New leadership adjustments

Our department has had a new director for a month and a half now. But that's basically the only change in the department's organizational hierarchy because the rest of us who were appointed to administrative positions in the department by the previous director were retained.

I think it's a most practical step for a new director not to appoint new "cabinet members". Making the least or no changes at all would make the transition from the old to the new administration much smoother management-wise. Each of us has been at our respective positions for three years (the length of the term of a department head) and have already become familiar with the current university administration's policies and procedures. But we would have to adjust to our new director's management style as well.

In my case, I suddenly found myself already having to explain a few things to this new boss about matters related to registration and a lot of other things we usually have to do at the beginning of each school term.

Then when he was informed that it is required of each department to justify teaching load assignments of its teaching staff, he apparently took it upon himself to write the letter to the university official concerned with such things. In the past, my old boss would delegate that responsibility to me. I would have to prepare the supporting documents as well according to the university administration's specifications.

So I had been struggling to work on the latter yesterday--lots of interruptions as usual--and was about to start writing the letter with our justification this morning when our new director suddenly showed up at my office with his letter with some supporting documents attached. (I don't mind at all that my new boss wrote the letter himself. That way, the university officials will contact him and not me in case they have questions. He-he.) But when I looked through the attachments, it dawned on me that our director wasn't aware that supporting documents had to follow a specific format and I had to tell him so. I assured him however that I was almost done with the required supporting documents (in the correct format) and would be able to hand them to him within an hour.

At that point, I realized that this was just one of the few things about our new director that I'd have to adjust to.

My old boss was rather fond of delegating a lot of work to supporting administrative staff but was still very much a hands-on type of administrator. She would be constantly dropping by checking on progress, making suggestions and sometimes providing input herself. She was fond of calling meetings among us with administrative positions to update us and discuss issues taken up at the meetings held among different department heads in our college.

On the other hand, while this new director of ours similarly would delegate work to others he had less of a micro-management style and appeared to be more output-oriented. He would choose to leave it up to us to work things out by ourselves and then inquire only in the end about the results. And instead of calling meetings, he would rely on emails to send us information. (Whenever I'd peep into his office, I'd always find him sitting at his PC staring intently at the screen and busy typing up something.)

It will be interesting to see how things would work out in the next three years under this new boss.