A Toolkit for Department Chairs [Hardcover]

Buller and Ciprianos A Toolkit for Department Chairs offers readers exactly what the title suggeststools that department chairs might utilize to strengthen their leadership skills and abilities. Organized in a straightforward, concise, and thoughtful manner, chapters include scenarios combined with activities and advice, illuminating the complex world of academic administration in exceptionally accessible ways. Covering hiring and evaluating practices, mentorship, teamwork and collegiality, communication, conflict, decision-making, and budgeting, chapters have real-world relevance, hitting right to the heart of many of the challenges administrators face. . . .Overall, the text makes clear that there are almost never easy answers to the challenges a chair will face, but that thinking through the possibilities can facilitate stronger decision-making, an outcome this text could certainly help achieve.Buller and Ciprianos collaboration, A Toolkit for Department Chairs, offers pertinent advice and a variety of practice exercisesgiving you immediately useable tools for just about any situation academic leaders face. . . .A Toolkit for Department Chairs delivers on its title, offering practical advice through cases and reflections to help equip chairs with insight into how to weigh options and apply the best tools to create a stronger department.Buller and Cipriano have delivered a rare combination of benefits in the publication of the A Toolkit for Department Chairs: a work of practical intelligence, specific advice, and humane wisdom. Just reading through the multiple scenarios they present would provide a new chair a crash course in the complexity of the context and the delicacy needed to be effective in the role. While reading the resolutions of these scenarios, new chairs learn what not to do and they also learn the precepts of effective action. Chairs who carefully read A Toolkit will come to understand how to navigate a true course through the inherent and conl#˜