I have worked with department chairs long enough to recognize a pattern that is both fascinating and sobering. A tenured faculty member, often an accomplished researcher or teacher with decades of institutional credibility, steps into a chair role and discovers almost immediately that nothing in their prior career prepared them for what the job actually requires. The skills that earned them peer respect — deep individual expertise, autonomous scholarly judgment, collegial relationships built over years — are precisely the skills that can work against them the moment they are responsible for leading the people who hold those same qualities.
That is by no means a criticism of faculty who become chairs. It is a structural feature of how academic leadership works, and it is one that institutions have a vested interest in addressing more honestly than they typically do.
The conversation I had earlier this year with Dr. Whitney Newcomb and Dr. Sara Schley on my podcast, Coaching in Higher Education, sharpened my thinking on this considerably.
Both serve as sitting department chairs, both are practicing coaches, and both contributed a chapter on coaching department chairs to the edited volume, Transformative Coaching for Faculty and Staff in Higher Education. Their insights confirmed something I have written many times before: that the most consequential leadership development gap in higher education may be sitting right in the middle of the organizational chart, largely unattended. In that vein, my conversation with Sara and Whitney logically continued my previous discussion with Dr. Kim Burns.
An Identity Transition Institutions Don’t Acknowledge
When a faculty member becomes a department chair, they are not simply adding a new set of responsibilities but undergoing an identity transition. They move from collegial peer to formal supervisor, and from individual contributor to steward of an entire unit’s culture and functioning. At the same time, they remain accountable to faculty governance norms that have long defined their professional identity. That is a significant psychological and relational reorganization, and most institutions offer little support for navigating it.
Whitney stepped into an interim chair role within her own department during a period of real turbulence. Sara arrived externally at a newly reorganized unit where several formerly separate programs had been consolidated, where faculty were still finding their footing with one another, and where the college itself was navigating a new president, a new provost, and sweeping curriculum changes. Neither of them had a map; both expected the other to begin leading. As I have written before, this is one of the institutional conditions that makes coaching in higher education so salient. Upper-level administrators often assume that content expertise translates into leadership readiness. It rarely does, and chairs pay the cost of that assumption, often quietly, and often without anyone registering the toll.
Leading with Influence vs. Positional Power
One of the more insightful framings I heard is the chair’s authority problem: chairs must lead through influence in a setting where several of the people they lead hold more positional security than they do. Tenured faculty cannot be managed through directive authority, especially not by one of their own. What works, and what coaching can help chairs develop, is the capacity to build relational trust across very different stakeholder groups at the same time.
The complexity of that stakeholder picture is easy to underestimate from the outside. Most departments include instructors and clinical or teaching faculty who are arguably more action-oriented and focused on getting things done, alongside tenure-line faculty who are deeply process- and research-oriented and cautious about moving before examining every dimension of an issue.
These two groups can frustrate one another considerably, not because of differing values, but because they are operating from different professional frameworks and with different behaviors built up over years in different roles. This is one area I thoroughly enjoy as a coach: helping chairs gain awareness of these differences for themselves and others, and supporting their faculty in seeing across boundaries they may not have realized exist.
Assessments can be one useful tool here. CliftonStrengths, for instance, can give a department a shared language for individual and collective strengths, and shift the conversation from rank and title to what each person actually contributes. DiSC, similarly, raises deep understanding of each person’s working and communication style and how each participant can flex a little better to collaborate across intra-departmental divides. The goal is not to flatten real differences in role or responsibility, but to create enough common ground that those differences can be named and worked with rather than generating low-grade conflict that no one quite explains.
Last year, I had an opportunity to administer and debrief DiSC with an entire department at The Ohio State University. The positive ripples were felt immediately and continue to this day.
The Weight of Invisible Work
There is another dimension of the chair’s role that I believe coaching is uniquely positioned to address: the invisibility of the supervisory load. Roughly 80% of a chair’s job may be supervision and confidential one-on-one work, and almost none of it is visible to faculty, because doing it well means doing it privately. Chairs carry a substantial relational and emotional weight that their colleagues simply do not see, and that isolation accumulates over time in ways that are worth naming.
