Your Career

Management can feel mundane while leadership is exciting, but a department chair must provide both

If you’re early in a faculty career, and thinking you might want to be department chair someday, what can you do to start preparing now? Good faculty leaders come in many different shapes and sizes. Some chairs are effective because they’re process-oriented and analytical, some because they lead with their heart first, not their head. Some chairs leave their legacy in updating and strengthening the curriculum; some, instead, make their primary investment in their faculty colleagues. There are a number of axes like these along which leaders might place themselves, and the picture that emerges would tell you a lot about where you’d most fruitfully invest your leadership energies.

Of course nothing is more important to position you for a chair’s job than success as a teacher and scholar/creator. So always keep in mind that the portfolio you’re building to win tenure and promotion isn’t different in kind from the CV that will get you that chair’s job.

For now, set about discovering which elements of faculty leadership are most rewarding for you, and lean into those. Look for occasional opportunities to step up, such as serving on a search committee or preparing the self-study report for a program review. Depending on your relationship with your current department head, you may also be able to mention your curiosity about the chair’s role, and signal your willingness to get a taste of faculty leadership when the chance arises (filling in during a leave or sabbatical, for instance).

Continue reading: “Ask the Chair: How Do I Start Training for the Role Now?,” by Kevin Dettmar

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What we’re reading

Here’s more on career issues and trends from around the web. See something we should include? Let me know.

• In The Wall Street Journal, a conversation about the growing interest in a four-day work week, and how it’s working at two companies.
• Advice in the Harvard Business Review on how to “compassionately hold your team accountable.”
• Still looking for summer reading recs? The New York Times has a list of 19 nonfiction books to read in your downtime.