IMPLEMENTING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE WITHIN THE DEAN’S OFFICE 67 [Structural]. The office was already at the limit. The dean believed she needed an individual to support faculty engaged in external grant applications. She made a case to her college’s leadership council to add a grants officer (a staff position) and involved her provost in the discussion [Political]. She stressed the imperative for increasing grants coming to the college to buttress her case for why resources should be put into such a development position, and the leadership council and provost supported the change. Cognizant of the limit on associate/assistant deans, but seeing more opportunities for faculty-level involvement, she created three administrative fellow positions (fac- ulty re-assigned part time to the dean’s office): one to oversee assessment, another to oversee centers, and a third to run the faculty mentor program. These administrative fellows became part of a “future leaders” program in the college, providing opportu- nities for faculty to experience administration while knowing they will rotate back into their normal faculty lines when desired. Once these faculty and staff were working in the office and started “digging into” the work to be done, only then did the enormity of the tasks they were assigned be- come apparent, leading to the obvious conclusion: additional support staff was need- ed. This example illustrates well how internal reorganization is an ongoing endeavor rather than a one-time activity. Shifting Staff Responsibilities A new dean at a public research university took a similar approach to adding part- time faculty lines to the office without adding full-time administrative positions. The dean created a suite of faculty-support members who, as part of the dean’s leadership team, each assumed well-defined responsibilities: equal opportunity liaison; coordi- nator of international programs; interdisciplinary program development; women in science; scholarship coordinator. The dean appoints individuals she believes are well suited to the needs of the position (and the potential to be future administrators) to two-year positions without a search, and provides a teaching load reduction or a summer salary. This approach is another example of creatively increasing staffing in the office without adding new positions, as well as supporting the professional devel- opment of faculty [Human Resource]. A dean at another public research university was in the unfortunate circumstance of needing to let a staff member go due to reductions in budget. He discussed this pending dismissal with the provost, who recognized the difficulty of the situation but under- stood the need to eliminate the position [Human Resource]. Later, when the staff mem- ber to be released showed up at the provost’s office to complain, the provost knew about the situation [Political], allowing the dean to proceed as planned. Have you ever found yourself hoping a staff member in your office would retire to allow you to revise the position description to better match the needs of the office? If so, you are probably in the camp of administrators not wishing to confront conflict