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TRYING to think what I could write about the daunting topic of the art of chairing, I was torn between, on the one hand, writing about what I think of as the ideal of chairing—the optimist’s stance—and, on the other hand, confessing the horrible realities—the realist’s stance. I decided I should focus on the former for two reasons: the first is that the horrible realities are mostly local and the ideal more easily generalized, and the second is that I really am an eternal optimist (which is a helpful trait in a chair).
This is the story of how I was introduced to the work of W. Edwards Deming—through the medium of a new provost with big ideas—and of how I learned some things from what Deming taught the Japanese in the years after World War II that have been useful to me as a chair. The story begins about fifteen years ago, when a new provost at my former institution came to the annual meeting welcoming faculty back for the academic year and told us about his mission of implementing Excellence (it was obvious there was a capital E). We were told (to our horror) about the importance of assessing the university’s mission through attention to our “customers”—whom we “employees” of course served.
I and my colleagues left that meeting ranting about the utter inappropriateness of applying any kind of business model to academe and in particular of considering students, their parents, the citizens of the state, or anyone else as our customers.
Two things happened during the next few years that gradually changed my mind: one was that our provost began to implement a university-wide review of the various service areas of the institution, one by one: purchasing, financial aid, the libraries, admissions, international programs administration, and so on. Each of those units was asked to describe all the facets of its mission or functions, and then extensive feedback was gathered from the employees themselves and from everyone with whom they came in contact about how the office was fulfilling its mission and what it might do to function better. I was amazed but the university did gradually become a better place to work. Those regular irritants of dealing with bureaucracies that weren’t designed to meet my needs gradually disappeared. Morale improved across campus. While the provost was wiley enough not to suggest again that his mission was to implement this sort of activity in the academic side of the university, some of that mission rubbed off on faculty members and academic units as well (probably with a good deal of behind-the-scenes nudging we didn’t notice).
The university began overtly engaging the community and the state legislators in discussions of how the university could serve them (and trumpeting the things it was already doing that fit their responses). Department staff members began focusing on how to serve students better, on how to serve faculty members better. Only the most churlish of faculty members could have ignored the change in the climate around them.
The second thing that changed my mind happened at about the same time. Several of our double majors in Japanese and business, of whom there were many in that time of a booming Japanese economy, approached me wanting to read more about Japanese management. To my surprise the ideas being propounded in the Japanese management literature were those being endorsed by our provost, and I found that both were part of a movement begun by an American who had had little response to his theories in the United States but whose ideas were taken up enthusiastically in post-World War II Japan: W. Edwards Deming.
A specialist in statistical sampling, Deming had been hired in 1940 by the United States Census Bureau to initiate sampling and statistical controls. In 1946 he left the Census to become a private statistical consultant while teaching at the Graduate School of Business Administration at New York University. His services were much in demand overseas following the war, and in 1947 he was hired by the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) to help plan the 1951 Japanese census. In the United States, industry had already returned to the peacetime production of consumer goods with an infrastructure largely unaffected by the war, and the process-oriented techniques advocated by Deming and his associates were largely abandoned as time-consuming and unnecessary.
Japan, in contrast, had been devastated by the war, and the Japanese were seeking any methods that might help them recover. On his first trip to Japan, Deming was greatly moved by the plight of the Japanese people. He also did what he could to learn about Japanese culture, attending performances of traditional theater, exploring markets and shops, visiting temples and shrines. “My method of learning is to become, so far as possible, Japanese,” he wrote in 1956 (qtd. in Aguayo 238), and clearly his later work was influenced by what he learned of Japanese social organization and behaviors. Unknown to Deming at the time, a group called the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) had already come together to aid the reconstruction of the country, but its members recognized that the situation called for desperate measures because Japan could not grow enough food to feed its populace. Japan needed to export goods for money to buy food, but both its traditional markets and its industrial base were gone. Learning of Deming’s work for SCAP, JUSE asked him to lecture. By the end of 1950, in addition to teaching statistical techniques to thousands of technical people, Deming had also reached the management of most of Japan’s large companies with his ideas on management.
