The Day‐to‐Day Life of a Dean: Engaging in Negotiations and negotiations

The touchstone for this article is the pioneering book by David Lax and James Sebenius, The Manager as Negotiator (1986), which captured the essence of business executives in action. An important purpose of this article is to record a number of insights and conclusions based on my experience as a dean, in the spirit of illustrating the manager as both a formal Negotiator (with a capital N) and informal negotiator in an academic setting.

I assumed the role of dean of the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University during the summer of 1971. The effort by Richard Walton and myself to understand the complex nature of labor negotiations had resulted in a book, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations (1965) appearing some six years earlier. Like Douglas McGregor (1960) who, after completing pioneering work on the prototypical managerial styles that he called “Theory X” and “Theory Y,” assumed the presidency of Antioch University in order to put his thinking into practice, so I was intrigued by the prospect of applying the tools and concepts of the behavioral theory that Walton and I had developed. At the time I thought, what better environment could I find than a school in which negotiation lies at the core of its teaching and research and where everyone — faculty, students, and alumni — think they are expert bargainers and enjoy testing their skills at every opportunity?

Early in my tenure as dean, I observed to a colleague that I found myself constantly negotiating, recording in my diary: “I never ask someone to do something, especially a faculty member, without being engaged in a process that can be labeled ‘negotiations’.” Lax and Sebenius (1986: 263) made this same point: “The very definitions we use of managerial functions should admit and not hide the fact that much organizational life involves negotiations.”

At the outset, it should be mentioned that this article is concerned as much about implementing change as it is about managing an organization in a status quo mode or “steady as she goes” operation. My conclusion after talking with many individuals who have served as deans, as well as reflecting on my own experience, is that faculty only accept important administrative responsibilities when we believe we can make a difference.

Time spent as a dean can be, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, both the best of times — and the worst. If one is fortunate to serve as dean of a school that has bright students, committed faculty, hardworking staff, loyal alumni, and supportive administrators, then it can be a rewarding experience. On the other hand, the students could be protesting, the faculty objecting to new program ideas, the staff rigidly administering policies, alumni demanding changes, and the administration looking over the shoulder of the dean. When days are characterized more by the latter, the dean may harbor a strong desire to “pack it in” and return to the “uneventful” life of a faculty member.

Interactions between a dean and the various players who comprise an academic enterprise can proceed along a variety of different paths. With students, staff, and alumni, the dean's objective is to be responsive, while retaining authority to make final decisions. With faculty, the modus operandi often involves a wide range of formal Negotiations (with a capital N) as well as informal negotiations characterized by a collaborative process.

Administrators want to avoid formal Negotiations or, at a minimum, keep them as informal or implied as possible because, as I will describe further, administrators prefer consultation rather than formal negotiations, which imply that the other party has equal standing. One means to this end is to have in place explicit rules and regulations that enable activities to take place in a coherent and standard fashion. Delegating authority is also critical, so that routine matters are resolved at the lowest levels by adherence to precedent and policies without the need for debate and discussion.

A clear delineation of roles and responsibilities does not take care of all exigencies, however. A dean often is required to resolve issues that arise between departments — and here mediation skills are in order. For example, on one occasion I asked the personnel officer to ask the director of the library if he would be willing to keep a position open to save money. The immediate answer was “no.” So I met with the library director to work out a compromise: keep the position open for one year and then fill it the following year, illustrating the value of expanding the agenda in what initially appeared to be a “zero sum” situation.

Office space and parking are always “hot button” issues, and a dean gets pulled into playing a peacemaker role. The arrival of a faculty member from another university, joining two others in the same office suite, created considerable tension for the secretary supporting these three professors. The new faculty member expected a high level of support (he worked late and required considerable typing), and as a result, the secretary felt overwhelmed and came to see me. My assistant befriended her and became her advocate. In turn, the personnel officer expressed concern that the troubled assistant had not first contacted her but had instead gone immediately to see the dean, and in the process gained the support of his own assistant. It took considerable mediation effort and time to get matters back on track, to persuade the new faculty member to moderate his demands, to counsel his assistant regarding the new workload, and to clarify the best route for support staff to follow when problems would arise.

