8 Deans Share: What I Wish I Had Known

Joseph P. Ward

Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Utah State University

In addition to nine academic department heads and program directors, more than a dozen professional staff members report directly to me or to my lead assistant. The portfolios of these staff members include academic advising, budget and human-resource management, fund raising, public relations, alumni engagement, recruiting, and event planning. All of these areas of activity contribute meaningfully to the success of the college. I am responsible for the college’s overall health, but I rely on my staff colleagues to carry out their work with little direct oversight from me.

I was not as prepared as I could have been to manage such a complex organization when I became a dean. My previous administrative experience as chair of a large academic department certainly introduced me to the variety of functions of a college, but leading a departmental staff of two is very different than what I am currently doing.

Training in organizational communication and development would have smoothed my transition into being a dean. As I began my work, I was expected to articulate general goals for the college’s staff members, although they recognized better than I did the challenges and opportunities that we faced. Training would have helped me to understand how information that is essential to the college’s operations flows both among staff members and between the staff and the dean. It would also have provided instruction on helping staff members to flourish individually while they support the work of everyone else; this instruction could have included guidance on evaluating staff performance.

Advice from colleagues across the college and the university has been invaluable as I have learned how to work with my college’s professional staff. I am sure, though, that with additional training I could have avoided some missteps along the way.

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James J. Winebrake

Dean of the College of Liberal Arts
Rochester Institute of Technology

I became dean after eight and a half years as a department chair. Because of the experiences the chair position provided, I needed little formal training in the administrative aspects of the dean’s job. I knew how to work with budgets, manage personnel, develop programs, hire and tenure faculty, and raise money.

What was new to me — and for which I received little formal training — was my leadership role during times of crisis. Whether triggered by nature (e.g., wildfires, blizzards, hurricanes), people (e.g., confrontation, violence, misdeeds), or technology (e.g., cyberattacks), crises require leaders to act quickly to mitigate harmful outcomes. Deans are often in positions where they are their college’s first responders, and their immediate actions after a crisis are critical. Good instincts and decision-making skills are not enough; deans need training in a wide range of crisis-management techniques.

How crises are managed can have significant consequences to an institution and the safety of its community. We have fire drills regularly on our campus, and it’s this kind of practice that ensures community safety. Crisis-management drills that cover different types of situations would be a welcome part of onboarding and ongoing training for all deans. The time for deans to think about ways to respond to a crisis is not after the crisis has occurred.

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Debra A. Feakes

Dean of the Shaheen College of Arts and Sciences
University of Indianapolis

A course for new deans that offers insights on workplace culture would be valuable. At a recent senior staff meeting, my university colleagues brought in an attorney who specializes in workplace culture. He offered concrete examples of poor workplace cultures — and the resulting litigation — and also provided recommendations for creating a good workplace culture. I would have loved an extended workshop similar to this before beginning my position as dean.

On another note, There is not enough succession planning within university settings. I was trained to always ask, “If something happens to you, who is going to take your place, and are they prepared to do so?” For internal searches, this is particularly true. There is no reason why an internal candidate isn’t familiar with all of the duties required of the dean. For external candidates, it seems that any university should be able to provide an orientation with basic information about campus policies and procedures, common deadlines and budget cycles, and institutional priorities.

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John W. Wright

Dean of Liberal Arts & Humanities
South Louisiana Community College

One of the realities of serving as an academic dean at a typical multicampus community college is that you are managing what is usually a fairly large instructional and support staff, spread across sites that can be remote from your central location. Like most new deans, when I assumed my first administrative appointment, I had experience managing and organizing meetings as a faculty member at the departmental, campus, and committee levels, and I considered myself quite organized and effective at running such meetings.

As a dean, however, I quickly discovered that the scope of pulling together necessary meetings of constituents in my division (especially with key people dealing with the logistics of travel and scheduling from our outer campus sites) made effective organization, and indeed simply initially scheduling such meetings, a challenge that most are unprepared for before becoming dean.

Those logistical challenges are then magnified by the fact that you are no longer a “fellow colleague,” but instead an academic leader, balancing the tasks of administrating policies and procedures while also listening to and advocating for the needs of your division and its educational programs. In short, you are now alone in front of a large group of passionate educators with a wide variety of needs, concerns, and ideas, and it is your task to keep the divisional train on the tracks, heading toward a common goal while still addressing any number of individual tensions.