In 1980, thirty years after he first lectured to the Japanese on his methods, Deming was “discovered” again in the United States, by a television producer, Clare Crawford-Mason, who was working on an NBC documentary. The documentary focused on the precarious position in which American industry found itself, faced, as it by then was, with the economic threat from Japan and other challenges. Running across mention of Deming in the course of her research, Crawford-Mason discovered him alive and still active in his eighties and ultimately she produced the influential documentary, “If Japan Can . . . Why Can’t We?” that led to Deming’s being hired by Ford, General Motors, and many other companies who were then willing to listen to his theories of management.
Deming had propounded fourteen points, based partly on statistical quality control methods and partly on things he observed and learned through his long contact with Japan. I’ve condensed his fourteen principles into seven principles for department chairs. Here are Deming’s points along with what I have learned about encouraging collaborative efforts, improving processes to make a better workplace environment and a better “product,” and decision making, all critical aspects of academic life and as applicable there as they are in industry.
1. Create constancy of purpose; focus on long-term goals rather than on short-term profits. Don’t sway in the breeze, Deming lectured. Take the time to review, to involve everyone who should be involved, and to gather the necessary data before trying to institute change. It is fundamentally important how the strategic planning (and other decision making) is carried out: collaborative decision making and distribution of responsibility are recommendations on which Deming seems to have taken lessons from the Japanese. He advocates involving everyone who has a stake in the outcome or participates in the process in every stage of planning. For chairs, this means taking a broad view of our constituents, who are not only department faculty members (tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure-track, part-time or full-time, adjunct, and shared with other departments, “research faculty,” “teaching faculty,” and all their permutations of responsibility) but also students of varying ages and races and backgrounds, departmental staff members who themselves have increasingly complex and differentiated responsibilities, and—beyond the department—the dean, the university, the community, the broader educational field of our academic speciality, higher education in general, potential employees, and so on.
In a recent publication of the American Council on Education, The Department Chair as Academic Leader, Irene Hecht, Mary Lou Higgerson, Walter Gmelch, and Allan Tucker note that new realities of academic life have led to a shift in emphasis from the concerns of faculty members as individuals to a focus on collective accomplishment: departments are now evaluated through outcome assessments of their students’ accomplishments, through regular programmatic reviews, and—most frightening of all—through budgeting based on productivity. These changes demand that a chair have the ability to create a shared understanding with others. In this climate, the role of the chair has become an interactive one whose purpose is to bring people together to work effectively.
How to bring faculty members together to develop and work toward collaborative goals is the chair’s main challenge because the realities of academic life unfortunately often interfere with collaborative effort and teamwork. The various research and teaching specialties within a department lead to a variety of interests. And governance policies and practices often inhibit rather than promote effective teamwork. Traditions of autonomy, independence, and individual rewards for faculty members make building a department’s collectivity difficult, if not impossible. Recognition that counts toward tenure and promotion is generally given for individual research or teaching effort, while service gets short shrift. Collective effort is rarely specifically evaluated and rewarded (Hecht, Higgerson, Gmelch, and Tucker 117–34).
The features of the Japanese character and organizational structure that inspired Deming’s principles are less pervasive and even perhaps less admired in the United States, but they are still valuable characteristics for a chair to foster. Many have noted that Japanese are socialized from their earliest years to see themselves in the context of, and in many ways as determined or defined by, the groups in which they are members. Status in Japan derives from membership in a successful group (or groups), so individuals are focused on the ways in which they can contribute to the long-term goals and successes of their groups. In spite of the barriers in United States academe, nowadays it is a chair’s chief responsibility to encourage faculty members to take an active role in collective decisions and endeavors, and the extent to which chairs can engage all faculty members will influence the culture and climate—and the success—of the department.
2. Change and improvement are ongoing processes that have no end points. Deming would have you establish within your department the philosophy that change and improvement are processes we have to live with continuously. As many have pointed out, there have been great changes in higher education since World War II in terms of demography, in the shift of the teacher’s role from lecturer to facilitator, in the reexamination of pedagogy and the content of the curriculum (with a renewed focus on interdisciplinary treatments), and in experimentation with technology for a variety of purposes. Fiscal crises also lead to new demands for accountability in terms of faculty productivity, student completion rates, student learning outcomes, and so on. Changes in the environment aren’t likely to slow, and discussion of how the department can meet new needs and contribute within these new contexts needs to be a constant within departments.