One technique for maintaining control, especially in interactions with faculty, is to hold meetings away from the “front office.” Faculty love the process of give and take, that is, informal negotiations, and one wag expressed their penchant this way: “Many faculty will not even take ‘Yes’ for an answer.” So when a faculty member called to make an appointment, I often proposed the following: “Why don't I catch up with you at the end of the next faculty meeting, or better yet, I can drop by and see you in your office?” Engaging the faculty member away from my office gave me more control: I was able to get up and leave, thereby ending the conversation, which would have been much more difficult to do in my own office without resorting to the “button under the desk” option.¹

I learned the stratagem of getting out of the office to meet with faculty (also consistent with the best practice advice of “managing by walking around”) from George Shultz, who later became Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State. Shultz often followed the practice of going to a faculty member's office to talk rather than scheduling an appointment in his office when he was dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago.

Another advantage of unscheduled encounters, especially when faculty may be suspicious about the intentions of the new administrator, is that they allow for more “natural” conversations. Typically, when my secretary called a faculty member to set up an appointment, often the first question was: “What's the agenda?” By contacting faculty in their own setting as much as possible without pre‐alerting them of the agenda, I tried to neutralize their efforts to rehearse arguments and reactions.

Unplanned meetings can reveal valuable information. One day I was crossing the campus and ran into a professor who was arbitrating a grievance brought by a staff member who had been laid off following severe budget reductions. I was not sure how this case was going to be decided, and I wanted to get a sense of what the arbitrator was thinking. During this encounter, he told me he was going to rule in favor of the staff member, which provided me with important lead time, which I needed to make accommodations within the department.

Military strategists advise choosing “the right time for engaging the enemy.” The counterpart maxim for an administrator is to engage problems at the most opportune time. In some cases, this means overlooking issues that, if confronted, would only weaken the administrator's effectiveness.

A dean, especially one who has been a faculty member, can appreciate that professors want to be left alone to do their research and teaching. Thus, during my early years as dean, I chose not to press faculty for annual reports. This was one way to save my bargaining “capital” for future agenda items. When my office received a notice from the Cornell budget office that the use of state vehicles was being abused (specifically, some faculty members were not using designated parking spaces when they parked their vehicles on campus), I filed the notice and did not send it on to the faculty, reasoning that it would make them feel as though “big brother” was watching.

Not addressing a problem right away can allow a situation to “ripen.” An administrator cannot push too many things forward at the same time nor push an agenda item when it is unlikely to gain support. So he or she needs to consider what is the best timing for taking action on problems.

A key member of the school's leadership team had been in the job several years but he was not working out well. His style was impetuous and he often inappropriately glorified his own status. For example, on several occasions he chartered a private plane when the trip could have been made just as easily and much more cost effectively using a car from the university pool. So when it was reported that he had exhibited inappropriate behavior toward several women at a party for graduate students, I knew I had the opening I needed. I met with him privately and said that I wanted his resignation and that he was welcome to remain as a tenured faculty member. He agreed, took responsibility for his behavior, and said he would get help for his drinking problem.

As a result of research I have conducted with colleagues Richard Walton and Joel Cutcher‐Gershenfeld, I have found it productive to think about negotiations, especially from a strategic point of view, as comprising a mixture of forcing and fostering processes (Walton, Cutcher‐Gershenfeld, and McKersie 1994).

The foundation for any negotiating strategy in this setting is understanding the sources of power available to the administrator. They make a short list. The office itself carries some authority, for example, authority to allocate faculty positions to departments, to appoint members to committees (especially tenure review committees), to control communications, and to bring various groups together for deliberation about new initiatives. At the monthly faculty meeting, I was always referred to as “Mr. Dean.” Initially, I felt uncomfortable with this label, but it did signal the authority that came with the role, and enabled faculty to feel more comfortable disagreeing with my proposals in a formal setting, while maintaining personal contact and rapport in individual interactions, where they were free to call me Bob.

Increasingly, budget control is an important source of power for a dean and also compels her or him to engage members of the organization. While few academic administrators will admit it, a budget cut may be welcomed as an opportunity to make changes that would otherwise be difficult to accomplish — they provide opportunities to close down weak programs or justify terminating staff members whose performance has been marginal but not weak enough to fire them otherwise. From the viewpoint of those being let go, the bad news is easier to accept because the public explanation will be that they were let go because of the budget problem and not their performance.

Even the legitimating aspect of a budget crisis, however, may not eliminate controversy. If the decision is handled in ways inconsistent with the organization's culture and values, the chances of any layoff or program reduction remaining relatively private and bilateral are reduced significantly. And typically, staff professionals (often the first target for reductions) will turn to members of the faculty for support to protest a layoff decision. Thus, the manner in which staffing decisions are made can be as important as the decision itself, given the diffuse power distributions inherent in a university. The dean must anticipate and contend with the coalitional sources of power that may be mobilized in the face of layoffs.

