On your worst days as an administrator, you will wonder whether you’ve accomplished anything that matters. Not long ago, I had that very conversation with a department chair who, after almost two decades in the role, was wistfully questioning whether he “had really had an impact.”
In psychology, the concept of “mattering,” and its importance for mental health, has been understudied yet is gaining attention. For campus leaders, it’s a key variable that affects their morale and job performance. Across higher education, we are in an age of administrator anxiety, a topic I’ve been focusing on lately in the Admin 101 column. Last month I looked at the challenge of finding good mentors in tense times. Here I want to explore the benefits — and limits — of feeling like your work matters to someone, including yourself.
In theory and application, the concept of “mattering” spans psychology, management, philosophy, political science, communications, and other disciplines. As Isaac Prilleltensky, a professor of educational and psychological studies and vice provost for institutional culture at the University of Miami, put it in a 2019 essay: “Mattering is an ideal state of affairs consisting of two complementary psychological experiences: feeling valued and adding value. Human beings can feel valued by, and add value to, self, others, work, and community.”
For chairs, deans, provosts, and other academic administrators, the duality of mattering means that it is both a pathway to self-fulfillment and a tool to improve your service to others.
Keep track of metrics that matter. Many of a leader’s accomplishments in higher education can be identified and quantified. If you are a director of graduate studies, for example, you can track any number of outcomes, including the ratio of students who have completed the program (from the start), graduated in a timely manner, and found positions (in academe or industry) to which they aspired. Numbers, thus, can prove your effectiveness and value — for you and everyone else to measure.
At the same time, one of the joys of higher-education management is that we (are supposed to) care about individuals — not just cohorts. A graduate director who told me that her “numbers were good” said she was also proud of the fact that doctoral students apparently felt comfortable approaching her for help with nonacademic problems. She cited the example of a student who came to her with a housing crisis. The graduate director, working with a staff member in student housing, was able to cut through red tape and find the student emergency housing that same day.
Having the trust of a constituency you serve can’t be computed with stats. But on a personal level, it shows you’ve made a difference and that at least some people realize it.
Make sure that what matters to you is tied to outcomes, not bureaucracy. One of the challenges to feeling that you matter as an administrator is that — whatever your title or role — you no doubt preside over an ever-growing mountain of paperwork. My father, whose career as a professor spanned the 1950s to the 1990s, recounted that in the older era, “You could go a whole semester without filling out a form.”
In defense of form-filing, it often has some rational justification. Today we have institutional review boards, lab-safety certifications, and travel-reimbursement procedures for very good reasons. But administrators who want to make a difference should not measure that by how much bureaucratic work they do or ask others to do. It’s work that can’t be avoided, but you can ask yourself: Does this busywork represent something more important that matters?
A case in point: A department chair at a public university in the Northeast said he had become crushingly disillusioned when he discovered that the program-assessment forms that he had been laboriously filling out each year were simply deposited into a database but never actually reviewed or used by anyone. All that wasted time, he thought, for nothing, helping no one. Eventually a new regime at the provost’s office heard about this black hole of bureaucratic process and worked with chairs and deans to ensure that the assessments were read and used internally. The chair was not doing less work, but he now felt that the work mattered.
Formally and informally, call attention to things that matter. You need co-conspirators in the idea that doing well in higher-education administration requires doing good.
A vice president for research once described how he held special monthly meetings with his associate administrators and staff members to review the “good wins.” They talked about newly procured grants that showed obvious promise of benefiting society, science, health, and the like. The aim: to remind people that their jobs mattered — not just for hitting funding targets but for service to humanity.
That kind of message can be spread informally, too. As a dean, when I was raising money and meeting with donors, I came prepared with headlines of positive news from my college. Perhaps it was a record number of students graduating or a professor getting a research award. If you’re meeting with alumni, find news they would be interested in hearing — say, about the particular program from which they graduated or about their career pursuits. Yes, this helps build the image of a unit worth supporting, but it also can serve to remind you that the department or college you represent is doing work that matters.
Force yourself to stop and tally what you did right. The typical day of an administrator can be a whirlwind of bustle. It can feel like your attention is only on things that are going wrong. Just catching up on email or other communications and running through all the scheduled meetings can push into the evening. Nowadays, many an administrator looks like Alice in Wonderland, running faster and faster just to stay in place. It is hard to carve out time to savor successes or ponder big ideas or values outside of a strategic-planning meeting.
So make sure “mattering” matters to you in your actual workday. It can be as simple as connecting the dots when several small actions over time have built into something that significantly helped students or faculty and staff members.
A dean recalled being greeted at a conference by a graduate student he’d mentored over the years. Together at previous meetings, they’d gone over the young scholar’s papers and edited her job applications. He’d encouraged her to keep at it. Now an assistant professor on the tenure track, she concluded their conversation with a heartfelt “I couldn’t have done it without you.” The dean told me, “That half hour of conversation made my month.” He further resolved to be more vocal in thanking people whose actions made a difference now in his own work and life.
Accept that people have different views about what matters on a campus. Plenty of things you do as an administrator will not be perceived to have any discernible impact. And sometimes, you won’t get the praise you deserve for big achievements. Fixate on those moments, and you will have a disappointing professional life as a leader.
A president of a small college mentioned how a department chair sent him a weekly “self-congratulatory newsletter.” In it, the chair listed every tiny action he took that he considered positive. That was obviously problematic: Administrators should never demand high-fives for just doing their job. There are no “participation” trophies for deans, chairs, or vice chancellors.
Academic leadership is an iceberg in which 90 percent of what you do is below the surface and would only be noticed if you screwed up. The pathway for a healthy attitude is the acceptance that “mattering” as a leader is not just about one-offs. It’s about the process.
It is a tough balance. Part of the stress of leadership is finding ways to apply yourself equally to the big attention-getters and to the mundane. A dean of engineering may spend a week of late nights immersed in a massive, complicated building renovation project, only to be called out on Monday morning for five other routine tasks left unattended. Sure, some things matter more than others. But they all have to be completed on time and with your full attention, even if no one cheers for you during the process or afterward.
In this series, I am balancing the human need (yes, administrators are human) for positive reinforcement with the political and behavioral fact that leaders who are constantly thirsty for accolades will fail at their job. Some of your “wins” will be recognized, while others will stay unknown save to a few staff members or administrators, or even just you. Really, if your priority is to make a difference, doing the right thing well is all that should matter.
