No One Wants to Be Your Dean. Here’s How You Might Fix That.

The call came one night last September for Logan Jones, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Not long after helping to build the M.B.A. program at Missouri Western State University’s business school, and then working to take it online, Jones, an assistant professor of management, was asked to appear the following morning to meet with the business school’s dean. The provost would be there, too. The subject? They wouldn’t say.

“It was a scary night,” Jones recalls. “I had no idea what to expect.”

His fears turned out to be unwarranted. Michael Lane, the dean, announced that he planned to retire and had chosen Jones — who demonstrated strong administrative skills during his few months as an associate dean — as his successor.

So, Have You Thought About Becoming a Dean?

Facing a shortage of faculty candidates interested in administrative careers, some colleges are taking steps to nurture new leaders.

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Still, the promotion delivered a shock. Could Jones learn his new job, which starts in July, fast enough to be effective from Day 1?

“I had worked in administration with the military and a police force before,” he says. “I had managed people and resources. But all I could think about was what I didn’t know about being a manager at a university.”

As colleges identify prime prospects for deanships, they describe working to become more adept at encouraging, training, and otherwise grooming people like Logan Jones. Faculty interest in administration positions is on a downslide, slowing the leadership pipeline to a trickle, college officials say. This comes at a time when deans are more likely to ascend directly to top slots as college presidents, making the need to develop more faculty members into administrators even more pressing.

“Presidents and provosts are struggling to find great talent,” says Kathleen Murray, president of Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Wash. As provost at three other colleges, she focused on finding the kind of faculty members who could become strong deans, usually by inviting them to attend administrative meetings and to take on more responsibilities.

Not enough administrators are taking such steps, she says. “Colleges need to do more to nurture people with the right skills.”

“There is a paucity of people who want to take on administration roles at colleges, and especially at business schools,” says Lane, the departing dean at Missouri Western. “It’s moving toward a crisis for higher education.”

While the evidence appears to be mainly anecdotal, college leaders who were interviewed strongly shared Lane’s views.

Some colleges and systems have begun to change how they view deanships. Instead of seeing them as a logical career step for faculty members who have climbed the ladder from professor to department chair to associate dean, they have founded leadership institutes to get more faculty into the pipeline — the sooner, the better.

Lehigh Carbon Community College, in suburban Allentown, Pa., offers two programs that buttress its efforts to grow more upper-level managers. Though both are too new to have yielded any deans, they have positioned talented faculty members for future managerial jobs, says Thomas Meyer, vice president for academic services and student development.

One endeavor, a yearlong academic program run together with nearby community colleges, includes speakers and discussions of topics vital to leadership, with the goal of providing faculty members with a comprehensive view of how two-year colleges are run.

Participants undertake a project together to show what they’ve learned and to develop their collaboration skills. “Last year they came up with some fascinating ideas about how to share employees among the three community-college campuses in the area,” says Meyer. “The idea is to prepare them to respond to the future needs of their institutions.”

A newer program identifies so-called emerging leaders at Lehigh Carbon, including junior faculty members. Fourteen of them, chosen by administrators from a pool of applicants, meet monthly with a leader from the college to discuss communication skills, leadership traits, risk-taking, and other aspects of leadership.

“We hope it pays off by encouraging them to become administrators,” Meyer says. “When I look at faculty, I look at people who have the capability to lead other faculty members. But I also look at other factors, like whether they can shepherd large grants and spend three to five years getting them from proposal to the end, and whether they can work effectively with different kinds of people. There are a lot of ways to make a dean.”

Yet there remains a gap between identifying such candidates and getting them on the dean track. Many colleges haven’t focused on getting people to think like deans or to envision themselves in the role. As a result, many deans recall their surprise when they were tapped for the job.

“When recruiters came looking for me, I just laughed. I seriously thought that I was being asked to apply to fill out the pool,” says Cathann A. Cress, who was hired as dean of the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences at Ohio State University last May.

“I was one of the lucky ones. I had two mentors along the way who told me to think of taking upper-administration jobs. Up until then, I had focused on being a doer instead of being a strategic thinker and delegator. It’s not easy to make that shift. You need to know that people think you can do it.”