What might be thought of as personal sources of power should not be overlooked. The willingness of a leader to accept risk and to push ahead in a period of uncertainty can confer considerable power on both the office and the role, assuming that more often than not the initiatives are successful. Not to be forgotten, charisma and expertise are also important sources of power — personal reputation is critical. Once a dean's reputation diminishes among the faculty, his or her decisions are questioned, opposed, or, even worse, ignored. As one colleague said, “Deans come and go … tenured faculty are forever.”

A dean is always riding a seesaw of gaining and losing political capital vis‐à‐vis the faculty. I learned this lesson from hard experience: when one's standing becomes subject to discussion, and then ipso facto one's power and influence will drop precipitously. This happened to me after I gave a controversial speech (most controversial were comments I made about a university faculty committee that I thought was being over zealous in monitoring a special program for minorities) and the faculty took a vote to label my remarks as a “breach of decorum.” As a result, I was placed on the defensive and it took considerable time to regain my standing.

Most deans also carry a professorial title and may want to speak out on subjects that their research and experience informs, but such statements may be read as reflecting school policy. So should a dean leave his or her professional views at the door when taking the job or can she or he speak as an expert in that particular area, as other faculty members? For a dean, the line that divides when to make a public statement on an issue of interest and when not to can be a fine one.

When under attack, administrators experience a range of emotions, from a desire to retreat, to retaliate, or to learn from the experience. My biggest challenge in being an effective administrator (or effective negotiator) was to be in touch with and manage my own feelings of disappointment, irritation, and even anger. When I received requests from faculty seeking special treatment, I found myself all too ready to become cynical and fail to put these events in perspective. Learning on the job is as much about developing emotional intelligence (Goleman 1965), assessing what happened and one's reaction to that episode, and finding ways to move ahead constructively, as it is about addressing the technical aspects of being a dean.

While it is helpful to understand forcing and fostering strategies in their purest forms, most issues that a dean faces will require a mixture of the two processes. A good example is the process of appraising performance and providing faculty with feedback on their chances for tenure. From one perspective, the underlying reality of performance reviews is that the “pie is fixed” (the distributive dimension); most universities limit the number of tenured faculty, and junior faculty know this. On the other hand, every junior faculty member should get a fair shot at earning tenure (the integrative dimension), and a dean can provide guidance and resources to this end.

The most difficult moment involves deciding how forthcoming to be with assessments. On the one hand, it is important to be honest and factual, and if his or her chances for tenure are problematic, then it is imperative to communicate this directly to the junior faculty member. But, at the same time, the assessment should not discourage the professor from working hard to overcome the odds against achieving tenure. Being clear, honest, and forthright is critical.

Deans should remind junior faculty members that there is life after being turned down for tenure at a prestigious university. The earlier in the process that the faculty member learns that prospects are not good for tenure, the more likely he or she will be to have the lead time and the mindset to capitalize on other opportunities and be in a stronger bargaining position to do so. This is one of a dean's most difficult tasks, and the challenge is to decide when it is appropriate to give negative feedback and how to do it well.

A dean may need to employ elements of a forcing strategy, especially when the central administration has urged or even mandated that the dean launch a “new chapter” at the school. Often a dean brought in from outside the institution has been hired because the president, provost, and perhaps even some faculty believe that important changes are needed, but often the majority of “insiders” do not see the same need. In such a situation, the best approach is neither to openly criticize the current state of affairs nor to perpetuate the status quo, but to use a restrained forcing approach, to persist and orchestrate “collisions” that can generate an “unfreezing” process that facilitates change.

One of the most effective forcing tactics is persistence. For example, a proposal to inaugurate a new off‐campus, master's degree program was defeated the first time it was presented to the faculty, who raised questions about whether it would be possible to staff the program, but the vote was close. We tried again several years later, after taking time to acquaint faculty with the need to deliver education across the state and to deploy more of the school's resources statewide. This time the faculty voted in favor of the program and it was launched.

I have found that relying on a planning or executive committee can be an effective way to move matters forward. Such a committee can examine strategic matters, such as budgeting and establishing new priorities, but its members are not asked to vote proposals up or down. To the extent that the faculty may be somewhat hesitant to accept ideas coming directly from the dean's office, a favorable review by a planning committee can smooth the way and generate acceptance among faculty. The administration maintains its authority and final say, but at the same time benefits from the give‐and‐take process of the planning committee. Committees, however, can take a long time to get things done or make recommendations and their use requires patience.

