Tag: relational

  • Relational Communication Theory in Action: Enhancing Learning and Competence – Faculty Focus

    Relational Communication Theory in Action: Enhancing Learning and Competence – Faculty Focus

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  • 4 Ways Chairs Can Develop Relational Attention (opinion)

    4 Ways Chairs Can Develop Relational Attention (opinion)

    It can be tempting for department chairs to think about their role as a series of tasks on a to-do list: managing faculty and staff reviews, running department meetings, implementing a new university policy, dealing with unexpected emergencies. After all, it’s an ever-changing list that demands attention.

    But focusing only on tasks misses the ways that chairs shape how department members interact with one another and the quality of relationships that result. Meetings are a common example. Chairs have choices about how to organize meetings, help staff feel included or excluded, coach new assistant professors about participation norms, and assign people to committees. How chairs do these routine tasks can have powerful effects on how department members relate to one another and the quality of relationships that develop. Cumulatively, small moments of interaction have a profound influence on a department and its culture and can be an important ingredient in helping to make departments healthier places to work.

    However, many chairs aren’t used to noticing all the ways their everyday chair work impacts work relationships. To take advantage of the opportunity to positively impact relationships in departments, chairs need to develop their relational attention, or ability to notice opportunities to impact how people connect. Two years ago, I developed a six-part workshop series, Healthy Relationships at Work Fellowship, for chairs at University of Massachusetts Amherst, for a small cohort to work on just this issue. By engaging with research-based practices, they were able to develop competence and confidence as leaders while improving the quality of relationships in their departments.

    Below, I describe four ways chairs can develop their relational attention and increase the occurrence of positive, inclusive relationships in their department. In describing these four suggestions, I share examples from two cohorts of chairs I’ve had the pleasure to work with.

    1. Invest in one-on-one relationships with department members.

    It is easy for department chairs to take for granted that they know the faculty and staff in their departments—and that they know you. After all, as a faculty member you have likely had many casual conversations and sat in many meetings with them. But relying on your past knowledge can leave chairs with an incomplete view. We all inevitably have some faculty or staff we favor and those we avoid, leaving us with uneven relationships and information about their work, motivations and lives. Similarly, faculty and staff may have a hard time viewing you as an impartial department chair unless you take the time to demonstrate it. After all, making visible efforts to cultivate relationships is a cornerstone of inclusive leadership.

    One important way to create the foundations for positive inclusive relationships with your department members is to re-establish your relationships with them. You can do this by holding 30-minute one-on-one meetings with every member of your department. Given that chairs often have very little idea about what staff do and how they contribute to the department, it is important to meet with staff as well as faculty. In some departments, it may be important to meet with students as well.

    Before beginning these one-on-one conversations, try to get in a mindset of openness, humility and genuine curiosity, no matter your relationship history. Ideally these meetings can occur in their workspace (versus your own office) so you convey that you are interested in them and are willing to come to their space. Ask open-ended questions about their interests, their motivations and their jobs. In smaller departments, these meetings can happen over the course of a month, while in larger departments it may require a whole semester. In larger departments, where one-on-one meetings seem impractical, you can hold meetings with small groups of people in similar roles or ranks. These meetings demonstrate that you want to hear from everyone, no matter your past relationships.

    You may also learn new things that you can use to make your department a healthier place. For example, you may learn that two faculty unknowingly have a shared research or teaching interest. By connecting them, you can help to strengthen the connections within the department and potentially spark new collaborations.

    What you learn in these meetings can also help to address unhealthy relationships. For example, one chair learned new information about a curmudgeonly faculty member who frustrated his colleagues (including the new chair!) because he had a reputation for not pulling his weight on committees. When the new chair asked him, “How do you want to contribute to the department?” she learned that the one thing he cared about was graduate education. With this new information, she placed him on a committee that matched his interests, and he contributed to the committee fully. By crafting his job to his interests, the faculty member was more intrinsically motivated to participate, and his colleagues were no longer annoyed by his behavior on committees.

    1. Learn about the diversity of your faculty, staff and students and demonstrate your interest in learning from them.

    Departments, like all organizations, are diverse in visible (race and gender) and invisible (political, neurodiversity) ways. While there is lots of debate about DEI these days, learning about the diversity of your faculty and staff helps you become a better leader because you can understand how to help everyone succeed. To develop positive inclusive relationships, chairs have to make visible effort to demonstrate respect and express genuine interest in people different from themselves.

    To build chairs’ foundational knowledge, you can learn about the experiences of diverse groups in your department, school or university by reading institutional resources, such as climate surveys, or by having a conversation with college or university-level experts. For example, a conversation with a school DEI leader can speak to the experiences of your faculty, staff and students. A university’s international office can provide insight into immigration-related issues, which may be useful for understanding the complexity of managing immigration for international faculty, staff and students.

