Note: In the “Ask the Chair” series, the author of How to Chair a Department answers your questions about departmental leadership. Send your queries via Twitter, Facebook, or email. Read last month’s column here.
Question: Much about the chair’s role was unfamiliar to me when I assumed the job. I’ve worked under and alongside chairs, of course, and have observed a few things over the years. One aspect of the job, though, has me completely buffaloed: how to work productively with my departmental staff.
I’ve never been a “boss” before. Chairs aren’t really a boss to their faculty, but they certainly are to their staff — assigning projects, approving timecards, conducting annual evaluations. It all feels quite strange and rather uncomfortable. What steps can I take to be a supportive and effective supervisor for my staff colleagues?
Signed,
Reluctant Boss
Dear Reluctant,
The only kind of boss I want to work for is a reluctant boss. I believe that, at its best, the chair’s role is a profound gift of service, and we only want someone to do it who isn’t seeking glory. (Never mind that anyone trying to use this position to win glory would end up sorely disappointed.)
It’s an oversimplification yet nonetheless true to say that a chair’s relationships with other faculty members in the department may be challenging because of what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences.” Our faculty colleagues are peers, albeit we’re all constantly, subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) jockeying for position. However, in a chair’s relationships with staff colleagues — and I notice and love your putting those terms, “staff” and “colleague,” side by side — one of the stressors is the opposite dynamic: The chair and staff members are in positions widely separated by institutional prestige, educational attainment, salary, working conditions, and sometimes age.
My faculty peers and I are roughly equals, posturing and pretending that we’re not — whereas my staff colleagues and I are working under wildly unequal conditions, but I’m trying to pretend we’re peers. And it often doesn’t work very well.
What can a chair do to level, at least to some degree, those hierarchies and inequities? Much of the problem is structural, of course, and you’re not going to be able to flatten the org chart overnight, however much you want to. For example, a department chair earns at least double (and, in some cases, four or five times) the salary of administrative staff members, depending on the institution, on the discipline, on their respective years of service, and other factors. Even if staff members in your department don’t know exactly what you make as chair, they do know it puts you in a different tax bracket.
As chair, you won’t have much say on salaries since the scales are set by the upper administration. But there are things you can influence:
Intervene, as needed, to adjust department civility. Professors can be utterly unaware of the ways in which they flaunt their professional privilege. At institutions fortunate enough to have various kinds of research and professional-development support for faculty members, your administrative assistant may be in the uncomfortable position of submitting faculty travel expenses to far-flung destinations for reimbursement. Sure those are work trips, rather than vacations. But most staff members are never offered the option of professional travel.
Likewise, even if you, as chair, put in a solid number of hours weekly at the office, many of your faculty colleagues will seem to come and go almost at will, sometimes dropping off work assignments on an administrative assistant’s desk with very little lead time, and not a word of thanks. And in a repeated pattern that I find completely demoralizing, faculty colleagues who pride themselves on their progressive principles and will join a staff picket line at the drop of a hat will nevertheless turn around and treat departmental staff members like hired help. To the staff, this “upstairs, downstairs” disparity must feel absolutely intolerable at times.
One consequence of such boorish behavior — and I’ve seen it so often, and in enough different places, to believe it’s the rule rather than the exception — is that the chair may have to act as a buffer between staff and faculty. Because you will be working closely with your staff colleagues (more so than most professors do), they may come to you when they feel disrespected. Owing to the yawning power differential between faculty and staff, staff members may hope that you will use your authority to intervene.
So you may have to have difficult conversations, over email or face to face, with professors regarding their treatment of a staff member. Most will be abashed to discover the way their behavior comes across. Remember, like you, they’re not really accustomed to being bosses, either.
Narrow the gulf between staff and faculty working conditions. Even the simplest changes can smooth the way to a more comfortable working collaboration:
- You may have little control over campus salary scales but you’re not entirely without agency as chair. At most institutions, the chair’s greatest influence on a department’s staff salaries is by way of annual performance reviews. I may be saying the quiet part out loud here, and your HR folks will certainly scowl in disapproval, but I use a wildly modified “grading scale” for staff reviews. As I touched on in a September column, if a staff colleague is genuinely not doing the work, a stern review and poor rating might be in order; but failing that, be a generous grader. Over time, it can make a significant difference to some hard-working and poorly paid folks.
- Offer your staff members some professional-development opportunities — without making them seem like remediation or not-so-subtle correction. I argue in my book, How to Chair a Department, that when professors choose to leave your department for more prestigious positions, it’s inconvenient, and sometimes heartbreaking — but it can also be an indicator that you’ve supported them well in their career aspirations. The same is true for staff. If you have ambitious and capable staff colleagues, and support their careers by calling their attention to, and offering to pay for, professional-development opportunities, they might just use that training to get a better position elsewhere. But the additional training could open up exciting new possibilities in their current position or simply help them carry out the standard functions of their job more successfully.
- Finally (for now), I’m a big believer in providing a flexible workspace and schedule — to the extent possible. Professors at most institutions work with an extraordinary degree of autonomy, while staff members often have to clock in at 8 a.m. and out at 5 p.m., with an hour’s lunch and very little ability to shape their schedule to their own needs and working patterns. Are there ways that, so long as all the work gets done, your staff members can be given more agency in precisely when and how — and perhaps even where — it gets done? It’s certainly worth thinking about seriously.
To close, I want to circle back to that term: staff colleague. I heard recently about an institution at which the dean’s office surveyed chairs and department staff members about their professional-development needs and put together a series of informal sessions. Not surprisingly, the session most requested by the staff was on how chairs could foster a mutually supportive relationship with administrative assistants. What was disappointing — though perhaps no surprise to those staff members who filled out the survey — was that not a single department chair showed up to the session. Surely we can do better for our staff colleagues.