A separate treatise could be written on the subject of planning and its proper role in an academic organization. Much of what goes under the guise of planning can be a waste of time. What is most important — using interest‐based terminology — is to define problems and generate options for meeting challenges. In some cases, priorities and planning processes are only determined after a problem is recognized and engaged. Once a direction has been set, then planning creates the template for change.

Another technique that administrators often use to force change is to rely on threats. This tactic can be effective but counterproductive. For example, a faculty member wanted to fire a staff member but had not made a persuasive case. This faculty member, known for his emotional outbursts and quick decisions, decided to fire the staff member, who was paid through a research grant. The staff member took her case to the second step of the grievance procedure, involving both a hearing and mediation. The hearing officer, deciding that it would be inadvisable to reinstate this person even if her firing was meritless, met informally with me and urged the school to “buy off” the individual with four weeks of pay. The funds for this would have to come out of the professor's research budget; he resisted and offered just three weeks. In response, we threatened to reinstate the worker, thereby forcing the professor to grant four weeks of severance pay.

Another example: when I was trying to gain support for establishing the off‐campus graduate program, I scheduled an evening meeting over dinner with key faculty and the chairman of the school's external advisory council. He laid out the case in strong terms, indicating that quick action was necessary or there would be repercussions for the future of the school.

In this case, my role had been to “arrange” a collision between the chair and the faculty committee studying the proposal. The faculty reacted strongly, however, to my orchestration of this event. Views expressed at the meeting were quite positional, and my role was seen as “unleashing” a strong advocate on the faculty, and I was the person who had precipitated this very charged meeting. While the faculty became more aware of the need to endorse this new program, at the same time they felt less rapport with the “messengers.”

While administrators like to retain control at all times, the reality in any organization — and especially in the academic world — is that others may take the lead, and the administrator must cope as effectively as possible with this challenge. An example of this occurred in my tenure as dean when some activist students decided that the curriculum needed additional coursework on trade unions, with the added proviso that more guest appearances by union officials should also be scheduled. (The name of the student organization, Committee on Labor Action or COLA, captures their approach.)

Students studying labor protest and the union‐management negotiations could be expected to “try their hand” at using pressure to gain their objectives. Recognizing that COLA was developing a “head of steam” behind its campaign to change the curriculum, I decided as a first step to ask a faculty member who formerly had been a trade union official, to expand his course offerings. The leaders of COLA viewed this change as only a token concession, and they requested that I attend one of their meetings to hear their demands. On reflection, I decided a better response was to send the director of student affairs, the person who worked most closely with students on a day‐to‐day basis.

Following this meeting, I agreed to meet with the COLA leaders in my office. At the outset, I indicated that I welcomed the opportunity to hear their views and engage in problem solving and that I looked forward to the discussion. At one point, their language became vociferous and accusatory, so I admonished the students for not acting in a professional manner.

Before the meeting, they had asked if an outside advisor (nonstudent) could attend the meeting. I felt uneasy about this and initially objected. Eventually, I agreed, believing that the group should be free to choose whom they wanted as part of their delegation. As it turned out, the outsider remained relatively quiet during the meeting, and clearly his role had been defined as advising the students behind the scenes.

I made no commitments during this meeting, but subsequently met with the relevant faculty members, and we developed a plan to augment the number of courses dealing with trade unions. This plan was presented to the COLA leaders at a subsequent meeting, at which point they announced a “victory celebration” dinner and invited me to attend. I chose to show up for the first part of the dinner, but not to stay for the full event.

During this episode, I was mindful of a number of dilemmas. One was the precedent that could be set for other groups that might want to mount a protest.² I was also concerned because COLA was not an officially sanctioned student organization, and I needed to brief the elected leaders of the student association about what was happening while negotiations were taking place with this “direct action” group.

Certainly, an administrator can use protest as an opportunity to create change. In this case, I thought, as a result of my own analysis of the curriculum, that more courses relating to the union movement were indeed desirable. Hence, the protest served to bring about change that otherwise would have been much more difficult to achieve, especially if I had tried to orchestrate the process from the dean's office.

