A Toolkit for Department Chairs

Buller and Cipriano’s A Toolkit for Department Chairs offers readers exactly what the title suggests—tools that department chairs might utilize to strengthen their leadership skills and abilities. Organized in a straightforward, concise, and thoughtful manner, chapters include scenarios combined with activities and advice, illuminating the complex world of academic administration in exceptionally accessible ways. Covering hiring and evaluating practices, mentorship, teamwork and collegiality, communication, conflict, decision-making, and budgeting, chapters have real-world relevance, hitting right to the heart of many of the challenges administrators face. . . .Overall, the text makes clear that there are almost never easy answers to the challenges a chair will face, but that thinking through the possibilities can facilitate stronger decision-making, an outcome this text could certainly help achieve. * VOYA *
Buller and Cipriano’s collaboration, A Toolkit for Department Chairs, offers pertinent advice and a variety of practice exercises—giving you immediately useable tools for just about any situation academic leaders face. . . .A Toolkit for Department Chairs delivers on its title, offering practical advice through cases and reflections to help equip chairs with insight into how to weigh options and apply the best tools to create a stronger department. * The Department Chair *
Buller and Cipriano have delivered a rare combination of benefits in the publication of the A Toolkit for Department Chairs: a work of practical intelligence, specific advice, and humane wisdom. Just reading through the multiple scenarios they present would provide a new chair a crash course in the complexity of the context and the delicacy needed to be effective in the role. While reading the resolutions of these scenarios, new chairs learn "what not to do" and they also learn the precepts of effective action. Chairs who carefully read A Toolkit will come to understand how to navigate a true course through the inherent and conflicting pressures that bear on the chair in critical and all-to-common situations. Having founded and co-led a new chairs support group for six years, I can confirm that they have accurately described many of the key dilemmas that chairs face and given extraordinarily useful guidance. In view of the fact that the seven challenges around which the book is organized have been rated the most important in a national survey of 4000 chairs, I can confidently predict that this work will be a tremendous support for many new chairs. -- Dr. David Kiel, Leadership Coordinator, Center for Faculty Excellence, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
A Toolkit for Department Chairs provides a useful book for beginning and more seasoned chairs. The book is organized around themes identified as important through surveys of current chairs, and the result is a thematic treatment of issues such as hiring and evaluating faculty, mentoring faculty, and managing conflict — issues that confront chairs daily across disciplines and institutions. For each topic, vignettes are presented to capture a number of the complexities and cross-pressures that are typically at play, and possible solutions are also explored. So often, successful academic leadership is a matter of carefully analyzing situations, thoughtfully considering options, and judiciously choosing strategies for action. Readers will find this book helpful in honing competencies in each of these domains. -- Brent D. Ruben, PhD, Distinguished Professor and Executive Director, Center for Organizational Development and Leadership, Rutgers University
The role of Chair is complex and the seven areas of responsibility that make chairs lose sleep are well-addressed in this volume. Crisp and practical approaches to each area are followed by multiple case studies constructed from the authors’ broad experiences. Chairs are almost certain to see themselves and their departments in one of the cases. The questions that begin each case analysis are well designed to deepen the reader’s understanding of the situation. Resolutions offered pay attention to the political landscape of the department and larger institutional system and emphasize the critical role communication plays in success of any strategy. Rather than a Machiavellian approach to department leadership, the authors anchor their guidance in the responsibility of the chair to foster positive climate and respect for each individual, challenging though he or she may be. This volume will be immediately useful to chairs whether they sit down and read it through, or pull it from the shelf when they need specific guidance for the crisis du jour. -- Pamela G. LoRusso Strausser, Sr. Consultant, Academic Organizational Development, Cornell University
Both new and experienced chairs will benefit from reading and thinking about the case studies described in A Toolkit for Department Chairs. The case studies cover a wide range of topics (e.g. hiring, evaluating colleagues, managing conflict, making decisions and budgeting). Every case is followed by questions and discussions of different approaches that will surely generate new ideas to address the challenges of being a department chair. -- Lawrence G. Abele, director of the Institute for Academic Leadership, Florida State University