Four Tips Before You Start Your Interim Assignment

Dr. Janel Curry
Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs
Medaille College (Buffalo, New York)

In April 2020, I began my first interim assignment amidst a global pandemic as the Interim Provost of Medaille College in Buffalo, New York. I knew going into this interim role that I would be leading a program prioritization process along with an academic division restructuring to improve student retention. Nearly a year later, I am pleased to share the lessons I have learned from this assignment. Where my colleagues have written before on effective strategies to implement after you begin your interim assignment, in the article to follow, I will outline three strategies to implement before you start.

Establish a clear, consistent, and disciplined communication strategy and timeline.  Before I “arrived” on campus for my remote assignment, one of my first actions was to establish a newsletter. This weekly periodical shared with the academic division a variety of information and updates from our program prioritization taskforce. The newsletter was an essential communication tool throughout the program prioritization process. Through the newsletter we could celebrate good news, inform faculty of what we had accomplished, and clarify what still needed to be achieved. To help ensure that all participants felt that they had a voice, we often finished our task force meetings with a discussion of what needed to be addressed and then reported in future newsletters. This process provided a consistent and disciplined communication channel that proved very useful.

Manage your own anxiety with a clear strategy. Prior to beginning the assignment, I developed a plan to address stress that colleagues might be experiencing from the departure of the former chief academic officer and the arrival of an interim leader. One way we addressed these potential anxieties was to create an opportunity for short pauses accompanied by a round of consultations. For example, when sensing campus stress was high and rumors rising, I scheduled an intense week of listening and talking with individual department chairs. Managing yourself means that you need to keep from impulsively following rabbit trails but rather be ready to go through cycles of listening, relationship-building, and discussion within the formal structures of the institution.  In my situation, these groups were department chairs, faculty council, and the academic council (administrative offices in the division). Using the structures that are in place are essential to managing the campus’s anxiety.

Find internal guides. Beginning an interim role without even having been on campus was an opportunity ripe with landmines. Every institution has its own culture, history, and ways of operating, and thus I needed to identify internal guides within the academic administration with a clear understanding of institutional process and culture. In seeking to identify such guides, I sought out staff with the ability to maintain confidentiality so that we could discuss preliminary ideas without fear of leaks. Likewise, I listened intently for those staff who displayed a willingness to share their honest views. In my case, once those individuals were identified, I explicitly asked them to not hold back in sharing their perspectives—I needed them to tell me the truth.

Find friends who will help you care for others and yourself. In my case, these were people outside of the academic affairs division. Often, these interim positions require that you lead the institution through change, a difficult process. These roles involve making decisions in the best interests of the institution’s future, which can make it difficult at times to offer care for the individuals impacted. Before I started my interim position, I sought proactively to establish a good relationship with the human resource director with whom I spoke almost daily. She played the role of immediately reaching out to individuals whose lives were impacted by the decisions that we made.