Department chairs rarely step into leadership under ideal conditions. More often, they inherit tensions over workload, equity, direction, or morale that require immediate judgment and careful navigation. A single conversation can shift a department’s culture; a single decision can either build trust or erode it. In these moments, it is not procedural knowledge that matters most, but the ability to lead with clarity, empathy, and purpose.
Most deans do not need to be persuaded that department chairs matter. The more pressing question is this: what exactly do deans need from chairs now, and how can they build a chair development program intentionally? That question has taken on greater urgency as higher education faces a convergence of pressures: technological disruption, enrollment and demographic challenges, financial uncertainty, regulatory change, and rising strain on faculty, staff, and students. In such a moment, deans need chairs who can do more than manage the academic enterprise competently. They need leaders who can interpret change, sustain trust, communicate with care, and help departments navigate uncertainty without losing sight of institutional values.
The Clemson Chair Academy emerged in 2024 from this context: not simply as a programmatic response, but as an effort to define, develop, and sustain the kind of leadership capacity departments now require. While grounded in Clemson’s institutional context, the model is replicable and offers a broad set of insights for other universities into how leadership development for chairs can be designed intentionally, developmentally, and in alignment with institutional priorities.
A Developmental Model for Building Chair Leadership Capacity
If deans expect chairs to lead in more complex and consequential ways, they must be equally intentional about how that leadership is developed. The Clemson Chair Academy offers one approach. Rather than relying on one-time workshops or policy-driven orientations, the model is structured as a developmental progression designed to cultivate leadership over time. It is grounded in a clear premise: leadership capacity is not transmitted through information, but developed through experience, practice, and reflection within a specific institutional context.
The development of Clemson’s Chair Academy followed a structured, multi-phase process developed and led by Dr. Tia N. Dumas, Associate Vice President for Strategic Alliances in the Office of the Provost. This process began with a review of relevant and extant literature on academic leadership, department chair effectiveness, and leadership development. The review drew on widely used frameworks and practitioner-oriented resources from organizations such as the American Council on Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Academic Impressions, as well as selected foundational texts (e.g., Buller, 2012; Chun, 2012; Dettmar, 2022; Evans et al., 2023), reflecting but not limiting the broader body of literature reviewed. This phase was followed by an expanded benchmarking analysis, conducted in partnership with Hanover Research, of leadership development models across a set of reference institutions and national organizations. In addition to reviewing program structures, objectives, and resource requirements, this analysis incorporated qualitative in-depth interviews with leaders at exemplar institutions to better understand implementation strategies, challenges, successes, and approaches to evaluation.
In parallel, Dr. Dumas engaged key institutional stakeholder groups, including Faculty Affairs and Faculty Senate, Student Affairs, Enrollment Management, Human Resources, the Division of Research, Finance and Operations, and Marketing and Communications, to surface cross-functional perspectives on leadership development needs and institutional priorities. Insights from the literature, benchmarking and interviews, and stakeholder engagement informed the design of subsequent conversations with Clemson’s academic leaders, shaping how deans were asked to define the leadership capacities required of department chairs to support institutional transformation. This approach ensured that the leadership capacities identified were grounded not only in external models and institutional priorities, but also in the complex, often ambiguous realities that chairs navigate in practice.
That distinction mattered because the hardest parts of chair leadership rarely appear on a checklist. Consider a chair who must address a long-standing inequity in teaching assignments that disproportionately affects early-career faculty. The issue is widely recognized but rarely discussed openly. Addressing it requires more than applying a policy; it demands careful listening, the ability to surface unspoken concerns, and the courage to make a decision that may be unpopular with more senior colleagues. In another instance, a chair may need to intervene when a highly productive but difficult faculty member undermines departmental morale. The decision is not simply whether to act, but how to do so in a way that preserves dignity, reinforces expectations, and maintains trust across the department.
Chairs certainly need practical guidance on policies, calendars, systems, and processes. But the real tests of the role are often more difficult and less procedural: how to give feedback that changes behavior, how to have a difficult conversation with a colleague who is also a friend, how to navigate power and identity, how to support faculty equitably, and how to lead cultural change without alienating the people one is trying to serve. Clemson’s deans made clear that procedural competence alone was insufficient. Chairs needed developmental experiences that facilitate the identity shift from faculty member to institutional leader.
