Coaching Skills for Academic Leaders: Bringing Out the Best in Yourself and Others

Deborah Borman glanced at her schedule for the day with a wave of anxiety. She was starting on one of the scariest tasks of her new department chair duties, a day of conducting annual reviews with her faculty with no idea how to prepare for these meetings, other than reading the professors’ self-evaluations. As a faculty member for 12 years, she had dreaded her own annual reviews with previous chairs because the conversations seemed so stilted, formal, and unhelpful. Now as a new chair herself, she kept thinking that there had to be a better way to help faculty monitor their job performance and achieve their dreams.