MANAGING CHALLENGING FACULTY

The workshop began with a discussion of horror stories of law suits involving problem faculty. The group felt that the problems of challenging faculty create many problems, but that in addition to these problems with bad faculty, there also are challenges with good faculty.
Excellent faculty members that threaten to leave for another job create a problem. The group suggested that a good way to handle the problem is actually to encourage the faculty member to look around at other offers. This will let that individual find out his or her worth on the market and will also allow the Chair to examine what is necessary to keep the faculty member. Sometimes the faculty member will learn that he or she really has it good in the current position and will be less dissatisfied. Sometimes, the Chair can try to identify what the faculty member really wants and will find that the faculty member can be satisfied with relatively modest changes (and not even financial) in the current department situation (for example: a change in service rotation, a new title, etc.).
Bad faculty members can be of many types. Some that were discussed were:
1. Former chairs - most times the former chair is very helpful, but in some cases the former chair can be destructive and attempt to undermine the department. Often former chairs are tenured faculty members and if bad, the best thing to do is to ignore them and hope that they "go away" by retiring or moving to another position.
2. Suboptimally productive faculty:
a. Competent faculty member who is just not productive: the chair should set very specific goals and objectives and document activity toward these goals; mentoring to understand how to become more productive may be all that is necessary
b. Incompetent faculty member: the chair must continually document every aspect of the problem and build a case which is helpful when salary and promotion decisions are made; ultimately documentation may be sufficient to warrant termination.
c. Disabled faculty member: reasonable accommodations should be made, but if still not able to perform, then should be encouraged to go on disability (depending on the plan available at the institution) or be "bought out" with some compensation package.
d. Difficult personality in a faculty member: this is among the most time consuming of problems; if competent sometimes the individual just needs mentoring to change the behavior; coaching may be successful; using group dynamics with peer pressure (from other faculty)to change behavior can also be a useful technique; sometimes devising challenging tasks will direct the individual into another endeavor and consume enough time that the difficulty personality traits will not be evident. The group felt that dealing with challenging faculty is such a big problem that the topic could easily consume a whole conference.