Being the Old New Kid on the Block—moving into a senior faculty or administrative position at a new university—can pose just as many challenges as starting your first job as an assistant professor. The search process will reveal some of the challenges you face as a senior-level newcomer. But your efforts may be undermined if you fail to recognize the implicit challenges that commonly confront senior hires.
The first implicit challenge is obvious but often overlooked in the first blush of excitement about being offered a new job: It is highly unlikely that you were the preferred candidate of everyone you’ll be working with. If there were internal candidates for your position, they and their supporters will have, at best, mixed feelings about your selection. You may enjoy little or no honeymoon when you arrive on the campus.
Second, if you are a newly appointed academic administrator, you can reasonably expect that some of your new colleagues will greet you with jealousy, resentment, and suspicion. If you’re already a seasoned administrator, you know that those unfortunate attitudes simply come with the territory. You’ve gone over to the Dark Side, after all.
Being hired into a senior faculty position with few or no administrative responsibilities will not exempt you entirely from jealousy, resentment, or suspicion. Some of the most bitter conflicts I’ve witnessed have been about making a senior faculty appointment. There will be those who opposed, on principle, the very idea of making a senior hire. Others may be jealous of the accomplishments that made you a strong candidate in the first place, and fear that their status in the department will suffer by comparison. The intensity of those negative attitudes increases if you’ve been recruited into an endowed professorship, which will confer both special status and resources that most of your new colleagues don’t enjoy.
Third, whether you are hired into a faculty or administrative position, it’s likely that you have been brought on board to shake things up. Perhaps your hiring will enhance the research profile of the department. Perhaps you’ve been recruited to start a new major or a new center. If you’re coming aboard as a department chair, it’s likely that you have been brought in to rescue a dysfunctional department. Deans are commonly hired to take their schools in a new direction. Change will definitely be in the air upon your arrival.
Actually making any changes will not be easy, however. In the search process, especially for a new chair or dean, just about everyone can get excited about the prospect of change. Indeed, just about everyone will have a list of changes that should be made. The trouble is that no two lists will be the same, and many may actually conflict. In any case, you’ll likely find that people will be enthusiastic about changes that others should make but considerably less so about changes they themselves must make.
So how can an Old New Kid on the Block make a solid beginning? Here are a few ways to increase the likelihood of success.
- Discreetly learn as much as you can about the circumstances of your hiring. The strength of your mandate—if such a thing ever exists—will depend on whether you were a consensus choice, a compromise choice, or (worst-case scenario) a selection imposed on your department or college by top administrators. By knowing the circumstances of your hiring, you’ll be able to approach your work with a more realistic sense of how quickly you can move to accomplish the goals set for you. And you’ll know how much effort you’ll need to put into building relationships and support for your work. (Hint: a lot.)
- Be humble. Don’t throw your weight around, demand special treatment, or otherwise insist on recognition of your new status. It will be far better for you in the long run to begin modestly and unassumingly. Paradoxically, the less you demand recognition of your status, the more status you will have.
- Ask lots of questions and listen carefully to the answers. Take full advantage of the fact that, during your first months on the campus, you can freely ask the kinds of questions that, a year later, will be impossible to ask. As long as you can say, “I’m the new kid on the block, so help me understand why we do X,” you have an opportunity to learn more. What’s more, asking questions and listening to answers is a surefire way to build positive relationships. That may be the most useful tool in your tool kit, so use it freely. (A word of caution: Your questions must be genuine, not rhetorical. Making statements disguised as questions will provoke defensiveness and resentment, and earn you a reputation as passive-aggressive to boot.)
- Test all of your assumptions. We make assumptions about meaning, motive, and even character all the time and in the blink of an eye: “Bill didn’t say hello to me this morning. He must be angry about what I said in the department meeting yesterday. He’s always taking things so personally. What a jerk!” Making assumptions can lead to serious errors in judgment when you’re the Old New Kid on the Block. So test them: “When you say you want to recruit better graduate students, I assume you mean that’s a priority for the department. Do I have that right?” The idea is for you to stay in learning mode instead of jumping to conclusions. As a bonus, you will also gain a valuable reputation as a good listener.
- Avoid making unfavorable comparisons between your new campus and your old one. However accurate the comparisons may be, and however much your outsider perspective was a factor in your selection, pointing out the shortcomings of your new campus is guaranteed to provoke a defensive and even hostile response from your new colleagues. Focus on improvement, not criticism, of the status quo.
- Finally, resist the temptation to make your mark quickly. It’s a powerful one for any Old New Kid: After all, you were recruited because of the experience, expertise, and perspective you bring to your new university. It’s perfectly natural to want to do something quickly to demonstrate that your hiring was a wise decision. However, if you make important decisions or attempt to make big changes before you’ve really gotten the lay of the land, you’re likely to make mistakes that, a few weeks or months hence, you would have seen coming a mile away. In the long run, spending time getting to know your new institution and building relationships will enable you to make a more enduring mark. Remember: This is a marathon, not a sprint.
If there’s a theme to my advice, it would be to have curiosity, humility, and patience as you settle into your new position. Those are worthy traits to exhibit in personal relationships, and they will serve you equally well as the Old New Kid on the Block.
