As I read the recent story on Pomona College’s squabbling English department, I had an almost physical sense of suffocation, coupled with an equally strong desire to close my browser window. Yet English professors — even former ones like me — seem mysteriously drawn to dark tales (real and fictional) of other English professors. So despite feeling dragged into someone else’s soap opera, my curiosity won the day.
It struck a nerve because — while Pomona’s infighting is at the extreme end of the spectrum — the fact is: A lot of academics struggle to manage basic workplace conflicts. And I know that because, in my work today as a professional faculty coach, I routinely witness the challenges that people face in simply getting along with one another.
Human relationships are rarely simple, especially in organizational settings. How do you strengthen a weak or tense bond with a colleague, mentee, or chair? Or, just as often, how do you manage a project that requires you to direct the efforts of people who don’t get along? There are many ways to build and maintain healthy professional relationships, yet academics are rarely exposed to those ideas.
In the reflection that follows, I share a few basic concepts and tools that I’ve found useful in thinking through workplace friction. I also glance back at my own years as a tenured professor in a far more collegial English department, to deal with the question left hanging by the Pomona story: “So what does this mean for the rest of us?”
Not all departments (even in English) are dysfunctional. Yet that old chestnut — about academic politics being so vicious because the stakes are so small — resonates with me personally. Two weeks into my first and only tenure-track faculty position, a senior colleague stole my desk.
It was July and the campus was quiet, but I was there as a newly hired assistant professor checking out my first real office. The department had ordered two new desks, and I had one of them. And because I needed external markers to shore up my fragile new identity, I swooned over this important-looking piece of furniture.
But when I returned to my office a few days later, my shiny, “executive” wooden desk had been replaced by one of those “sad,” beaten-up ones that aren’t hard to find on any college campus. A senior colleague had taken “my” desk because — as a departmental administrator blithely informed me — that professor had “worked here for 25 years and never had a new desk.”
My department’s interior-decorating misadventure, while it pales in comparison to what happened at Pomona, could easily have formed the basis for one of those ugly, years-long internal grudges. But it didn’t. Within a few more days, the new desk was back in my office, along with a gracious handwritten note of apology.
How did it get resolved? I spoke up. And that senior colleague and I brushed past that awkward moment to enjoy a strong working relationship. No doubt things went smoothly, in part, because my senior colleague nabbed the second new desk that summer before anyone else could.
But really, it wasn’t personal. The colleague just wanted new office furniture and didn’t disrespect or harbor any malevolence toward me. I was able to see that because the entire department had done an exceptionally good job of making me feel welcome. Faculty members had provided concrete help as I looked for a place to live and got settled. They invited me for dinners and walks and sent encouraging emails. I felt valued, like I belonged. So when the desk went missing, I knew it wasn’t about me, and that it would be OK to say something.
This anecdote anchors my recommendations for both department leaders and members on how to manage — and even constructively prevent — workplace infighting.
Most people don’t like conflict, and can be very good at denying or suppressing it. It’s not surprising that we often hear, or read, about academic strife only after it’s gotten so out of control that people are hurt, reputations and careers are tanked, and expensive fixes are called for in the form of consultants, mediators, and lawyers.
My focus here is not on how to resolve those internal crises — to the extent that they can be resolved. Rather, my aim is to propose habits and skills to deal with basic workplace drama and prevent it from spiraling into something worse.
Advice for Department Chairs
According to a useful model created by David Rock, a leadership consultant, human needs in organizational settings fall into five buckets:
- Status: What is my value?
- Certainty: What will happen next?
- Autonomy: What is in my control?
- Relatedness: Who cares for me?
- Fairness: Do I have what I deserve?
As a department head, you probably spend a lot of time placating the egos of colleagues (status), and ensuring the equitable distribution of resources (fairness). You have far less control over your institution’s financial or leadership stability (certainty). And most chairs are disinclined to micromanage members of the department (autonomy).
But what about relatedness? Making sure that your people feel supported and connected is an important leadership skill that any department chair can master, although unfortunately, many don’t.
To be fair, these are challenging times for fostering “relatedness.” As I noted in a previous essay on productivity, the culture of hyper-productivity prevalent across higher education discourages many academics from prioritizing relationship-building. I see the effects of that all too often, in the form of new assistant professors who feel rudderless and associate professors who feel bereft of intellectual community.
