Jossey-Bass Resources for Department Chairs – Serie

Practically focused, easily accessible, this book is directly relevant to the academic environment in which department chairs operate. The authors—internationally known experts in academic administration—conducted interviews with department chairs and heads at 38 academic institutions from across the U.S. and Canada, public and private, two-year and four-year. The extensive interviews resulted in four thematic patterns that covered the overarching issues department chairs face: quality, change, culture, and leadership. Each chapter is packed with practical advice and concludes with questions and resources to help chairs develop constructive responses to the myriad issues facing them.

"Department chairs who have asked themselves the question 'Who knows where the time goes' should ask Christian Hansen for the answer. His book, Time Management for Department Chairs, will help chairs maximize the investment of their most important resources—their time, focus, and energy."—Don Chu, author, The Department Chair Primer"Department chairs take note: Hansen's Time Management for Department Chairs can change your life in just three hours. Written by a seasoned academic chair, the author offers practical ideas and strategic advice about how to increase your day-to-day effectiveness (and sanity) by using proven approaches to managing expectations, organizing tasks, running meetings, monitoring communication, controlling calendars, avoiding interruptions, containing crises, and everything else in between. If you want to learn how to strike a better work-life balance, this book should be at the top of your reading list!"—Christine Licata, senior associate provost, Rochester Institute of Technology"It's about time—the resource department chairs have the least of and what faculty want the most! Christian Hansen's book is filled with insights, techniques, and artful strategies to help chairs maximize their time while working effectively with faculty and balancing their personal and professional lives. This book is a life saver!"—Walter Gmelch, dean, University of San Francisco

Facilitating a Collegial Department in Higher Education Written for department chairs and deans, this well-researched resource offers a practical reference for how to create and sustain a more civil and harmonious departmental culture. Filled with useful information, including relevant case law, the book gives readers what they need to know to enhance the climate, culture, and collegiality in an academic department, as well as the university. Praise for Facilitating a Collegial Department in Higher Education "Bob Cipriano has provided a book that addresses department civility— a critical, ongoing problem in higher education. The book is rich in examples, best practices, and strategies for dealing with individuals as well as ways to build collegial departments…. Not only is the book packed with information, the author also has an engaging writing style and wit." —DANIEL W. WHEELER, higher education consultant; professor emeritus and former head, University of Nebraska-Lincoln "Pull out a fresh highlighter before opening this book! Be prepared to immediately collect practical, usable tools for building civility in your department from an experienced chair and successful workshop presenter." —SHARON BROOKSHIRE, director of conferences, Division of Continuing Education, Kansas State University "Department chairs' greatest job dissatisfaction emanates from colleagues in conflict. Bob Cipriano teaches and guides us, first how to deal with toxic colleagues and then how to turn your department into a collegial environment." —WALTER GMELCH, dean, School of Education, University of San Francisco

If higher education is to fulfill its vital social mission, new department leaders must be prepared for their positions and get up to speed on the basics quickly, educating themselves about the role and continuing to learn on the job.In this second edition of his classic resource, Don Chu outlines the proven ideas and strategies new department chairs need in order to do their jobs well. Thoroughly revised and updated, The Department Chair Primer contains information that addresses the current pressures and challenges in higher education and offers practical suggestions for responding to them.Filled with illustrative examples, the book gets straight to the heart of challenges and issues. Each chapter details a particular problem, includes a brief introduction to the topic, and provides tips on how to deal with the situation. Covering a wealth of topics, The Department Chair Primer Explores the chair's role as department leader Offers suggestions for handling stress and conflict Includes information on budgeting, resource management, and development Contains strategies for professional development, people management, and working with challenging personnel Presents ideas for handling department communications, student development, and strategic positioning Written in a concise and accessible manner, The Department Chair Primer is an ideal resource for the busy new department chair.

THE ESSENTIAL DEPARTMENT CHAIR This second edition of the informative and influential The Essential Department Chair offers academic chairs and department heads the information they need to excel in their roles. This book is about the "how" of academic administration: for instance, how do you cultivate a potential donor for much-needed departmental resources? How do you persuade your department members to work together more harmoniously? How do you keep the people who report to you motivated and capable of seeing the big picture? Thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded, this classic resource covers a broad spectrum of timely topics and is now truly more than a guide—it's a much-needed desk reference that tells you "everything you need to know to be a department chair." The Essential Department Chair contains information on topics such as essentials of creating a strategic plan, developing and overseeing a budget, key elements of fundraising, preparing for the role of chair, meeting the challenges of mentoring to increase productivity, and creating a more collegial atmosphere. The book also explores the chair's role in the search process, shows how to conduct a successful interview and what to do when it's time to let someone go. And the author includes suggestions for the best practices to adopt when doing an evaluation or assessment. The Essential Department Chair, Second Edition, contains a wealth of new, realistic case studies to equip leaders in this pivotal position to excel in departmental and institutional life.