Most college leaders agree on the characteristics of a solid prospect for dean: A good listener who is data-driven, ethical, fair, focused on service, open-minded, and knowledgeable about faculty- and student-assessment methods. Administrators look for detail-oriented jugglers who are dynamic yet show equanimity, who can be both sociable and introspective. Strong prospects will have earned the respect of colleagues because of their work as a chair, educator, or researcher.

Above all, a dean should be able to transparently communicate his or her goals and decisions to the college community and the public.

Diversity should be weighted heavily when making hiring decisions, administrators say, though many acknowledge that they struggle to make their ranks as diverse as they should be.

There are disqualifiers, too. Candidates who espouse a broader agenda that isn’t mindful of the institution’s culture are often nixed early in the search process. “I’m leery of anyone who says they want to fix the faculty,” says Meyer, of Lehigh Carbon.

Although intense preparation is key, administrators agree, some express concern about people who may have targeted a deanship early in their careers.

“I doubt those people would make good ones,” says Murray, the Whitman president. “They’re likely to think that the dean’s job carries power, but it doesn’t. People who make a commitment to becoming great teachers tend to make great deans.”

More likely, however, junior faculty members — and many of those in midcareer — haven’t even bothered to consider deanships.

“It’s a major shift for them,” says Marci Sortor, provost and dean of the college at St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minn. “It’s not about them getting published or gaining tenure. It’s hard to get some faculty to see that service is a major part of working at a university.”

Most often, colleges look toward people with some management experience, such as department chairs and associate deans. But a deanship is a tough sell to make, even to chairs: The job isn’t likely to last forever. Most deans serve for two to four years before either moving up the ladder or going back to their faculty posts. Some prospects see a deanship as an interruption of their research and teaching work.

Some professional associations are encouraging their members to think more about developing leaders from within.

During its annual meeting, in January, the American Conference of Academic Deans featured a first-time round table, led by Sortor, called “Growing Your Institution’s Leaders.”

ACAD and other groups have long helped colleges deliver administrative training to faculty members. Colleges often send prospective deans to meetings sponsored by the American Council on Education, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and the Council of Graduate Schools, as well as to regional and discipline-specific conferences and seminars.

Logan Jones’s saga at Missouri Western parallels those of many other new and emerging deans. Michael Lane and other administrators started cultivating his talents 18 months ago. Jones was one of a handful of faculty members at the business school who had expressed interest in attending meetings that had little to do with the courses they taught or research they were conducting.

“As a rule, I’ll announce at a faculty meeting that there’s an accreditation conference or something like it coming up,” says Lane. He has taken note of those who have volunteered to attend. He also meets individually with each faculty member. “It’s my job to identify faculty members who have an interest in administration and to do what I can to prepare them,” he says.

For Jones, that now means attending meetings of the Dean’s Council — regular gatherings, held by the provost, that include top college administrators — even though he has not yet started the job. He also journeys regularly to national conferences of deans. “The networking with deans is really important,” he says. “I get to hear their horror stories, what they consider to be best practices, and what to do in my first year.”

He also shadows Lane around the campus most days. “He’s learning what meetings are — I’ll tell you that,” Lane says.

Jones has also picked his mentor’s brain, getting advice on when to take calculated risks, how to strategically approach donors and evaluate academic programs, and how to put out sudden management fires.

In the meantime, he has become a studied observer. He appreciates that Lane “is a politician, but at the same time, he’s apolitical,” Jones says. “Unlike in the military, where people will do what you tell them, you have to be a politician in this job. He has the ability to talk with people and give them the right kind of attention, but not take sides.”

Jones is already looking to apply what he has learned to some of the problems that Missouri Western’s business school is facing.

For example, because of changes in the national immigration landscape, in the past year the school has lost most of the students in its master’s program in information management — about 30 were from India and other countries. Jones is making plans to shift his energy, rework some course offerings, and shift some faculty members from that program to a new online M.B.A.

One of the goals he has identified so far: “I’m concentrating on our potential for growth.”