consensus-driven culture forward.
This article offers guidance for department chairs and other faculty leaders on how to meet today’s leadership challenges by leveraging personal strengths, setting clear goals, communicating effectively, focusing advocacy efforts, and leveraging strengths.
Rising to the Challenge
Through our coaching and consulting with academic and administrative leaders at the Academic Leadership Group, we have observed the pressures these individuals face as they strive to fulfill their institution’s mission in demanding environments. Effective leadership requires navigating contentious discussions and balancing personal views with institutional responsibilities.
In a budget-constrained environment, faculty leaders are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources. Department chairs need to be creative in pursuing resources and focusing the energies of faculty and staff to maximize outcomes aligned with the institution’s expectations.
For new leaders, it is particularly beneficial to understand proactive steps that can enhance effectiveness in their roles. This approach helps navigate potential institutional barriers, ensuring a more productive and fulfilling leadership experience.
Accessing Leadership Strengths
Understanding and developing core skills for effective leadership is a worthwhile investment that yields benefits both now and in the future. Key areas in which we have helped leaders develop confidence and effectiveness include:
Setting meaningful goals
Communicating to build relationships
Listening for understanding and influence
Focusing advocacy to deliver results
Knowing your strengths, and the strengths of others
Set Meaningful Goals
When assuming a leadership role in higher education, set clear and measurable goals for yourself. These goals should align with your purpose in taking on the role and be meaningful to both you and the department's operations.
Our coaches engage you in a goalsetting process whereby you reflect on past successes, current challenges, and craft motivational and achievable goals going forward. Or, if you would like to try it yourself, here are some questions you can answer and then reflect on to help get clarity around your goals:
What brought you the most happiness in your professional role last year?
What activities did you engage in that brought your greatest results?
What people or activities or habits contributed most to your challenges or frustrations?
What would you like to do more of in the upcoming year?
What would you like to do less of in the upcoming year?
Communicate to Build Relationships
As a faculty leader, you need to navigate, build, and maintain a broader set of relationships than when operating as an individual faculty member. This shift in leadership requires synthesizing diverse views and advocating for directions that best suit your department or role. While it's tempting to rely on email or large group discussions, it's crucial to engage in direct dialogues and invite perspectives so that people feel heard. This may mean balancing individual, small and large group discussions, and advocating for a position based on this input.
Listen for Understanding and Influence
Convening groups and listening to people’s perspectives are learned skills. As a leader, your goal is to ensure others trust that you understand their perspectives as well as those from different parts of the university.
For example, we worked with a senior faculty leader who faced challenges in gaining consensus. The large discussions were contentious, with conflicts and disagreements. We coached the leader to move the dialogue to one-on-one conversations to clarify different perspectives. This enabled the leader to acknowledge these perspectives and bring smaller groups together to discuss specific issues before presenting a recommendation to the full group.
Focus Advocacy Efforts
Prioritize a few key initiatives to move forward, and articulate them well. This involves creating a business case and understanding the broader institutional context in which your request is evaluated. Practice articulating the rationale and stories about why your priorities matter to the mission. Enlist others to help refine your message and build a compelling story. Remember, influencing others with different perspectives requires framing your request to support their goals amd meeds as well as yours. This is a crucial skill.
Know Your Strengths, and Build on These
Understanding what you do well - what people really value from your leadership - is foundational to growing your leadership skills. You may already have an idea of this, and, there are likely more that you could discover.
We use two methods to support faculty leaders in strengths discovery. One is the Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment. This assessment ranks your core strengths and also gives helpful feedback on potential weaknesses or pitfalls, which in the CliftonStrengths context are often misuse or overuse of a strength.
Another is to get leadership feedback. We do this through interview-based 360 assessments where we work with faculty leaders to identify people that they work with and gain valuable input on both strengths and opportunities to learn and grow.
And, knowing your own strengths can also raise your awareness of the strengths of others, allowing you to better engage with and leverage your team.
At the Academic Leadership Group, we provide university leaders with the tools they need to succeed and thrive in their roles. We would love to hear from you!