As much as we or faculty members would like to keep things the same, change happens despite the conservative nature of academic organizations. It is better for us to be in front of change instead of chasing it. Planning requires constant review and constant coaching to remind the department about its agreed-on goals and to push faculty members to assess the effect of day-to-day decisions on the realization of those goals. A chair’s role is largely that of coach, explaining the need for a change and helping faculty members evaluate alternatives and develop approaches to the change. This participatory approach, surely not exclusive to Japan, is actually ideally suited to the academic environment.
3. Drive out fear. The increasing focus on individual productivity and on evaluation by the numbers, not only for promotion and tenure reviews but also for annual merit increases, for posttenure reviews, and so on, makes this point particularly difficult for chairs. Deming admonished that primary goals be set in as large a time frame as possible, that short-term productivity and developments be assessed only in terms of long-term goals, and that individuals be assessed not by numbers or by their short-term productivity but by ongoing contributions to the progress of the unit as a whole toward its long-term goals, but this admonition is not one that our legislatures, boards, or higher administrators have taken to heart.
So the problem for chairs is insulating faculty members and staff members from the negative effects of short-term, numbers-based evaluations while at the same time finding ways within the unit to reward the contributions the unit values—that is, contributions to long-term goals. Chairs can help faculty members, in annual private discussions of their contributions, in departmental faculty meetings, in whatever venue, to see their contributions in the context of the collective goals of the department and to let them know the department values those contributions and will use whatever resources it controls (whether travel money, released time, or other perks, which although small can make a big difference) to reward them—while at the same time advocating for more effective reward systems based on collective progress toward goals.
People who feel safe feel free to innovate, change, and improve. Chairs need to provide regular opportunities for people—not only faculty members but also students, staff members, and other groups as well—to express their ideas about department activities and suggest improvements. We need to find ways to compare perspectives on departmental objectives in a climate in which everyone is free to express opinions and views without fear.
4. Work with suppliers to continually improve the quality of incoming people, equipment, and supplies. In academe this is easily translated into an exhortation to work with K–12 schools on articulation projects, sharing information about curricula and goals. In addition we need to work with our education schools to prepare teachers in our field and to work with publishers to provide the best teaching materials designed to fit our needs. Concern for broader educational policy has to be part of our portfolios.
5. Institute training. People can’t know when they have done their jobs right unless there is consistent information about the goals they should target as well as training for what is required to get there. Not only do your staff members need to attend whatever workshops are offered on your campus, your faculty members need to be encouraged to participate in pedagogy-related meetings as well as in research meetings, and they need to be mentored to enlarge their understanding of your institution and its workings and of the role of your institution in the broader educational community and with your constituencies. Train future leaders as well as strong researchers and teachers. Get them involved in service. You are going to want a successor sooner or later.
Do whatever you can to institute a program of education and training for all faculty members (in new methods, including teamwork). Support faculty members and staff members in any way you can to take any kind of training they are willing to take. Again we can learn from Deming, who said, “It is not enough to have good people in your organization. They must be continually acquiring the new knowledge and the new skills that are required to deal” (qtd. in Aguayo 173) with changes in the environment—in our case, changes in our academic fields, in university administration, in means of instructional delivery, in whatever it may be. If you encourage broad-based knowledge gathering, you are more likely to have people with the relevant knowledge and skills to meet new challenges and to be at the forefront instead of playing catch-up. You can’t do it all, so you need to delegate and share the responsibility. Delegate to others and get them the training they will need to take responsibility.
Part of training is finding ways to familiarize everyone in the unit with all its functions: as in the Japanese work unit, here too rotation of assignments is important so that each individual in a group is familiar with the operations of the whole, respects the jobs and contributions of the rest of the individuals, and understands their jobs and concerns. The Japanese system of job rotation encourages diversity of skills, knowledge across the organization, and connections with others. In Japan, flexibility is the central goal of employee development. The goal is to develop workers to contribute across the unit in as many ways as possible.
