Member-only story
Effectiveness in Chairpersoning
Why I think I’m a good Chairperson
In last week’s piece, I discussed some of the reason’s why I like serving as the Chairperson for the science department. In short, it’s a job that I really enjoy, and it’s one that plays to my particular strengths. At the end of the piece, I indicated that I had a pretty good handle on how well I do the work, and foreshadowed that I would explain why I feel this way this week. So here we go.
Generally speaking, my current school offers no evaluation of its Chairpeople. Over the course of the year, or the span of a Chair’s three-year appointment, nothing is ever systematically done to capture the thoughts of department members about how well they feel their Chair is doing. I suppose the supervising administrator for a Department has some handle on it, if only to determine if a given Chair should continue in the role when their term is up. But again, there’s nothing formal.
As this is my last year in my current appointment, I thought it might be useful to get a more solid understanding of how my colleagues in the science Department felt about the work that I have done as the Chair. As luck would have it, I wasn’t the only Chairperson who was interested in something like this. So it was that I met with two of my fellow Chairpeople to develop a survey instrument that we could have our department colleagues (anonymously) fill out to give us some understanding of how they felt we were doing in the job. The survey was simple: A series of Likert scale items for participants to use to evaluate how well we did the various aspects of the job as per the official description of the role. What was particularly nice about this structure was that it was able to show us the perceptions of our colleagues while not being too burdensome regarding the time they would need to fill it out. It was also flexible enough to allow us to put a few additional items on to look at aspects of the work that we each might have felt was important, while not being in the official description of the job. We also decided to stick a few, optional, qualitative items at the end for more details about the things that our colleagues felt we did really well, things we could do better, and anything else they might wish to add.