The result was a structured progression model centered on learning, skill development, applied practice, reflection, and community, rather than a series of disconnected workshops or day-long sessions filled with back-to-back speakers. In this way, the Academy became not a conventional leadership program, but a cohesive, conversation-driven model intentionally designed to build the kind of leadership capacity Clemson’s deans believe their departments now require.
Designing Development Around the Real Work of Leadership
For many institutions, new chair onboarding is treated as a logistical necessity. It is an opportunity to convey policies, timelines, and institutional procedures. While these elements are essential, they are insufficient for preparing chairs to lead in the ways deans now require. If the role demands judgment, cultural stewardship, and the ability to navigate complex interpersonal dynamics, then the earliest stage of development must do more than orient chairs to systems; it must begin shaping how they understand and inhabit the role itself.
At Clemson, this work begins in the Stewardship Fundamentals stage through a program called New Chair Onboarding: a nine-month, cohort-based experience designed to support faculty as they transition into their roles as academic leaders. The 2024-2025 cohort had seventeen chairs who were either new to their roles or new to Clemson and nominated to participate by their deans. The 2025-2026 cohort included twenty new chairs and associate chairs, also nominated by college deans. Participants did not receive additional compensation for their participation, and participation was encouraged, but not required. While the program introduces chairs to mission-critical systems, processes, and institutional expectations, it is intentionally structured to do more than convey information. Each monthly session integrates practical guidance with deeper engagement in Clemson’s values, history, and academic mission, ensuring that chairs understand not only how the institution operates, but what it stands for. In this way, onboarding becomes a developmental space where new and emerging chairs begin to ground their leadership in personal identity, academic values, and a sense of institutional belonging.
The structure of the program reflects a deliberate shift in emphasis. Rather than separating technical knowledge from leadership development, the Academy treats them as inseparable. Decisions about budgets, faculty evaluation, workload, and student support are presented not simply as procedural tasks, but as moments that carry cultural and ethical weight. For example, a budget reduction is rarely experienced as a neutral financial adjustment. How a chair allocates limited resources, such as what is protected, what is reduced, and how those decisions are communicated, signals what the department values and who it prioritizes. Similarly, decisions about annual reviews or merit raises can either reinforce a sense of fairness and transparency or deepen perceptions of inequity. These moments, while administrative on the surface, are often the most visible expressions of leadership. By embedding these dimensions from the outset, the program invites chairs to interpret their responsibilities through a leadership lens, rather than approaching them as a series of discrete administrative functions.
Several design elements reinforce this approach. The New Chair Onboarding curriculum is intentionally aligned with the academic calendar, allowing chairs to engage leadership concepts in direct connection with the operational and strategic demands they are actively navigating. As chairs move through key moments in the academic year—faculty reviews, budget planning, course scheduling—they are not only introduced to relevant processes but also supported in interpreting those decisions through the lens of institutional priorities and values.
At the same time, the Academy does not assume that chair leadership looks identical across all disciplines or colleges. While chairs share common responsibilities—faculty development, budget stewardship, evaluation, conflict navigation, and alignment with institutional priorities—the conditions under which those responsibilities are enacted can differ significantly. The leadership realities of a chair in a laboratory-based STEM field, for example, are not identical to those of a chair in the humanities, professional programs, or arts-based disciplines, where workloads, external expectations, and faculty cultures may take different forms. For that reason, the Clemson model was built with enough structure to provide a common developmental foundation, but enough flexibility to allow differences across colleges and departments to surface in discussion, mentoring circles, and future stages of the program.
Sessions are facilitated by experienced academic leaders and subject-matter experts who bring both technical knowledge and lived leadership experience. Rather than delivering information in a one-directional format, these facilitators engage chairs in highly interactive discussions, case studies, gallery walks, and game-based learning that surfaces the complexities of real departmental leadership. In doing so, they model the kind of reflective, values-informed decision-making the Academy seeks to cultivate.
A central component of each monthly session is the use of mentoring circles: small, peer-based groups facilitated by eleven experienced associate deans and chairs serving as Success Coaches. Within these interdisciplinary circles, participants engage in candid conversations about shared challenges, emerging questions, and the often-ambiguous realities of the role. These discussions create space for chairs to test ideas, reflect on difficult situations, and learn from one another’s experiences. Just as importantly, they reduce the isolation that often accompanies the transition into chair leadership and help normalize the complexity of the work.