6. Institute leadership. Deming’s definition of leadership, too, shows clear connections with Japanese ways of behaving. Japanese leaders play the role of the “parent,” the oyabun, within the organization. They see their job less as leading their group and more as supporting it and doing whatever is needed to make it possible for the group to be productive as a unit. The Japanese leader is a conduit—a link between subordinates and superiors; between outside and inside. The functions of the oyabun include bringing outside information to the group, doing whatever can be done to keep the members of the unit ready to act on that information and to change as they deem appropriate, mitigating developments that may be destructive, and advocating for the group to others. Their work consists in helping people do a better job, in keeping an eye open for those who need individual help, and in discovering the barriers that prevent the department from doing its job as well as it could.
Before making decisions, Japanese organizations engage as fully as possible in an elaborate decision-making process termed nemawashi. Nemawashi includes drafting proposals for different alternative decisions (these are typically prepared by mid- or lower-level management), a process that is followed by extensive discussion and suggestions. The drafts are gradually revised until they achieve widespread agreement, and then all formally sign off in a process known as ringisei. These steps ensure that two important criteria for effective decision making are followed: anyone with a stake in the outcome is included and anyone with any expertise is involved. This decision-making process is also motivational because everyone involved has to express a commitment to the decision that is ultimately reached.
There are two important implications for leadership of this Japanese-style decision-making process. First, the formal leader can yield as much of the oversight to the informal process and the informal leaders. This frees the leader to be more attentive to cross-boundary relations, both vertical and horizontal. And second, disagreement is treated as a temporary, resolvable condition and not as an irreconcilable obstacle.
In Japan, work groups readily take on the character of what Deming called self-managed work teams. They are accustomed to working together in voluntary and involuntary groupings, to sharing decision making, to feeling comfortable floating ideas for change up the hierarchy as well as across boundaries into other units without fear of being ignored or thought out of place. Like the Japanese leader’s, a chair’s greatest power is ultimately in guiding the process of discussion in the department.
7. Break down barriers. Deming advises breaking down barriers among departments, groups, and individuals and fostering collaboration rather than competition. I think we all recognize that increased cooperation among academic departments can improve the quality of education. And collegiality among teachers at all levels is recognized as a strong factor in improving instruction, which results in the strengthening of education as students are led to draw the connections among disciplines and develop skills across departmental boundaries. Breaking down the barriers facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration in teaching and research and, occasionally, even appropriate resource sharing. Departments can no longer pursue exclusively disciplinary desires; we all have to address our contributions to the institution as a whole.
In addition to the dean, with whom one obviously wants to be on good terms, chairs need to cultivate connections with other units of the university. Institutional approvals for new lines are likely to come more readily if you have met with appropriate colleagues to discuss how the expertise of the new hire will support the work of related departments. There are even times when a shared hire may be the one means of adding someone to your department. There are definitely positive benefits to be gained for a department that can build effective collaborative linkages with related departments. Other benefits come from developing good working relations with the administrative and staff units of the institution, especially any administrative office that your department depends on for particular services: library, registrar, international programs office, custodial staff, admissions, advising and counseling, institutional planning, human resources, development, security. Remember as well those linkages to K–12 education, to community groups, to alumni, and to parents.
According to Hecht, Higgerson, Gmelch, and Tucker:
Two attitudes underlie much of the behavior manifest in university departments today. One is the notion of individual autonomy; the other is the conviction that the pinnacle of intellectual life is to do groundbreaking research. [. . .] However, higher education is now experiencing powerful cross-currents tugging at our application of indvidualism and the universalistic pursuit of original research. That pressure is coming from the public domain in the form of demands for accountability that can be answered only by moving one’s cone of vision from individual to collective performance. (232–33)
A chair sometimes has the unenviable duty of transforming pressures for change being put on institutions into pressures on the individuals within departments.
This doesn’t mean the academy can no longer assert its belief in the importance of the individual or that scholarly research has become unimportant. What it does mean is that we have reached a point where individual autonomy needs to be balanced with collective good. [. . .] If we are to reestablish a sense of community we need to see that individuals are part of complicated social networks in which their behaviors can enhance, undermine or even destroy collective effort. (234)
Despite my earlier resistance, I have come to believe there are some things we can learn from Japanese organizational behaviors and from the principles Deming and the Japanese laid out that will help us meet contemporary challenges to our departments, even if they originally were developed for the for-profit sector.
Hecht, Irene W. D., Mary Lou Higgerson, Walter H. Gmelch, and Allan Tucker. The Department Chair as Academic Leader. Phoenix: ACE, 1999.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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