If you’ve served as a department chair, you know the role is unlike anything else in academia. It sits at a crossroads: part administrator, part faculty peer, part conflict resolver, part strategist. On any given day, you might be handling budget requests, onboarding a new faculty member, addressing student concerns, fielding institutional mandates, and navigating your own research and teaching responsibilities.
And somehow, through it all, you’re expected to lead your department forward.
But here’s what often goes unspoken: while the expectations are sky-high, the preparation is often minimal. Many chairs step into the role with little training, no clear roadmap, and limited support for how to actually lead.
Leadership, Without the Playbook
Some institutions provide some form of chair orientation or handbook. These cover the mechanics—how to process a course release, submit a hiring request, or manage faculty evaluations. What they often don’t cover is how to lead people. How to mentor faculty who are burned out or struggling. How to mediate interpersonal conflicts without losing trust. How to set a vision for your department and bring others along.
And when you don’t have support in those areas, it’s easy to slip into a reactive mode, which means putting out fires instead of building systems.
Why Faculty Development is the Real Work of the Chair
At its core, the chair role is about developing people. Your department’s long-term success depends on how well your faculty thrive. How supported, productive, and engaged they feel. But faculty development isn’t just about offering occasional workshops. It’s about creating an environment where people can grow.
That means:
- Knowing how to have hard conversations with clarity and care
Recognizing when someone needs structured support—and what to offer - Making equity a lived value in how work is distributed
- Balancing institutional priorities with individual goals
- Modeling the kind of professional culture you want your faculty to sustain
Those aren’t innate skills. They’re learned, and they’re exactly what many chairs wish they had more training in.
A Different Kind of Chair Development
This is where structured leadership development makes a difference. Not just one-time training, but sustained support that gives chairs a space to learn, reflect, and build real tools for real problems.
That’s what the Department Chair Success Program (CSP) is designed to provide. And if you’ve ever thought, “I wish I had a better way to lead these conversations,” or “There’s got to be a more sustainable way to do this,” then you’ll want to hear from others who’ve been in your shoes.
Join us for a free preview webinar of the program on July 16 at 1:00 PM EST. You’ll hear from current and former CSP participants and coaches who will share how the program helped them build practical strategies for leading their departments, and supporting their faculty, in a more intentional way.
If you’re ready to move beyond survival mode and build a department culture that actually works, this conversation is for you. Register now!