With so many students and faculty and staff members under so much stress across academe, it’s no surprise that the administration is a target of their ire. Point out that campus leaders and managers have been struggling with serious tests of their own physical and psychological health, and you may hear little sympathy, if not outright disdain.
I get it. In the Admin 101 series on higher-education leadership, I once wrote that administrators should never complain about their own situation. By nature of the position, we are paid to endure Shakespeare’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” with aplomb and responsibility. No one cares that, as a dean of students, you are being yelled at by parents more frequently than ever before, or that your work schedule, as a vice president for research, went from about 50 hours a week in 2019 to 80 in 2021, or that your scheduling and curriculum-management duties, as a department chair, have doubled. The job, we have told ourselves, is whatever and whenever the job is.
Yet we are now seeing the fallout from suppressing or ignoring the importance of self-care for administrators. Recently, I talked with the president of a major search firm who said, “We have never been at a time where more people are dropping out of [academic] administration or are deciding not to go into administration.” Likewise, bright colleagues all over the country tell me, “Nobody wants to be chair of our department” and “I used to think I wanted to be a dean, but not anymore.”
This is a potentially disastrous situation because higher education has never needed effective, empathetic, and, yes, enthusiastic leadership more than it does now. Further, research suggests that people in groups that have historically been underrepresented in management — such as women and people of color — are less likely to aspire to move up if leadership positions are seen as debilitating or high risk.
So as administrators, we must pay some attention to our own self-care — without taking away from the significant hardships of the people we serve. Simply put, you can’t look after others if the intense stresses of the job lately are threatening your own mental or physical health.
What follows are some basic principles and applied practices that I hope will help you to be a better chair, associate dean, or chancellor — and maybe even save your health and career as well.
Accept that your physical and mental health matter. I’m dean of a college at a large university. Each year, the college has an annual scholarship banquet recognizing the recipients and thanking the donors. The keynote speakers are always student awardees who describe how the donations helped them get to college and stay there. The speeches are a reminder of why we are here. That point needs constant reiteration in the day-to-day minutiae of emails, budget spreadsheets, personnel matters, and curriculum scheduling.
In this series, David D. Perlmutter writes about pursuing a career in academic administration and about surviving and thriving as a leader – whether you are a chair, a dean, a provost, and or any of the positions in between and beyond.
If an administrator’s ability to do the job well begins to crack under the pressure that is fast becoming the nature of these positions, many people, including our more vulnerable students, will suffer. So there’s nothing mercenary or egoistic about your being concerned about yourself, and making sure you are able to serve the constituencies you care about well.
Step No. 1 is to acknowledge that you matter, too.
Is your busyness truly useful or just theater? A crisis can prompt you to prioritize what’s really important and necessary in your work schedule. We are operating in an era of multiple continuing crises, mixed instructional modes, unreliable supply chains, and increased stress and impatience among all of our constituencies. A practical step toward self-care is to be a leader in defining what truly matters. For example, here are some of the questions we are asking in my college about the regular meetings we hold:
- Are these meetings necessary?
- Do they have to happen as often as they do?
- What is the best way to distribute information, especially in a governance culture, so people can be aware of it and act upon it without being overwhelmed?
- Do people understand the steps and goals of the process, or are they just participating out of tradition?
- Can the number of participants be reduced without hurting governance?
- Do we need to modify any of our processes because of the lack of face-to-face interactions that have occurred off and on since the pandemic began?
The point is to optimize the use of people’s time, including your own. Your job as an administrator will make you busy. However, you have the right to ask yourself and others if that busyness is necessary or just for show.
If a process is overly complex, pare it back. Everything about teaching, research, and management has become more complicated in my 30 years in higher education. But does our bureaucracy always have to expand in kind? Now is the time to reduce the convolution of operations. Does a particular process need to have 122 steps, or can it be cut to just 98, or even 70?
For example, in my program, we decided to simplify our internal budgeting process:
- Earlier than ever before, we determine budget allocations, both in projection and in fact, so that departments and programs know what is available to spend, and don’t require constant updates throughout the year.
