Gmelch and Mishkin (2004) shared that “higher education will continue to have a “leadership crisis” as long as chairing a department remains an unmanageable and unproductive option for faculty members” (p. 132). For a role that has been referred to as a lynchpin in the university (Cipriano, 2011), faculty often try to avoid the chair role because they do not want to deal with the stress of the role or have to worry about falling behind in their research. For many individuals who assume the chair role, this is their first foray into leadership. While faculty are trained to be leaders in their disciplines, very few are prepared with the skills they need to step into formal leadership roles.Over the last few decades, the number of women receiving doctoral degrees has reached gender parity, yet the number of women advancing into academic leadership roles has not experienced the same growth. As individuals stepping into the chair role may already experience a shift in identity from faculty to leadership, this study focused on understanding how women perceived their transition from faculty to chair. Eight women department chairs were identified from a conference of R1 institutions and participated in this qualitative study examining the challenges and successes of their lived experiences throughout their first-year in the role. Schlossberg’s Transition Theory combined with Gmelch and Buller’s Framework for Developing Academic Leaders guided the data collection. Narrative analysis was used to examine stories the women chairs shared and identify common themes. The experiences the women shared were diverse; however, the most common theme they all discussed related to the transition being a time of learning. While initial conversations focused on learning specific tasks and responsibilities of the job, the learning process extended to self-discovery for the women around who they are as leaders and how their first-year experience developed their leadership capacity. In addition to learning traditional aspects of the chair role, the women and those who held additional intersecting minoritized identities found they had to learn how to manage the hidden work related to age, race, or ability. Analyzing the stories of the women chairs revealed several implications for approaches to help make the role more manageable by initiating new learning strategies and exploring how the role could be reimagined. This study provides recommendations for those in institutional leadership roles, current faculty development practitioners, and for the new chairs themselves. While women were the focus of the study, suggestions discussed have implications for anyone stepping into a department chair role.
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