The Kardia Group

One of the more significant challenges for department chairs is their relationship to departmental staff. On the one hand, being chair means depending more than ever upon the people, policies, and systems that keep the department functioning, making the staff one of your most important allies. At the same time, you become manager and supervisor, responsible in new ways for the outcomes produced by office staff and for the many aspects of addressing job performance, team dynamics, job satisfaction, and other personnel matters.

This role is made all the more challenging by the relative temporariness of the chair's role. Most department staff have seen numerous chairs come and go and have, amidst these changes, invested in their own ways in keeping the department stable.

The faculty often aggravate these challenges further in a variety of ways: by treating the staff badly, creating tensions and resentments; by fostering staff behaviors that benefit individual faculty but not the department as a whole; and by drawing staff into rivalries, territorial disputes, and conflicts that exist among the faculty.

Working with Staff as a New Leader
An important first step in your new leadership is to establish a working relationship with the department staff who directly support the department, program, or committee for which you are assuming authority. Because the staff have the day-to-day responsibility for this arena, they will have valuable expertise and investment - and if you're not working with these assets, you may find yourself inadvertently working against them.

A meeting with staff early on will be important to accomplish the following three goals:

- distinctly signaling that this is new leadership and a new day and acknowledging that this can be both exciting (creative, addressing long standing problems, etc.) and awkward (change in general, learning to communicate, not being able to take things for granted)

- being as forthcoming with them about your goals and ideas as possible so they don't feel like they have to second guess you or like they have to fight against you

- asking for their input, ideas, concerns, etc. as the ones who know this arena better than anyone; you won't necessarily agree with all they put on the table, but you do want to put their expertise to work, and also be able to talk through where their ideas don't match what you have in mind