Ideas for Supporting your Department

Department meetings

• Is the meeting necessary? Can you articulate the goal(s) of the meeting in a sentence? If it’s just announcements, keep it to email.
• Pre-meeting preparation. Agenda items are most effective when framed as questions to be answered by the group rather than general topics. Ideally, you can indicate an estimated time to be spent on each item so everyone has a sense of pace.
• High-stakes issues:
  • Find methods to make sure everyone (that is, faculty at all ranks, both the outspoken and more reflective colleagues) can find ways to offer feedback. Check out examples of “Brainswarming” from the Harvard Business Review, demos available online: chair defines a common project and departmental resources; colleagues work with whiteboard or post-its for a period of silent, individual thinking first before all members contribute ideas, paths, to larger dept goals.
  • Work toward consensus, take votes. Chair should summarize action points aloud before meeting is over, record in meeting notes.

Building collegiality and a cohesive department

• Consider doing more one-on-one, “touch base” conversations (having face-to-face interaction is really helpful, and helps sidestep miscommunications of tone in email)
• Benevolent attribution experiment: When there are differences of opinion, small mistakes, missed deadlines, can your colleagues agree to one semester in which they actively resist explanations that involve failings of character (laziness! Self-involvement! The wrong pedagogy!) and instead be open to benevolent attribution (this new colleague is really struggling -- he simply misread the date -- there’s more than one way to teach this topic)? Follow up with a few brief reminders to the department during the semester (“Thanks for keeping up with our benevolent attribution experiment!”) and see if the climate feels less divisive. Even if it *hasn’t* made much of a dent, there’s no harm done. And if it’s turned around the negative impulses of even one resentful colleague, that’s a big win.
• Consider collectively drafting a “department code” as a way of kicking off the year, and hearing what everyone needs from the workplace environment. Establishing rules early is best, but be willing to consider changing them if they’re hindering rather than helping the dynamic. This is something to write up, if that’s helpful, or just talk through informally if that’s less intense. Either way, you should be clear on why they exist and ask for contributions/feedback from everyone. Keep it simple, like --
  • When we meet, we’re all present. OR: We’ll keep cell phones face down during meetings with the understanding that we’ll only respond to urgent texts relating to family issues, etc.
  • We’ll be open and civil about our frustrations.
  • We listen with intent, rather than waiting for our turn to talk.
  • We respect out-of-office hours and won’t expect communication unless it’s an emergency.
• Consider Strengths, Appreciations, and Differences (adapted from Hanna Price's blog on workplace dynamics):
  • Strengths: find ways to signal to the department that you’re all rooting for each other; celebrate publications, acknowledge new research, leadership positions.
  • Appreciations: If divisiveness and resentment have been an issue in the past, building a culture of gratitude is the most immediate step in reversing that. Look for opportunities to publicly (and privately) thank colleagues for their great teaching, for their committee work, for a personal favor, whatever feels authentic and meaningful.
  • Differences: be clear that the department does not have to be of one mind, one approach, in order to be successful. ALL workplaces generate irritations; we all tend to bristle at the differences in opinion or frustrating idiosyncrasies we encounter in the workplace.
    • But in response to these inevitable differences, agree with your colleagues that this shouldn’t and won’t lead to others ignoring, dismissing, or shouting down those ideas.
    • Nothing shuts down collaboration and trust like defensiveness; nothing is more toxic to morale than eye-rolling and contempt.
    • INSTEAD: agree to embrace difference and disagreement -- anything that doesn’t explicitly disrupt the core work of the department deserves your consideration.