To engage in effective fostering, an administrator must have a deep understanding of the faculty's interests. Whenever I pushed ahead without fully appreciating the interests of the faculty, I stumbled. One such moment arose in my approach to the “charter” faculty of the school, all of whom were in their early or mid‐sixties when I arrived in 1971. These individuals had been at the school since its establishment in 1949 and were seen by the alumni as cherished mentors and revered founders. A point in the history of the school had been reached when it was imperative to hire a new generation of faculty. So I developed a plan that enabled them to retire and be rehired on a half‐time basis, resulting in no loss of income.

I thought this was a brilliant idea, but I did not appreciate their point of view that saw the arrangement as diminishing their status. I viewed the matter much more in terms of a business transaction and I did not respond to their deep emotional needs and interests. As a result, I encountered considerable opposition. One of them counseled me later that I should have used budget pressures as a substantive reason for going this route, emphasizing the trade‐off involved in hiring assistant professors (at lower salaries) at the same time that half of the higher salaries for these senior faculty members came off the books. In modern negotiations theory, this approach would be called “reframing” the issue in ways that engage an interest of the other party, in this case the charter faculty members’ loyalty to the school and its future.

Consultation — engaging in negotiations while maintaining control — is an important component of any fostering strategy. In my experience, consultation, especially with faculty, is more effective when done before, rather than after, a plan is formulated and announced, because after the announcement faculty will focus on the process of the decision and not just its consequences. Engaging in consultation en route to formulating a plan has many advantages. It honors institutional values of collegiality and helps achieve the “consent” of the organization's members.

What I envision as “consultation” is not a process of co‐decision making. On one occasion, students complained that they did not want to be consulted about a proposal for a new course; rather, they wanted to be present at the outset when the problem was first identified and options considered. My approach has been to encourage input, and even on some occasions to put students on search committees, but at the same time to ensure that the administration retains the final say. For example, when a search committee was formed to find a new director for the placement office, several students were recruited to serve, but I made it clear that the final hiring decision would remain in the dean's office.

As I have thought about the consultation process, I have found it helpful to draw two lines on a graph that track both the quality and acceptability of the decision‐making process. Simply stated, the participation of a few key individuals usually improves the quality of the decision dramatically, while consultation with additional parties does not add much in the way of incremental improvement. On the other hand, involving additional people, especially when doing so taps into a range of diverse stakeholders, can substantially improve the acceptability of the new initiative. So at some point, the administrator reaches a “sweet spot” in which sufficient participation has occurred both to improve the substance of the proposal and to gain its acceptance.

Consultation is required for budget setting, especially when reductions are involved. As I noted, budgetary limitations can be a useful lever for change, and deans who have been down this road may try to reduce expenses even more than mandated as a way of making room for new initiatives, although such programs should not be launched too quickly. Hiring new staff while others are being let go can be awkward and create bad will, and if a union is present then it may constitute a violation of the collective bargaining agreement. Another caveat is to undertake reductions as quickly as possible and in one stroke, rather than stretching the contraction over phases. Any downsizing significantly diminishes morale and to minimize the negative impact on the organization it is better to be able to say: “We have taken the cuts and now let us get back to doing our work as effectively as possible” knowing that many in the organization will have to assume additional duties as a result of the reductions.

While extensive consultation may minimize pushback as well as the need for formal Negotiations, the areas of the organization affected by cutbacks may respond with various kinds of resistance. When the budget reduction plan at Cornell called for shifting some operations from the alumni office back to the office of student affairs, a delegation of students mounted extensive protests, forcing my hand and requiring a course reversal. As a result, the student newspaper announced in a headline, “Students in Negotiations with the Dean Force a Cancellation of the Move of the Placement Office.”

The administrator must decide how extensive to make the consultation process, recognizing that additional input beyond a certain point will not improve the quality of the initiative. Extensive consultation takes time and requires designating key players among a range of constituencies: students, staff, faculty, central administration, alumni, trustees, and possibly even parents.

Despite the lengthiness of the consultation process, to shortcut it can create problems. The director of special programs reported that a group of human resource managers were quite dissatisfied with a seminar program that had just ended. Rather than first talking with the faculty member, I asked to see the evaluation sheets. The faculty member learned of my request and stormed into my office and I apologized for this “end run.” He objected that I had not first contacted him about the complaints and in the process surfaced the feedback from the seminar participants. Faculty want to and need to be treated as colleagues.

Extensive consultation entails other disadvantages beyond the time it consumes. It may appear to observers that the administration is indecisive and not in control of the process. Then too, some faculty may feel they are being co‐opted before the proposal comes to the faculty floor for discussion and a vote.