In Positive Academic Leadership, Jeffrey Buller offers new insights and practical tools, as well as language and tactics, for fostering a more effective approach to leadership. With acumen and a dash of humor, he shows leaders how they can take the focus off the negative and change what they say, their perspectives, and their strategies. This more constructive leadership style plays to the strengths of leaders rather than to the weaknesses of their institutions.Offering time-tested and fresh ideas for becoming the type of leader who acts as a coach, counselor, and conductor for faculty, staff, and students, Buller demonstrates how positive leadership can become a day-to-day practice. With its down-to-earth style, the book draws on the most current research on positive leadership in neuroscience, psychology, management, organizational behavior, and other disciplines and translates their lessons into readable and accessible recommendations. It then makes these recommendations come to life by providing real-world examples that illustrate how to implement positive leadership strategies in all spheres of the leader’s activities and institution. Positive Academic Leadership is a wise guide for transforming any leader’s attitude about inevitable daily crises into manageable challenges that are based on a philosophy of accepting the environment and situation but working to make things better.

The go-to reference for academic leaders seeking practical answers to everyday challenges The Essential Academic Dean or Provost explains the "how" of academic leadership, providing a practical, comprehensive, reality-based reference for almost any problem, challenge, or opportunity. This updated second edition includes new chapters on the difference between leadership and management in higher education, leadership in politically charged environments, effective strategies for making decisions, and working with associate deans or provosts, plus new case studies, new research, and ten additional chapters available on the companion website. Each topic deals concisely with the most important information deans and provosts need when faced with a particular situation, providing both a comprehensive guide to academic leadership as well as a ready reference to be consulted as needed.The role of a dean or provost at a modern university is extremely complex, involving budgeting, community relations, personnel decisions, management of a large enterprise, fundraising, and guiding a school, college, or entire institution toward a compelling vision of the future. The details academic leaders have to deal with are numerous and critical, and every little thing matters. This invaluable guide provides the answers you need when you need them, and gives you framework for successfully navigating your job's many competing demands. Build support for a shared vision of the futureInteract effectively with different internal and external constituenciesLearn decision-making techniques specific to the academic environmentSet, supervise, and implement a budget that allows your programs to flourishAcademic leaders need a handy, focused reference that provides authoritative answers to the many issues and questions that arise every day. With proven solutions to a multitude of challenges, The Essential Academic Dean or Provost shows academic leaders what they need to know in order to successfully guide their institutions into the future.

One of the most challenging responsibilities of being a college department chair or dean is to effectively manage the diverse and independent intellectuals that form the typical college faculty. Many administrators not only complain about the amount of time they devote to grappling with problems between faculty and staff members—but many also feel inadequately trained for resolving the problems they with which they are confronted. Managing People helps administrators handle the challenges they face when dealing with everyday personnel management problems. A collection of 13 essays, this book is written by experienced chairs, deans, and vice presidents who offer sensible advice based on personal experience and scholarly research. Each essay tackles a different aspect of people management, explaining the dimensions and subtleties of the issue as well as offering targeted suggestions and resources. Topics include An analysis of how self-understanding is essential to any leaderStrategies for working with faculty and staff in a sincere and authentic mannerApproaches to positive leadershipTips on achieving consensus among facultyAdvice on conducting departmental or college meetings that create cohesionThe different types of detractors or difficult individuals, and how best to deal with themAn explanation of how to eliminate negative defensesEvaluations as useful for enhancing faculty performance and satisfactionWays in which to build and maintain faculty moraleThis book offers readers a practical guide on how to better manage faculty and staff in order to realize shared visions and positively impact their institutions.

Evaluation in departments is widespread but often fails to spark positive change. Based on his extensive work with academic departments across the country, Wergin explains that successful department evaluation exists only when faculty and departments have a strong influence on the purposes, processes, and methods of evaluation. The central purpose of Departments That Work is how academic programs can make evaluation more useful and critical reflection more likely. Topics include:* How quality has become confused with such concepts as effectiveness, productivity, and marketability and how it might more constructively be conceived as focusing on the engagement of the department with its constituencies* An examination of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators of faculty work, the concept of organizational motivation, and the factors influencing identification with the institution and motivation to contribute to it* The three critical factors of effective department evaluation* How academic leaders can create a culture of engagement* How to define and negotiate academic values with diverse stakeholders* How to ask the right questions and collect the right idea* How to determine standards and make meaning of evaluation data* An overall summary of specific recommendations for academic leaders and departmental faculty, including an appendix of the constructs presented in each chapter

American society thrives on innovation, which is advanced by the quality and productivity of research from higher education faculty. It is therefore typical for the responsibility of nurturing and sustaining faculty research to fall upon department chairs and deans at postsecondary schools. In The Research-Productive Department, the authors recognize the importance of this task, and share tested strategies for facilitating quality faculty research and promoting an institution’s overall vitality. Many such books written for department chairs and deans have chosen to address the full range of leadership and management tasks that typically occupy this readership. However, few have narrowed their scope—as this book does—to the important leadership tasks that influence the overall success of academic departments in one critical area: research. This book features the experiences of nearly 40 leaders from well-respected research institutions from across the country. It offers specific, useful recommendations for academic leaders seeking to promote high levels of research productivity, including insight on: recruitment practices, mentoring programs, reward systems, culture-building activities, and the distribution of fiscal as well as human resources.An eminently practical book, The Research-Productive Department provides readers with two essential tool sets: a user-friendly summary of over 40 years of literature on the characteristics of research-productive organizations, plus a wealth of descriptive examples of how these characteristics are actually manifest in a large number of research-productive academic departments and schools. This book is an engaging exposition of best practices that readers can adapt as befits their own institutional settings.