IMPLEMENTING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE WITHIN THE DEAN’S OFFICE 69 be more complex. What follows are examples of how some other deans approached realignment of responsibilities. When starting in her role, a dean at a public research university observed how the associate deans and staff in the office interacted and performed their duties. She soon recognized that the position responsibilities—and maybe even the people in those positions—needed to change. As she developed an organizational chart with job descriptions and reporting lines in anticipation of reorganizing, she did not put people’s names in the boxes on the organizational chart, as she did not want to create a job for a particular person. Instead, she wanted the ideal organization for the college [Structural]. Because there are real people in the current positions with whom she would like to maintain relationships, she wanted to move thoughtfully and slowly [Human Re- source]. When she realized some staff members serving “at will” would need to be replaced as they no longer fit the new position descriptions, she received the backing of the provost before proceeding further [Political]. Instead of running the searches herself, she asked an associate dean of a different college to chair each of the searches. This helped the reorganization process to appear as the best choice for the college and university, and not just for the dean [Political]. Further, this approach distanced her from the frustrations of individuals who supported the occupants of each position, which might have otherwise resulted in disrupting the search process or weakening the support for the new staff chosen for those positions [Human Resource]. In another case, an associate dean at a private research university was tasked by the dean with reorganizing the roles of staff positions in the office due to budget re- ductions. The associate dean went to Human Resources to initiate this discussion and found an HR person skilled in running reorganization processes. The HR represen- tative kept the associate dean (and thus, the dean) aware of each step of the process, including how to group activities into categories and how to align categories of tasks [Structural] (similar to the activity described in Chapter 3 and Appendix B). This structural approach allowed the dean’s office to envision how the office could function with fewer staff members and to reconfigure the physical layout of the dean’s office to align the work areas of the staff with their revised responsibilities. A dean may not consider changing to whom a person reports as changing their responsibilities, but this change can be perceived as such by staff. For example, upon arriving at a large public research university, a new dean learned the director of the college’s communication efforts was supervised by one of the associate deans. Un- fortunately, the two had a combative relationship. Until he could understand how to repair their relationship (or determine if one of them needed to be replaced), he shifted the reporting line of the director of communications to himself. Later, when an assistant dean was replaced with a faculty member skilled in external communica- tions, he moved the reporting line of the director to her. This change may sound simple enough, but it was not. From the communication