But the consultation process cannot be conducted superficially. Those being consulted need to feel that their voice is being heard and that the process is not pro forma. The administration must take seriously what is being proposed by various stakeholders. One example: I asked a department head to make a recommendation with respect to salary increases, and when he made a recommendation with which I did not agree, I then had to spend considerable time explaining to him why my views differed from his.

Similarly, when faculty are briefed regarding the details of the school's budget, they inevitably scrutinize how much money is being spent on items that they term “public relations,” and they are likely to propose that such “unnecessary expenses” be reallocated to other priorities, such as faculty research. Similarly, when the school embarked on a program entitled “War on Waste” to help close a budget gap, some of the staff — for the first time observing how much money was being spent on professional travel for faculty — asked to have this “perk” reduced, or at least to require faculty to stay in cheaper hotels.

The net effect of too much consultation can lead to “enmeshment,” in which everyone is looking over everyone else's shoulder: faculty worry about university investments, trustees worry about the appropriateness of tenure decisions, and department heads argue over the allocation of vacant faculty lines.

So, where do I stand on this important issue? I believe the administrator should do enough initial work to have a plan in mind, but at the same time remain open to the possibility that the plan may need to be abandoned and/or modified substantially. In the language of negotiations this sequence would be: the administration has an interest (moving ahead with a new program), and develops a working draft or proposal, but it is quite willing to enter into a problem‐solving process that elicits the interests of relevant stakeholders to improve the design, hopefully to achieve acceptability when the proposal comes to the floor of the faculty meeting.

In this brief account, I have highlighted some of the negotiation facets and challenges that a university dean can encounter. Because of the number and diversity of stakeholders, the importance of the agenda items, and the notion that universities should be deliberative, the dean's vantage point is an excellent one from which to consider negotiations practiced at both the formal and informal levels.

Several themes emerge. First, the appropriate negotiating strategy can shift depending on the role of the “other party.” Students often want to engage in formal Negotiations and sometimes use coercive power to bring an administrator “to the table.” My approach in such situations is to keep negotiations informal to the extent possible and to utilize consultation as a means for forestalling formal Negotiations.

When faculty are involved, consultation is also the dominant and preferred strategy for satisfying their interests and, happily, in most instances for achieving their consent. But when an administrator accepts a mandate to “shake up the organization” (by retiring senior faculty, hiring new faculty, initiating off‐campus degree programs, etc.) to advance the mission and reputation of the school, then the approach inevitably will involve more formal Negotiations, utilizing a mix of forcing and fostering strategies.

In situations in which an administrator has an ambitious change agenda, she or he confronts challenging choices. Should the mandate to make fundamental changes be shared openly? In seminars on interest‐based bargaining, the advice is to be as transparent as possible about interests. But when the administrator's interest is to move the organization in a new direction and key stakeholders may be negatively affected, then some discretion about openness may be in order.

The administrator's overriding imperative is to maintain control and standing. After all, unlike many organizations, in academia the dean's tenure ultimately depends on maintaining the support of the group most likely to be affected by a change agenda, that is, the faculty.

Two ameliorating strategies can take the edge off of a change program that may contain elements of forcing. First, as discussed, the administrator can use consultation to informally achieve many of the advantages of interest‐based bargaining without ceding the right to make the final decision. The second approach, which often takes place outside of work, is the practice engaged in by political leaders of cultivating and developing “social capital” by, for example, entertaining faculty, attending student parties, and being sensitive and responsive to personal issues affecting all members of the organization. This can be summarized in the words of a faculty member: “I don't like many of the changes being advocated by the dean, but I cannot help liking him as a person.”

Some of the tactics described in this article might be viewed as Machiavellian, for example, catching faculty “on the fly,” using a planning committee to run interference for the dean, letting a problem ripen before addressing it, and taking advantage of budget cuts and student protests to further a change agenda. Rather, these tactics should be seen as necessary steps in a journey to achieve improved outcomes for the education enterprise.

When Dick Walton and I wrote A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations almost half a century ago, we were only observers of the process. Serving as dean presented many opportunities for practicing and reflecting on the art and science of this discipline. I came to appreciate the importance of strategy, of knowing when to force and when to foster, of keeping the process from escalating into formal Negotiations when informal ones would work better, and of preserving and enhancing the essential, yet fragile, determinant of leader effectiveness, the power to influence and achieve desired results.