Taken together, these design choices ensure that onboarding is not experienced as a series of one-off sessions, but as an integrated developmental process embedded in the real work, relationships with both faculty and staff, and rhythms of academic leadership. This approach is particularly important because the most consequential challenges chairs face are rarely routine. By situating these challenges within the onboarding experience, the program begins to prepare chairs not only to manage departments, but to lead them with clear values and intentions, and aligned with institutional priorities.
Outcomes
While the Clemson Chair Academy’s New Chair Onboarding program remains in an early stage of implementation and outcomes are necessarily preliminary, several indicators point to its emerging impact. To date, 37 department chairs have completed the program, supported by Success Coaches who volunteer two-year mentoring commitments. Sustained participation, deep engagement in mentoring circles, and consistent feedback from participants which describe reduced isolation, greater role clarity, and increased confidence suggest meaningful developmental gains.
Early outcomes also suggest increased cross-functional engagement with key institutional offices which meet with the participants. Deans and campus partners have observed stronger collaboration between admissions recruiters and college-based recruitment efforts, greater alignment in marketing and communications strategies, and increased outreach to industry partners in some areas. These developments remain preliminary, but they point to an important shift: chairs are beginning to engage the role less as isolated departmental managers and more as institutional leaders working across units and relationships.
We are also observing a shift in leadership practice as chairs move from managing tasks to leading people. Participants report making clearer decisions, navigating complexity with greater confidence, and building more aligned teams. Many are engaging in conversations and decisions they might previously have avoided. Deans’ early observations reinforce these patterns, noting stronger engagement with industry and donors and increased endowments tied to confidence in chair leadership.
The program also contributes to institutional capacity by strengthening the leadership bench, cultivating leaders prepared to be effective over time. Success Coaches have established a monthly Community of Practice for associate deans focused on faculty success. This group shares insights, identifies areas for improvement in the onboarding program, and coordinates support for chairs, while also informing ongoing development of the Academy. Continued interest in future development of the Academy suggests the need extends beyond onboarding across the arc of academic leadership.
What This Means for Deans and Where to Start
For deans, the implications of this approach are both practical and strategic. If chairs are expected to lead in more complex and consequential ways, then development cannot be treated as a one-time orientation or a collection of disconnected workshops. It must be intentionally designed, aligned with institutional priorities, and embedded in the real work of the role. Perhaps most importantly, the earliest stage of chair development—often heavily centered on policies and procedures—represents a critical opportunity to shape how chairs understand leadership from the outset.
Deans do not need to replicate a full academy to begin this work. A few intentional shifts can significantly strengthen chair leadership capacity:
Define what you need from chairs. Move beyond task lists and articulate the leadership behaviors your institution requires. What does it look like, in practice, for a chair to shape culture, build trust, or align decisions with institutional priorities?
Reframe onboarding as leadership development. Use the earliest interactions with new chairs to establish expectations about leadership, not just operations. Even small changes such as integrating discussions, reflections, or cohort-based learning can shift how chairs interpret their role.
Use real work as the curriculum. Anchor development in the decisions chairs are already making such as faculty reviews, workload allocation, budgeting, and conflict navigation. These are not just administrative tasks; they are the primary sites of leadership.
Create space for peer learning and reflection. Chairs often experience the role in isolation. Structured opportunities to learn with and from one another can accelerate development and normalize the complexity of the work.
The challenges facing higher education are not likely to diminish, and neither are the demands placed on those who lead within it. Department chairs sit at the intersection of institutional strategy and departmental life, shaping culture, decisions, and direction in ways that are both visible and consequential. Understanding policies and procedures is necessary, but not sufficient; the real question is whether institutions are willing to invest intentionally in developing chairs as leaders rather than simply preparing them to manage. Leadership capacity does not emerge by chance. It is built—purposefully, over time, and in alignment with what institutions value most.
References
Buller, Jeffrey L. The Essential Department Chair: A Comprehensive Desk Reference. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012.
Chun, Edna, and Alvin Evans. The Department Chair as Transformative Diversity Leader: Building Inclusive Learning Environments in Higher Education. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2015.
Dettmar, Kevin J. H. How to Chair a Department. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022.
Evans, Stephanie Y., Stephanie Shonekan, and Stephanie G. Adams, eds. Dear Department Chair: Letters from Black Women Leaders to the Next Generation. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2023.
