By Rob Jenkins

Six years ago, when I accepted a job as founding director of the Writers Institute at my college, I naturally assumed that my previous administrative experience would serve me well. After all, I'd been a department chair for nine years and spent another year serving as interim academic dean on a large campus.

Boy was I wrong. Directing a program is about as different from running a department as two jobs with similar rank can be.

Not that there wasn't some carry-over. As a chair and a dean, I had learned a great deal that has been useful to me as institute director. More to the point, the people I got to know over the years and the alliances I made in those jobs have proved invaluable in this one. But the bottom line is that directing a program isn't like chairing a department or serving as dean.

To begin with, it can mean longer hours on the job than being a chair or dean, especially if your program is responsible for organizing campus events, most of which take place in the evenings or on weekends. And as your program grows and gains recognition, you may also find yourself in demand at other campus and community functions, such as alumni receptions, drama and music productions, and dinners.

If you're fortunate (like me), the person you report to will allow you to arrange your schedule so that you're not working 70-hour weeks all the time. But you can still expect some of those each year.

Moreover, directing a program isn't primarily a desk job. True, one of your main responsibilities as a department head is simply to be in your office as much as possible, at the beck and call of anyone who happens to have a complaint. The same holds true, to a lesser extent, for deans.

But running a program—and especially starting one—requires a decidedly more assertive approach. The director must constantly be out and about, drumming up support, forging partnerships, handling logistics. There is a fair amount of paperwork, as in any bureaucratic job, as well as other things that can and should be done in the office. But program directors who spend most of their time behind a desk probably don't have much of a program.

At the Writers Institute here at Georgia Perimeter College, for example, we work with partners on and off of the campus to provide high-quality literary programs for our college and the region. The college itself has five campuses, and in order to serve them all we have to spend a fair amount of time on each one. We're also fortunate to be in the Atlanta area, which has a number of thriving literary organizations. We work with just about all of them from time to time and with many on a regular basis, so I spend hours meeting with my counterparts around the city.

Unfortunately, the fact that you're not always in your office can cause problems for you on the campus. You are an administrator of sorts (that is, you probably have administrative rank and a 12-month contract), and the traditional model for administrative work consists of two primary activities: sitting behind a desk and attending meetings. To people who hold that view, you might not seem to be much of an administrator. It might not seem like you're doing much actual work at all.

In other words, because building a program is very much a creative enterprise, program directors suffer from a fundamental problem shared by other creative types: Much of what we do isn't visible to others, and the part that is visible doesn't often look like work.

The solution to that problem is communication. I mean the normal sorts of communication that pass between subordinates and their superiors: frequent e-mail messages, annual reports, regular discussions.

But I'm also talking about communication in a broader sense. As a program director, you learn that your superiors aren't your only constituency. The job of directing a program has a significant public-relations component—another way in which it differs from the position of department chair. Chairs tend not to concern themselves with PR, or at least they worry about it only when it has the potential to be negative, such as when a faculty member is caught having an affair with a student, or a local radio host discovers that a professor has actually admitted (in class!) to holding political views.

In contrast, program directors must always be concerned with generating positive PR, and always presenting their programs in the best possible light. It's a form of marketing, letting people know about the programs and what they have to offer. That's why program directors sometimes become minor public figures, occasionally even gracing the local newspaper or giving radio and television interviews. One of the first things I learned as a director was the importance of owning at least one nice suit.

Even more important, however, is internal PR. Indeed, the key to the survival of any program—especially a new one—is for students, faculty members, staffers, and administrators to know about it and regard it as a positive force on the campus. Your program is not going to last long if it's little known, or if most people who do know about it think it's unnecessary or a waste of money.

Which leads me to my final point: Directing a program is a more politically fraught job than I ever imagined—more so than chairing a department. Certainly chairs have to deal with their share of campus politics. Indeed, in the Department Chairs' Handbook of Common Complaints, No. 53 reads, "I can't stand the politics at this place." Department heads must possess a certain amount of political savvy if they hope to keep professors, students, and upper-level administrators all (relatively) happy. They also have to play politics in order to garner money and other resources for their departments.

The difference is that, when I was a department chair, the potential consequences of failure were relatively short-term and fell mostly on me. If I was unsuccessful in navigating the institution's political waters, the department might be understaffed and underfinanced for a while. Faculty members and/or students might even revolt. But eventually I would be forced to step down, and, over time, things would be put right. The department would go on as if nothing had ever happened. It would not cease to exist just because I'd been bad at my job.

As a program director, that is precisely the specter I confront every day. I could do a good job in terms of organizing events and involving students and others, but if I fail to make sure that the right people know about those successes, the program could be axed in the next round of budget cuts. (In this fiscal climate, it might be anyway.) And if I neglect to cultivate the right relationships, both inside and outside of the college, my program might lack the political clout to withstand inevitable attacks from those who see us as nonessential or who simply covet our budget.

Despite all of that, I have no regrets about taking the job. When it was offered to me, I thought it sounded like the most challenging thing I would ever do professionally—and also the most fun.

Boy was I right.

Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English and director of the Writers Institute at Georgia Perimeter College. He writes occasionally for The Chronicle's community-college column and blogs at http://www.academicleaders.org. If you would like to write for our regular column on faculty and administrative careers at two-year colleges, or have a topic to propose, we would like to hear from you. Send your ideas to careers@chronicle.com.