Education Commons^™

Chairs Mentoring Faculty Colleagues, Jeff Kerssen-Griep

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

Many academics struggle to manage the changes that come with suddenly being responsible for chairing a group of peers. As in skilled classroom instruction, leading an academic unit invokes specific structural, strategic, tactical, and interpersonal abilities. New chairs often quickly have to add ways of thinking and acting that are beyond the precise expertise that got them to that point in the first place. With our focus on understanding process, communication scholars may be better equipped than some others to understand this role shift’s dynamics, but often we struggle as mightily as our chemist or engineering or nursing peers to …