- We create shared online locations where people can check the status of different parts of the budget without calling meetings to review the details.
- We designated authority to some faculty and staff members so they can make budget decisions without waiting for other people’s decisions.
- We published internal guidebooks, so everyone has access to the same definitions and terms of various budgetary items.
The result has been a simplified yet more effective budget process that takes up less of everyone’s time. My own contributions to our financial decisions are cleaner, clearer, and, yes, less stressed. I can focus more on the big picture than on technicalities.
A symbiosis occurs when you reduce confusion and complexity for others — you also end up taking care of yourself.
Don’t capsize your life-work balance. Both of my “greatest generation” parents were professors who worked day and night — meals were times to discuss work; on vacations they took work with them. I didn’t inherit their imbalanced work-but-no-life ethic, but I came from a generation that was reluctant to admit there was anything outside the office. I’ve been gratified to see that the Generations Y and Z faculty members have largely rebelled against the idea that family, play, and serenity are either to be shunned or never talked about.
Yes, if you’re an administrator, you are going to put in long hours. But don’t let your schedule become a runaway train. I’ve written about how good time management can make you a better leader, but “efficiency” can also be a path to less stress.
For instance, my work emails now include the following message: “Please know that my working hours may not be your working hours, so do not feel it is necessary to respond outside of your normal schedule.” The point is to let people know that, as dean, I am not expecting a response on weekends or after hours. And in those cases when I do need an immediate response, I write “emergency” or “please help right away” in the subject line.
I have set limits on how late at night or how early in the morning I’m going to work on something. Lessening your stress level as an administrator can’t help but have a de-stressing effect on those around you.
Invest in your whole health. On an email list for academic administrators five years ago — back when we were in “normal crisis” mode and not in “crazy crisis” mode — there were lots of comments along the lines of “I don’t have time to be healthy.”
Make time. Administrators should follow the same advice that everyone else gets about physical and mental health. Work and health are not an either/or choice. Set daily exercise goals, however modest. Stand during meetings, instead of sitting. Diet matters as well, especially if you dine out a lot as part of the job. Show the same discipline about your health as you do about, say, your budgeting.
Following ancient principles, your mind needs healthy habits as much as your posterior. Some administrators spend time with beloved pets. Others do woodworking, garden, or build model airplanes. Audiobooks have also been a rescue for me. Try to do something that removes you from the job, whether that’s with a child, a cat, or a lathe.
If you don’t regularly evade the concerns of the immediate, you will be consumed by them.
Seek out validation from peers. It’s often said that the higher you rise in rank, whether in business, academe, or the military, the fewer real friends you have. That’s not strictly correct, but it sometimes feels that way. True friends are people with whom you can share concerns, worries, and weaknesses; that’s not something the average vice president for admissions feels comfortable doing with just anyone.
Once you enter administration, fewer and fewer people have work experience that matches yours. Even in a megasize public university there may be, at most, a dozen people who are deans of independent colleges. There’s only one provost and one dean of students. And you may not want to share shop talk, political or otherwise, with people at your home institution.
Find peers you can trust and open up to. In my case, just a few years ago I discovered an organization that I wish I had known about when I became a dean: the National Conference of Academic Deans. At its most recent annual meeting, I was a keynote speaker, and I found both the formal and the side conversations to be informative and even healing. They get me; I get them. So find your people, and make friends. You will discover that you can do your job better when you can turn to a cohort of peers who face the same issues, but from comparative perspectives in different venues.
I have the good fortune to work at an institution where “putting people first” has been not simply a slogan but a policy during these crisis years. We had no pay cuts, forced furloughs, or academic layoffs. This year, budget cuts taken last year were restored to most units. Yet still, many people in different roles on the campus have been stressed and stretched to the point of fracture. It’s our job to care about those people. At the same time, self-care is not selfish. Indeed, it will help both the mission and the people you serve.