Upper-level administrators who wonder why their department chairs seem stressed or disengaged had better take notice here. Chairs are navigating confidential information from administration while maintaining credibility with their faculty and staff. They are triaging what a genuine crisis is and what merely feels like one on a particularly difficult day. They are advocating upward to their dean while still delivering unwelcome messages downward. That is not a peripheral aspect of the role. It is its daily texture that can take its toll.
I also often wonder what institutional leaders would learn if they regularly asked chairs, safely and candidly, what they actually need, both to be better prepared for the job and to not burn out. So I’m not talking about what their performance metrics suggest, but what the person doing the job finds genuinely sustaining or genuinely depleting.
An ideal onboarding structure, for instance, might combine cohort-based peer learning, structured monthly professional development, and both group and individual coaching sustained across the first year.
I don’t believe that this is an extravagant ask by institutional standards.
After all, institutions appear to consistently find resources for external consultants who arrive with prescribed answers. The coaching model is different in a way that matters: it builds the chair’s own capacity to navigate complexity, rather than creating ongoing dependency on outside expertise for every difficult decision. Nonetheless, coaching for chairs remains rather uncommon, often underfunded, or quietly misunderstood as something reserved for “fixing” leaders who are struggling.
What Department Chairs Need Us to Understand
Department chairs are not a uniform population, and that specificity matters enormously for how we work with them as coaches. Many come from within their own departments and must rebuild trust across newly asymmetrical relationships. Others arrive externally and are building relationships from scratch while simultaneously trying to understand an unfamiliar institutional culture. Some hold the chair role for two or three years; others inhabit it for a decade.
As a result, year one looks very different from year nine, and coaching engagements that treat all chairs as interchangeable will miss what’s most salient for any given client at whatever stage they’re in.
What does carry across the population is the need for what I would call 360-degree relational awareness: the capacity to hold multiple stakeholder perspectives simultaneously, to translate institutional messages that land differently at different levels of the organization, and to help faculty and staff see each other’s work with more clarity than the structural boundaries typically allow. This is deeply human work and requires coaches who are willing to sit with ambiguity, who understand the particular rhythms and pressures of academic culture, and who can support their clients in developing that awareness without prescribing the conclusions.
Given how much a department shapes the daily experience of faculty, staff, and students, investing in the human beings who lead them is not simply good professional development practice. It is one of the more direct levers available for strengthening institutional culture over time. The ripples of that work extend well beyond any single chair’s tenure.
If you are a coach working with department chairs, or a higher education administrator thinking about what more intentional support for your middle leaders could look like, I invite you to explore my professional coaching and advisory services.
You can find this and all other Coaching in Higher Education podcast episodes on:
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Department Chairs and Coaching: Your Questions Answered
Why are new department chairs so often unprepared for the job?
The skills that earn faculty respect, like deep expertise and independent scholarship, do not automatically help when you supervise colleagues. On top of that, chairs go through a real identity shift from peer to supervisor, and most institutions offer very little help with it.
How can a chair lead when they have limited formal authority?
Mostly through influence. Tenured faculty cannot simply be managed by directive, so chairs have to build trust across groups that see the work very differently. Coaching can help them grow that skill.
What does “invisible work” mean for a department chair?
A big part of the job is private supervision and confidential one-on-one conversations that faculty never see. That emotional weight is easy to overlook, and it builds up quietly over time.
Does coaching look the same for every chair?
Not at all. A chair promoted from within often has to rebuild trust in relationships that suddenly changed. An external hire has to learn an unfamiliar culture from scratch. Treating all chairs the same misses what matters most at each stage.
What would good onboarding for new chairs include?
A simple structure can go a long way: peer cohorts, monthly professional development, and coaching across the first year. That is not an extravagant ask, and it builds the chair’s own capacity instead of creating dependence on outside experts.