Resources for Academic Leaders

“Academic Leadership is the act of empowering members of the faculty and staff by working with them collegially to achieve common goals, build a community of scholars, and sustain a high level of morale.”

Gmelch & Buller, Building Academic Leadership Capacity: A Guide to Best Practices

Consultation Services for Academic Leaders

About These Resources

Serving your colleagues as a leader can be a wonderfully fulfilling—and challenging—role, one where you can have a significant impact on the experiences of students, on the work of your colleagues, and on the campus community at large. There are not many jobs on campus that have as broad and deep an impact on faculty, staff, and students as those of a department chair/head, program director, dean, or associate dean.

Leading and managing a department, a program, a school, or a college requires knowledge and skills that many of us do not learn in graduate school. The resources on this page are designed to provide “just-in-time” information for managing the day-to-day operations of your unit as well as some strategies and resources for leading the faculty and staff you supervise:

Important Calendars and Due Dates
Boise State’s “Handbook for Department Leaders”
Resources for New Academic Leaders
Resources for Managing the Department/Program

As an academic leader, you are also part of the Academic Leadership Council (ALC) which meets monthly.

Important Calendars and Due Dates

Add "Academic Leaders Due Dates & Suggested Activities" to your Google Calendar

Resources and professional development for new academic leaders

New Academic Leaders

New Academic Leaders Program

Handbook for Department Leaders

Overview

Introduction

The Office of Academic Leadership and Faculty Affairs has created a Handbook for Department Leaders. If you are a new leader, we recommend that you read through it as part of your orientation. In particular, you might begin by consulting the page “Preparing for A Change In Leadership: A Transition Guide For Outgoing And Incoming Department Chairs.” Recently we have also added resources for leading during a crisis that might prove helpful right now.

The handbook is organized around the “Position Guidelines for Department Chairs and Heads at Boise State University,” a document that was created based on yearly interviews with department leaders about their responsibilities (authored by Cindy Anson, former Director of Professional Development for Academic Affairs at Boise State University).

These categories of responsibility are common across most departments, although the nature and degree may differ. Some departments, schools, or colleges distribute the responsibilities to associate chairs, program chairs or directors, coordinators, and so on. No matter how the work is distributed, this handbook serves as a resource for anyone invested with these leadership and management responsibilities. To the extent possible, we use the term “department leader” rather than “department chair” throughout this handbook to reflect the diverse ways that traditional department chair roles have been reconfigured in some schools and colleges.