Week 4: Confessions of a Community College Dean

The thing I like most about this website is that the Dean posts something almost everyday, therefore I feel I get to know the most relevant issues that might be going on. For this blog assignment I read all of the blogs he has posted so far this month.

One of the main topics that keeps appearing in the blog is about budget cuts, since that is hitting Community Colleges (CC's as they are refered to in the blog) hard. I will talk about the cuts a little later in my blog. But first I want to touch on something that only appeared once in the blog, but really got me thinking.

The first blog of this month was about the administrative program at his cc, how it is the most requested position by employers but is the least attended program. He discusses the reasons why people are not enrolling in the administrative program, which is seen as the secretary position. A reason that was given that made me think is, secretary positions are ones that don't have authority therefore people are not attracted to this position anymore. That got me thinking about authority and apparent authority and all the jazz. I also feel that leadership/being a leader in connected with authority. Do we see a secretary as a leader? I would argue that they are leaders, a supervisory management leader I would say. They need to have high technical skills and human skills, with lower conceptual skills. I also would say that they have abilities to become leaders by promotions with in the company, but over time they can make change within companies. I think that good/great secretarise know how to do things more then the staff they work for and are well liked by most staff, which gives them political power and the ability to be a leader of change.

Now unto the budgeting issues that the dean of a cc is facing in his blog:

In the cc a dean was fired, making the faculty not so happy. Which you might think would be the other way around. Faculty was fired meaning eduaction is very important and also they are able to spread out the administrative tasks of the dean. The reason why faculty was not happy, was due to the faculty thinking that the dean was a champoin for them, that the dean was the fighter. They gave the dean more leadership, they put them into the top leadership (sorry I dont have my book on me to give it the proper name). When in reality a dean is more of a mediator between the faculty and higer administrators, so they are middle management. This makes you ask what happens when someone has more percieved authority/leadership than in reality? Is it a bad thing for people to place you into top leadership, when your role is within middle management? I think it can depend on the situation......so along with skills approach this could be a situational approach.