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…
