66 ORGANIZING ACADEMIC COLLEGES: A GUIDE FOR DEANS new positions may be interpreted as evidence about how you handle challenges—you solve your own problems first, and then look to helping others. Although it is unlikely you want to be viewed in this manner, faculty will gladly interpret your actions for you. Therefore, take time to learn about the college and its needs. If adding a staff member is appropriate, take the time to obtain buy-in from the provost, department heads, and faculty. Adding a person to your office means, of course, there will be a new reporting line, as that person needs to report to someone. One dean reported to us that his current situation of having thirty direct reports strains his ca- pacity to supervise all of these individuals effectively. Therefore, if he creates a new position, someone other than him would need to be the supervisor. Adding a person also impacts the responsibilities of someone else in the office. For example, if you create a position for an IT manager, someone in the office was performing pieces of that job. When the new person comes on board and the other individual is relieved from it, be assured that the re- maining responsibilities of the person relieved of the task will expand to fill the work- load space just created. Covering new responsibilities by adding positions can be a driver of “administra- tive bloat.” All deans want their offices to perform every task to the highest standard, but in resource-limited systems, not enough staff can be hired to reach such a stan- dard. A perpetual struggle in the dean’s office is deciding what aspects of the office work are getting done “good enough”—not poorly where faculty or students are suf- fering as a result—but not done so well that spending these resources is at the expense of other areas in the college or its units. Therefore, you need to decide the following when hiring a new person: Do you want existing personnel to focus more time and quality effort on their existing re- sponsibilities (default), or do you want them to take on a new responsibility? If it is a new responsibility, communicate this to them well in advance of the hiring of the new staff member for them to begin envisioning how they might factor the new responsi- bility into their workload. Examples abound about how deans have used creative approaches to solve staffing issues in their offices. When a new dean at a public master’s university walked into her job, it became clear her predecessor had relied on a model of minimizing the activities run through the dean’s office. With no time available to the dean for fund- raising, and with the provost’s office in the process of moving more responsibilities down to the dean’s office, she realized there was insufficient staff in the office for all the work needing to be done. Her options were limited, however, as the upper admin- istration at her university—wary of increasing the number of administrative posi- tions—had placed a cap on the number of faculty serving as associate/assistant deans Examples abound about how deans have used creative approaches to solve staffing issues in their offices.