That can be a daunting learning experience for the new dean. It is something that could be made more of an onboarding process at institutions, especially community colleges. Experienced academic leaders can provide, through institutional leadership academies or leadership team retreats, experiences and best-practice training for their new deans on ways to effectively organize, manage, and drive divisional-level meetings.

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Deborah Merrill-Sands

Dean of the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics
University of New Hampshire

A ll new deans should take a leadership course during their first year. This not only helps them hone critical skills but also allows them to step back and reflect on their performance. I took several such courses before becoming a dean, and subsequently I taught in the executive-education-leadership programs at Simmons College. Teaching on the topic is very helpful in keeping you reflective and mindful about your own leadership.

Similarly, I would recommend that all universities give new deans the opportunity to attend a robust leadership-development program that includes a 360-degree assessment and coaching for at least six months after the course. This would help to ensure that the new deans take the insights they glean about their strengths and areas for improvement and put them into practice. The coach can help the deans remain focused and reflective on the behaviors they have decided they need to strengthen or reinforce.

A 360-degree performance assessment after one year is an excellent way to get candid feedback from diverse stakeholders on your leadership performance. Other useful areas are negotiations, strategy, leading and managing change, managing high performers, and providing feedback constructively.

I also enlisted the support of a strategic coach my first two years as dean. She helped me to understand and navigate the institutional landscape and to develop effective strategies for advocating for my school. In addition, she helped me reflect on my leadership and strengthen the skills I needed. I have always thought that this was one of the most important factors that positioned me for success as a dean.

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Darryl Scriven

Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, Business and Education
Winston-Salem State University

Although robust fund raising is rarely under the purview of department chairs, advancement work is an increasing expectation for deans (new or otherwise) and is vital to furthering institutional objectives. Training in how to create a development plan would expose future deans to the fund-raising process as well as help to generate early cooperative energy among chairs, deans, institutional-advancement staff members, and foundations.

As a new dean without a dedicated advancement officer within my unit, it was difficult for me to juggle college-administration duties and fund-raising opportunities. Each set of donors has different priorities, so it takes time to do research, cultivate relationships, communicate needs, and request the appropriate amount of funds. There is a rhythm to these encounters that can be challenging without previous development exposure.

In my case, I was fortunate to have worked as an associate director at the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care, at Tuskegee University. Because we lacked a dedicated funding source, all operational costs came from sponsored research and fund raising. Consequently, the director often took me to visit donors and funding agencies to solicit support for programming and annual costs. As a result, the development process included active learning opportunities for me to gain competency securing major gifts. New deans need similar opportunities to build their skills.

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Maria R. Altobello

Dean of the College of Graduate and Professional Studies
Franklin Pierce University

Most deans arrive in the position with terminal degrees but not necessarily any formal preparation in leadership and management. Aside from strategic thinking, deans need a mix of organizational behavior, budget management, and communication skills in their toolbox. I was fortunate to have an M.B.A. under my belt, but this is not the norm. Institutions of higher education should consider sponsoring current and future deans in their role by preparing them in those areas. The training could be in the form of a series of four independent courses or a tailored certificate. I would encourage deans to engage in these courses with people in other industries, not just in higher education, because interdisciplinary training will broaden their experience.

There are professional-development groups in nearly every region of the country for new deans to gain the skills they need to succeed. When I started, I joined an academic think tank run by Brandeis University, which brings together both new and long-serving deans — from colleges public and private, large and small — four times per year to share experiences and to collaborate in developing best practices. I would recommend that all new deans connect with this type of organization.

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Megan Brooks

Dean of Library Services
Wheaton College (Mass.)

As a new dean of libraries with responsibility for a complex budget, I wish I had spent significant time in my first month learning the ins and outs of my department’s budget. Part of my role as dean is to responsibly steward institutional resources. Knowing the gory details of the budget is the best way to do that. A course would have helped.

Beyond offering a course, colleges and universities can do a better job of preparing aspiring deans to engage with complex budgets by including them in budget-development and -submission processes. For library deans in particular, being involved in all phases of budget development, from salaries to materials and endowments to operating budgets, in the roles they inhabit before becoming a dean would be useful. I was fortunate that I was able to participate in the development of a library-materials budget in a previous, pre-dean role. However, that only partially prepared me for working with the full library budget.