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I sat in on our theatre department's faculty search this semester as the outside member — and I came away thinking about something I hadn't anticipated: what it actually looks like when a department knows how to work together. They knew how to talk to each other. How to actually listen. And when the candidate asked about their working relationships, they shared example after example of moving through real challenges productively — arriving at outcomes that were at least as good, and often better, than what anyone had hoped for at the outset. And yes, they clearly liked each other — but the liking felt like a product of something, not the source of it.
Once I noticed it, the explanation wasn't difficult to find. Theatre faculty don't just share a discipline — they share a deadline, every semester, in front of an audience. And critically, they are not just working with each other — they are working alongside students who witness that collaboration and depend on the faculty's ability to sustain it. The working relationships came first. The rest followed naturally.
Most academic departments don't have that — and the difference is more consequential than it might appear. A department is not a team. It is a group of people whose individual interests and intellectual commitments happen to run parallel — close enough to share a building and a curriculum, but not close enough to have forged the working relationships that real collaboration requires.
Academic life is, at its core, profoundly individual. Most faculty work alone, or with one or two others. Many are the sole person in their institution working in their particular subspecialty. What holds a department together is not shared work but shared geography — offices in the same hallway, courses in the same catalog, PhDs in the same broad field. Proximity encourages friendliness, and sometimes genuine friendship. But friendliness is not a working relationship, and when departments face real pressure — budget constraints, curricular restructuring, difficult personnel decisions — the difference becomes painfully clear.
What tends to emerge in those moments is committee logic: people staking out positions, seeking consensus, trying to persuade. It isn't dysfunction exactly — it's just the default mode when a group hasn't developed the capabilities that working together requires. Knowing how to speak directly. Listening without defensiveness. Subordinating individual preference to a shared outcome that nobody simply voted for.
These capabilities are natural to theatre departments because the discipline demands them — and because the students in the room demand them too. For most other departments, they have to be built deliberately. This is where a coaching-trained Chair becomes genuinely valuable — not as a facilitator of better meetings, but as someone who can begin developing a collection of individuals into something that actually functions as a team.
Coaching strategies for building a department that knows how to work together:
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Name the shared mission explicitly: Ask "What is the one thing our department is uniquely positioned to do for our students and our discipline right now — that none of us could accomplish alone?" Departments that can answer that question have the beginnings of something worth building on.
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Create a visible, collective win: Identify a near-term initiative that requires genuine collaboration and has a clear, observable outcome. The experience of making something happen together is the fastest culture-builder available.
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Surface the listening deficit: Ask "When did we last have a conversation in this department where someone genuinely changed their mind as a result of what a colleague said?" The answer is usually instructive.
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Distinguish friendly from functional: Ask "Do we know how to disagree with each other productively — or do we avoid the conversations that matter because we'd rather preserve the relationship?" That distinction is where working relationships either develop or stall.
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Find your production: Ask "What is the shared, visible work that this department could commit to — something that requires all of us and matters beyond ourselves — that could become our equivalent of putting on a play?" That question, taken seriously, can reorient an entire department.
The departments that will navigate the current pressures in higher education most effectively are not necessarily the ones with the most agreeable faculty or the most resources. They are the ones that have found their production — a shared external purpose that makes genuine collaboration not just desirable but necessary. A Chair with coaching tools can begin building that deliberately, turning a group of people who happen to share a hallway into a department that knows how to function as one.
Reach out to LifeBound to learn how we partner with institutions to help academic leaders build departments that are genuinely worth belonging to.
To learn more or explore which option is right for you, visit www.lifebound.com.
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