The Department Chair as Talent Manager: A Discussion Series

Take your leadership to the next level by joining us monthly throughout the academic year to discuss what it means to be a talent manager within your department.

Overview

Traditionally, the role of the department chair is to work directly with faculty and staff to create a meaningful and engaging experience for students. In recent years, however, there’s a growing need for department chairs to also serve as talent managers for faculty and staff. According to McKinsey and Company, “Talent management includes all the ways that organizations bring employees on board, keep them happy and productive and help them continue to develop their skills over time.” Specifically, there are five key focus areas of talent management, as follows:

Finding and hiring the right people
Creating opportunities for learning and growing
Managing and rewarding performance
Tailoring the employee experience
Optimizing workforce planning and strategy

For many department chairs, the training, support, processes, and policies necessary to support this type of work may be lacking. But if the Great Resignation has taught us anything, it’s that we cannot delay this important work any longer.

To help you meet these challenges, join us online once a month throughout the academic year to discuss a new topic related to faculty and staff talent management. In these one-hour sessions, you’ll get tips and strategies from your peers and program facilitators that will help you to deliver on the five focus areas above.

How it Works

Each month throughout the academic year, we’ll be featuring a new topic related to faculty and staff talent management. Each session may look and feel a little different—but all sessions are designed to be discussion-based, so that you can join other department chairs from across the country in exchanging ideas, sharing current practices, and providing the space to ask questions. Sessions may include some combination of presentation, large-group discussion, and small-group breakouts.

You may choose to attend some or all of the discussion sessions. To get the most out of the series, we encourage you to attend all of them; however, if you can only attend one or two, you will still benefit from the information and collective dialogue involved.

Who Should Attend

This discussion series is specifically designed for any/all department chairs or program directors who are looking to better understand what it means to think like a talent manager. If you’re looking for new ways to recruit, manage, engage, motivate, and, most importantly, develop your faculty and/or staff, this discussion series is for you!

Academic deans, including associate/assistant deans, who are interested in supporting their department chairs in this work, will also benefit from this discussion series.