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If you are a faculty member ready to explore administrative opportunities, congratulations! These rewarding leadership roles appeal to academics who enjoy creative problem-solving, and they enable you to make an institutional impact beyond your own classroom, lab, or department.
As you are wondering where your leadership aspirations might take you, I encourage you to experiment with opportunities at your current institution first. You’ll learn where your skills and talents lie and develop your institutional mindset. If these roles turn out to be a good fit, you will likely reach a point where you need to move on to a new institution in order to move up.
When you are ready to make this more permanent transition into administration, don’t limit yourself to the institutional type where you have taught. The mission-driven work motivating you to seek new challenges at your current institution can help you successfully transition to a leadership role at a different institutional type.
Advance in Place While Growing Your Institutional Mindset
During my time as a faculty member, I held numerous director-level roles, overseeing program assessment, a graduate program, an interdisciplinary studies program, and a faculty development office. These are the kinds of leadership roles that at many institutions come with course release while allowing one to remain on the faculty. Saying yes to these varied administrative roles will help you identify a personal mission that helps you assess future leadership roles for fit — I found that I particularly enjoyed curriculum development and faculty development as ways to support innovative teaching for under-represented students.
Look for ways to broaden your scope beyond your department or school. I served on the university tenure and promotion committee, including a term as chair. Two Fulbright fellowships gave me invaluable experience working at institutions abroad with very different norms and cultures. Completing a HERS Leadership Institute enabled me to develop a true institutional mindset — members of my cohort came from institutions all over the country and, in addition to administratively curious faculty like myself, came from advancement, finance, facilities, enrollment management, student affairs, and athletics. I learned about the functions of — and the relationships between — areas outside of academic affairs.
Look for similar ways to gain experience outside of your college or school, outside of academic affairs, and with different institutional types — you can do all of this without “leaving home.”
These experiences prepared me to make a bigger leap up the ladder and try my hand at an associate vice president’s portfolio focused on undergraduate studies. Over five years, I gained teamwork, management, strategic planning, and budgeting skills while leading accreditation processes and developing international partnerships. In this role, I relied heavily on my institutional mindset — to be effective, I had to understand the needs of and collaborate with deans in schools I was less familiar with, such as education, public health and business, and with AVP counterparts in operations and elsewhere.
Use strategies like these to advance in place — they will help you to discover what your interests are and to gain needed confidence and perspective as a leader, all while maintaining important relationships at your home institution and your community that can sustain you as you grow.
Use Mission Alignment To Transition to Another Institutional Type
When I was ready for a vice presidency, I initially focused my search for a chief academic officer role on public regional comprehensives because of my teaching and administrative experience at that type of institution. But shifting my focus from institutional type to institutional mission helped me identify another excellent fit — liberal arts colleges.
I knew I wanted to lead at an institution with a strong teaching identity, and I had gravitated toward undergraduate-focused teaching and administrative roles throughout my career. My own undergraduate experience at a small liberal arts college gave me some advantage in translating my experience into application letters and interviews in ways that demonstrated I “got them.”
Do not be afraid to cast your job search net far wider than any of your direct experiences. For example, as provost, I have now hired many faculty candidates who successfully translated their exclusively R1 experiences into terms that demonstrated they were well-suited to a SLAC that prioritized teaching, valued interdisciplinarity, and cultivated engaged citizens. It can be done!
In addition to a teaching focus, I realized many small liberal arts colleges shared other familiar attributes with my regional comprehensive institution. Both are places where everyone has to wear many hats, and where everyone has to be creative with every dollar. Both are places that broadly define research to include the scholarship of teaching and learning. Both value involving undergraduate students in research. And they have more in common in terms of student population than is commonly understood. Liberal arts college does not necessarily mean expensive or exclusive. Many teaching-oriented colleges are broadly accessible and increasingly diverse.
Put another way, demonstrating mission alignment can more than compensate for not having experience in the same type of institution. Read a broad range of job ads with an eye toward both the mission and the attributes of the institution. Identify the values, skills, and experiences that show you are a “mission match” and draw on them with conviction when making your application and interviewing with search committees.
I encourage you to pay attention to signals that you might be ready for new challenges and consider administrative roles. Higher ed needs creative, reflective, adaptive leaders like you. Say yes to work that is outside of your training as a faculty member, or even your comfort zone, and have confidence that you have learned how to learn. Embrace the experiential learning these roles provide, and you will be rewarded with new opportunities to learn and grow. The strategies shared here can help you develop the skill set and the institutional mindset you will need to eventually transition to a new place. And once there, you will find that a familiar, meaningful mission will continue to guide you on your journey.
