The “friend gap” in campus administrative culture is real. It doesn’t manifest in the same way for everyone, but it is frequent enough and serious enough to contribute to leadership stress and turnover.
We’ve all known academic administrators who were “friend-challenged,” and thus, isolated in the job. Yet it is entirely possible to form real human bonds and keep them as you move up the leadership ranks. Where things get complicated is in the type of friendships and the methods by which you forge and maintain them.
In the Admin 101 column, I’ve been exploring how work-related stress and anxiety have contributed to the unsettling turnover in higher-ed administration. In my October column, I explored the problems and misconceptions that affect the quality and quantity of friends you make in a management role. In Part 2, I aim to offer practical suggestions on how to make and keep friends while administrating.
Be friendly but don’t insist on friendship. A faculty member told me about a department chair who overused the friend card. Any time he needed support on something, he would say things like, “I know I can count on you as a friend to help me out on this.” Discomfort was nearly always the reaction to that appeal.
The characteristics of a good leader share some of the qualities of a good friend — someone who is respectful, empathetic, a good listener, and sensitive to body language and tone of voice. Those meta skills are an important part of professional comportment and deportment. But being courteous and attentive in a leadership role is part of the job, and won’t necessarily help you secure new pals.
After you and a colleague have weathered some shared trouble together, it can be disappointing to presume it’s brought you closer together only to find it has not. Don’t push it: There’s something off-putting about a needy administrator who’s always trying to make friends or affirming, “You and I are friends, right?” At the same time, if a genuine friendship does emerge out of some internal battle or over time, by all means, embrace it. Take it as a happy surprise, not an expectation.
Build at least some friendships that aren’t about talking shop. In these complicated times, you can’t expect your leadership mentors to advise you on all things personal and professional. It is better to find specialists: someone to counsel you on strategic planning, for example, and others to help you with student-advising or personnel issues. The same is true of an administrator’s friendships.
Mix it up. Yes, you need friends who can be a sounding board on a tough personnel decision or a sympathetic ear when you need to vent about a frustrating situation at the office. At the same time, you need casual chums with whom you can chat about anything but work, such as a mutual hobby or even your own academic field.
A dean of an arts college described a friendship he’d forged with a faculty member over a musical instrument that they both loved playing, teaching, and composing for. By mutual agreement, they limited their conversations to the instrument — to new music, recent performances, and student achievements on that instrument. For the dean, this friend was someone exclusively helping to remind him — amid myriad personnel, budget, and facilities decisions — “why I originally fell in love with the arts in the first place.”
So as an administrator, while it’s a blessing to have trusted campus friends with whom you can discuss any and all topics, there’s also a huge benefit to narrowly focused relationships.
Devote time to friendships with no higher-ed connection. Years ago, a law professor gave me sound advice on this front: Worried that he was spending all of his free time with other attorneys, he told me he had decided to work extra hard to make friends who had nothing to do with the law.
When you’re an administrator with a very dense schedule, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of only making friends with people in your immediate vicinity. I’ve been lucky in my life to have “hobby friends” (who share a passion for a particular pastime), “cause friends” (who support the same nonprofit interests as me), and “culture friends” (who care about the same cultural content and events as I do).
Almost none of them had any connection to the universities where I’ve worked. In fact, we hardly ever talked about our jobs. Work friends are great but there is a tendency to talk (or whine) about the latest things going on at work — and everyone needs a break from that.
Make friends in high places … far away. Frogs around the same pool don’t have a lot of contrasting perspectives. Which is why fellow administrators at other institutions can be such a rich source of counsel and comradeship without the political sensitivities and internal conflicts of your own campus. Having a friend far away who is, for example, trying to fill a similar budget hole as you can be a relief (“I’m not the only one dealing with this.”), an outlet to vent without repercussions (“I can’t believe I’m saddled with such a mess!”), and a counselor (“So how did you handle the same problem?”).
Sure, it’s possible to trust the chair of another department in your college but it’s politically safer to confide in someone who has no conflict of interest and no possibility of competing with you for campus dollars. Distant friends rarely find themselves on opposite sides of academic politics.
Don’t assume that a professional conflict will end your friendship. Academic and administrative politics can be vicious, and as a leader, you will often be cast in the role of the villain. We all know friends who found themselves on opposite sides of a serious workplace battle, withdrew from one another, assumed the relationship was over, and held a grudge for years. But there are plenty of stories of people who worked it out and moved on.
A case in point: A department chair at a Southeastern university said he feared he had truly fractured a long-term friendship with another chair in a campus budget crisis. Their respective departments had fallen into a turf war over credit hours from similarly themed courses in both units. The once-close friends found themselves continually at odds, to the point where it began to feel personal.
The issue was eventually settled, as they so often are, to no one’s satisfaction. In my conversation with one of the chairs, he said he had avoided his friend for a while, frankly embarrassed at how out of hand the dispute had gotten. But the next time they met, they fell into the easy and jovial pattern that had marked their relationship in the past. In silent mutual consent, they declined to bring up the “old” issue. It was, after all, just business. At the end of the day their professionalism kept their friendship alive — a goal you should strive to keep in mind in difficult times.
The “lonely at the top” assumption about higher-ed leadership is not a myth. But that doesn’t mean you can’t build and maintain friendships, even through hard times and awkward situations. Trusted work friends are important for your job and your soul; there is no need to abandon one for the sake of the other.