    Bolstering your own knowledge can help contextualize issues that come across your desk. For example, if a student comes to you to complain about a faculty member’s teaching, and you have learned that members of that group have to fight for respect in your university’s classrooms, your knowledge about the broader climate can help you think of this complaint in light of the larger context as you consider what an appropriate response might be.

    If you have more confidence in your knowledge, skills and abilities to manage DEI, you can connect more publicly. For example, if there are on-campus employee resource groups or off-campus community organizations, reach out and tell them you would like to learn from them; ask if there are any events that would be appropriate for you to attend. Given your stronger foundation in terms of the local DEI landscape, you can offer to connect marginalized faculty and staff with on-campus mentors and communities.

    The ability of chairs to engage publicly with DEI issues will depend both on their own expertise and their institutional and local contexts, as DEI work grows more fraught in many parts of the country. Some chairs who have expertise in DEI or related topics may be comfortable hosting activities in their departments. For example, one chair hosts a monthly social justice lunch and learn, a voluntary reading group for faculty and staff. Given her expertise, she chooses the article and is comfortable facilitating the discussion herself.

    Chairs can also create opportunities for critical feedback for the department. For example, if there is tension between groups within the department, instead of ignoring it, create a game plan for how to receive critical feedback about what’s causing the tension and how it might be addressed. Faculty and staff exert a lot of energy withstanding such tension; finding ways to address it can be a huge relief and release of energy.

    Remember, faculty and staff evaluate a leader’s inclusivity based not just on one-time events, but instead search for patterns in terms of the leader’s efforts around inclusion. You don’t have to have all the answers about how to serve the diversity of members in your department, but you can strengthen your networks to include those with knowledge and expertise.

    1. View committees as connection opportunities.

    Chairs can use committees, meetings and other routine ways that faculty and staff gather as opportunities to build higher-quality connections. By focusing your relational attention on these routine interactions, you can improve relationship quality. For example, people often don’t know why they’ve been placed on a committee or task force, nor do they know what other people bring to the table. As a chair, you can use introductions strategically. Publicly communicating your view of faculty and staff strengths and potential contributions to committees, task forces and meetings helps them feel respected and makes it more likely others will view them that way. This can increase the chances that these routine ways of interacting will result in positive connections.

    Committees and meetings are also opportunities to create greater inclusion of staff and to spread knowledge about their work. University staff too often feel like second-class citizens and that faculty don’t know or care about their expertise. To counter this tension, one chair introduces staff members as experts in their respective areas and provides them with opportunities to present in their areas of expertise in meetings. This chair reported that these innovations created new positive connections between faculty and staff; faculty had a new appreciation for staff work, and the staff felt seen and valued.

    1. Design social events as connection opportunities.

    We are in a moment in which many people want, and some have, the ability to work remotely. At the same time, faculty and staff desire more connection from work. As an architect of social relationships, chairs have the opportunity to hold meaningful social events that will bring people together. There is no one-size-fits all for designing such events: The goal should be to make events magnets, not mandates.

    To start, think creatively about what will bring people together in your specific department. For example, one department chair knew all faculty would come together to support their students. In his department, faculty wanted their undergraduates to have a good experience in the major because they genuinely valued undergraduate education. Accordingly, the chair organized an open house event for faculty and students. In the process of connecting with students, faculty also deepened their connections to each other.

    Another chair created a social event around the dreaded faculty annual reviews. The day before the reviews were due, she reserved a conference room and brought snacks so that faculty could trade tips about how to complete the cumbersome form. Still others hosted department parties at their homes, used departmental funds to host monthly lunches or upgraded the department’s shared space to make it more conducive to shared interactions.

    Improving the quality of relationships through social events in a department doesn’t have to rely on the chair alone; it can also be the work of a culture committee that can brainstorm social events that will resonate. Ideally, these events will become part of the rhythm of the department. One caveat: It is not advisable to use workplace socializing to try to repair relationships between warring internal factions. In fact, it can make things worse.

    Each of these four approaches can help chairs invest in and improve the health of relationships in their departments. It is, of course, also important to contain and manage negative relationships in them (that is another topic I address in the Healthy Relationships at Work program). But taking advantage of these everyday opportunities through strategically investing in your relationships, your knowledge and the ways people connect provides important sustenance to support departmental relationships and ultimately a positive departmental culture.

    Emily Heaphy is a professor of management, a John F. Kennedy Faculty Fellow and an Office of Faculty Development Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She developed the Healthy Relationships at Work Fellowship for department chairs when she was a Chancellor’s Leadership Fellow affiliated with OFD in 2023–24.

