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.