Yet feeling connected is critical — not just for peoples’ careers, but because strong relationships engender trust, and where trust exists, people are less likely to take offense or assume bad motives from things their colleagues say or do. Building trust also takes thought and care, especially when faculty members are underrepresented in some category (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, discipline), or if they arrive at the institution with a history of adverse work experiences (toxic environments, bullying, harassment) from elsewhere.
Departmental relationships would benefit if chairs focused on boosting their skills in two key arenas of connection:
- Running department meetings. It’s the chair’s responsibility in leading a meeting to ensure that communication is respectful, that everyone has the opportunity to speak, and that people feel safe enough to do so. In the classroom, academics have no problem calling out a disruptive student, fostering open and respectful conversations, or helping quiet students find their voice. Yet once they find themselves in a role of authority among their colleagues — in the hidebound, baggage-laden genre of Department Meeting — some chairs suddenly feel at sea, unable to keep the bullies and the blowhards from dominating the conversation as they have at every meeting for the past 10 years. Meetings are never just a vehicle for getting things done (or not). They are the primary way in which departmental norms of behavior and communication are formed. As a coach, when people come to me for help with managing their colleagues in meetings, we often explore the concept of transferable skills: How might the skills you honed in one domain (say, the classroom) transfer to your role as chair?
- Executing difficult conversations. A lot of bad behavior happens in higher ed because otherwise responsible people — like department chairs — allow it to go unchecked for years. Sometimes the instigators aren’t even aware of the impact of their behavior. For that reason, I routinely recommend Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, which emphasizes the importance of being direct and respectful in your communications. I also encourage you to be thoughtful in deciding how (and where) to execute a potentially explosive conversation. It may initially feel less uncomfortable and more expedient to send an email, but with sensitive subjects, that rarely proves to be the case.
Advice for Department Members
Whether you are a new hire or a longtime professor in your department, you can head off workplace conflict by being more strategic in how you build relationships — with senior leaders, colleagues, students, and staff members. And whether you lean toward the introverted or extroverted side of the spectrum, you need to get comfortable having direct, diplomatic conversations.
In many of my coaching sessions, we end up focusing on an issue or conflict that could be easily resolved, if the faculty member could just work up the gumption to say something (respectfully) to another person. And because direct communication is so critical to resolving interpersonal differences, I also encourage you to support colleagues who try to spark candid conversations.
Don’t be an enabler. How many times has a colleague come to you, complaining about something a third party has said or done? What role do you play in the exchange? If you let that person vent unchallenged — or worse, agree that the third party is toxic and obnoxious — you may be (or may become) part of the problem, contributing to harmful gossip, workplace drama, and the development of factions.
Instead of serving as an echo chamber, try on the role of mentor or coach. For example:
- Support your colleague by helping to brainstorm constructive ways to manage the situation. Tensions often arise, not from internal machinations, but from genuine workplace misunderstandings. So invite your colleague to imagine what a healthy, productive conversation with the offending third party might look like.
- Or maybe the third party is truly a toxic or manipulative person, in which case you might propose some self-care strategies, such as how to distance oneself from a bad colleague.
Be the adult in the room. Whatever your position in the department, you might also find it beneficial to reflect on the role you usually play in internal politics versus the role you want to be playing. For example, I once coached a very senior, capable leader who nonetheless reported “feeling like a child” by the highly politicized dynamics that she routinely faced in meetings of a certain standing committee. “What would it look like,” I asked her, “to respond to that situation like an adult?”
That question — inspired by a wonderful 1994 essay, called “Games People Play at Work” — unlocked something for this leader. In a flash, she moved from feeling trapped by the situation, to identifying multiple ways to take charge in the meetings.
As that essay noted, you always have choices in how you show up in departmental culture. You can be a child — focused only on your own needs, sullen and resentful when things don’t go your way, or fearful and overly deferential around authority figures. Or you can be an adult — confident in your abilities, knowledge and value, thoughtful of the needs of others, and respectful, courageous, and truthful in how you communicate.
Who’s stolen your desk recently? What would you like to say to the thief? What would allow you to do that, both truthfully and respectfully?