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  • Only connect: why investing in relational infrastructure is critical for universities

    Only connect: why investing in relational infrastructure is critical for universities

    Today on the HEPI blog, we explore the discussions at a recent HEPI roundtable with Elsevier on the topic of the Fourth Generation University – which combines teaching, research and knowledge exchange.

    You can read a full write-up of the roundtable, by HEPI’s own Director of Partnerships, Lucy Haire, at this link – or read on for a discussion of relational infrastructure by Sarah Chaytor.

    • Sarah Chaytor is Director of Strategy & Policy and Joint Chief of Staff to the UCL Vice-Provost, Research, Innovation & Global Engagement.

    At a recent HEPI roundtable dinner with Elsevier to discuss how universities could strengthen their regional and civic contributions, there was a rather sobering discussion of the ‘low stock’ of universities amongst both government and the public.

    This was in the context of an ongoing, international discussion about the concept of ‘fourth generation’ universities. These are defined as ‘global universities that are fully integrated in their local innovation ecosystem with the aim of tackling worldwide societal challenges and driving regional economic growth.’

    We are well-versed in our sector on the economic benefits of universities and well-practiced in trumpeting these to ourselves and to government. Yet at the same time, there is a growing evidence base on the disconnect between the British public and universities. Reports from UPP/HEPI and from Public First suggest a significant lack of awareness amongst many citizens of how universities positively affect their daily lives or contribute to the places they live. As someone working in university research, I am particularly concerned by public attitudes to research and development (R&D) – important work done by CaSE on public perceptions of R&D has found that a significant majority of people think that that ‘R&D doesn’t benefit people like them’ or feel neutral or unsure about R&D’s impacts.

    I’m not sure that, as a sector, we have fully grasped how serious this is. It cannot be a state of affairs that we simply shrug our shoulders at. As CaSE has observed: ‘This is a precarious position for a sector that receives substantial public investment.’  We risk undermining the ‘social compact’ that exists between universities and the public – that is, the basis on which we receive public funding (especially for R&D) is our ability to make a broader contribution.

    I conclude from this that the focus over the past 20 years or so on universities’ economic contribution doesn’t cut through to those citizens who feel that the economy simply doesn’t work for them. Making universities part of an abstract and disconnected concept of economic growth is of no interest to people worried about access to housing, cost of living or the state of their local high street. It also overlooks the multifaceted ways in which universities are contributing to places across the UK, from providing jobs to sports facilities to cultural institutions to working with community groups to undertaking the research that can save lives or tackle pressing challenges. 

    I think we need to focus more on how universities can make human connections and articulate their research benefit in human terms. To draw from Peter Kyle’s framing of innovation, we need to show how universities are putting their considerable assets and resources to use for the public good. From a research perspective, this requires us to think about the purpose of knowledge and how we connect knowledge to communities across the country.  In particular, we need to work much better to build trusted relationships that enable us to understand the needs of communities and citizens around the country and ensure that we are demonstrably meeting these.

    For me, that starts with taking much more seriously the need to invest in the ‘relational infrastructure’ that can support those connections. Put simply, relational infrastructure is the people, structures and processes that support universities to connect with other parts of society. At its core are people – people who build and maintain relationships, who manage processes and structures for engagement, who keep connections going between specific projects and funding periods.

    In my own world of academic-policy engagement, this relational infrastructure is the crucial ‘glue’ which underpins a whole host of interactions, projects, and exchange of ideas. It supports ways of working with policymakers that are about long-term partnership and collaboration rather than one-off transactions. (More on this in the final report from the Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement project.)

    We know that universities can tell a powerful story about their civic contribution – as the Civic University Commission noted, universities are ‘hugely important to the economic, social, cultural and environmental wellbeing of the places in which they are located’. This concept is echoed in the idea of the ‘fourth generation’ university. But perhaps we have focused too much on shiny projects and initiatives, and not enough on the simple relational approaches which underpin successful and long-term engagement and meaningful partnerships.

    Relational infrastructure is all too easy to overlook or to take for granted. It rarely appears in business cases or exciting new project proposals. But it is one of our most precious assets and should be actively cultivated. This requires institutions to acknowledge the need for long-term investment and to recognise that, whilst it will deliver dividends for universities, these will not necessarily arise a short time-frame or via our ‘usual’ metrics. What relational infrastructure will deliver is deep and meaningful connections with other parts of society, which enable universities to put their research (and other) assets to public good use.

    It’s time to take our responsibility to develop and maintain relational infrastructure seriously – it is the route to rebuilding our relationship with wider society.

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