By Donald S. Lopez

Many relationships, both real and conceptual, change when you become a department head, as I've discovered after six years as chair.

Your relationship to e-mail. As a chair, you will spend far more time on e-mail than you ever have in the past. Your words will become official pronouncements that can come back to haunt you.

You can avoid problems by following some simple tips: Reread every message twice before sending it. Double-check the address of intended recipient. Pause, and think, before you hit "reply," "forward," or "reply to all." Never respond to affect, only respond to content. If you cannot resist making a clever retort to a moronic message, write it, and then delete it. And in order not to be overwhelmed by e-mail messages, try to answer them immediately.

Your relationship to colleagues. It is important that you be regarded as a fair and impartial chair. For that reason, it may be necessary to place some symbolic distance between yourself and those who have been your closest colleagues and to narrow the gaps between yourself and those with whom you have been more distant. That can be difficult but will ultimately benefit you and the department.

Delegate responsibilities among the department's faculty members, both to save your own sanity and to prevent the appearance of autocracy. Although it is very time-consuming, if your department is not too large, you might consider taking each faculty member out for coffee or lunch. That will allow you to get a sense of both individual and collective concerns and will help faculty members feel that they have a stake in the health of the department. It will also signal your willingness to listen, and will extend the length of your honeymoon period (which will inevitably end).

Your relationship to department staff members. This is, by far, the most important relationship you will have as chair. If you develop a sense of esprit de corps with your staff, your term can be a relatively pleasant experience. If you don't, it can be extremely trying.

Every effort you make to improve the working conditions of staff members—who, unlike faculty members, spend at least 40 hours a week in their offices all year long—will be richly rewarded. Rely on staff members to solve problems that are within their purview. Publicly acknowledge their contributions and protect them from petulant professors.

Your relationship to students. It is easy to lose track of your students during your stint as chair unless you make a special effort to keep in touch with them. It is important to maintain office hours for your undergraduate courses and to give your graduate students priority in making appointments with you. To the extent that you can maintain contact outside of the office with your graduate students (for example, by taking them to lunch), you should do so, letting them know that you still care, even when you cannot give them as much of your time as you used to.

Your relationship with the dean's office. Faculty members tend to have limited relations with the dean's office until they become department heads. As chair, you will find yourself in a new place. Are you the advocate for your department to the dean, or the agent of the dean's agenda to your department? Ideally you will find those two roles rarely in contradiction.

You should find your dean and associate deans to be a source of good advice in the face of all manner of crises, even going so far as to suggest appropriate wording for a difficult conversation with a faculty member. The dean's office can be particularly helpful in "providing cover." For example, you may receive an incredibly ridiculous request from a faculty member—a request that you would prefer, for good reason, not to have to refuse directly. You therefore send a message to the dean and say, "So and so wants money for such and such. I should say no, right?" The dean will respond shortly with a message that says, "Right." At that point, you tell the faculty member that you took the request to the dean and it was refused. At the same time, you should resist the temptation to blame the dean for problems that lie within the department.

Your relationship to money. By money, I mean both the department's and your own. As chair, you will be responsible for the largest sum of money that you have ever had to deal with. (If you have dealt with sums larger than your department's annual budget, you should ask yourself why you became an academic.)

In tough economic times, chairs have a natural tendency to be conservative with their budgets. I would encourage you to spend—but, of course, not overspend—the money available to you, using it to improve the quality of life in your department. When faculty members feel that most reasonable requests will be approved, an important level of confidence is created. It is, thus, crucial that you understand your budget.

You will probably find the most difficult part of your job to happen not during the academic year but in the summer when it is time to make salary recommendations. Some departments have highly developed formulas for assigning merit increases; some have more fluid systems. Regardless, you will always have less money to disperse than you would like.

And it is inevitable that every year, some faculty members will be upset by their raises. Some will say nothing, some will come in to complain, some will complain directly to the dean. No matter how generous some increases are, you should not anticipate a word of thanks. It has been my experience that almost all faculty members think they are paid less than what they really deserve.

Now for a word about your own money. The college compensates chairs well (although it does not give us what we really deserve). Even after taxes, you will note a significant increase in your paycheck. If I can offer one piece of advice, it is this: Use the extra money to take a vacation outside the United States (preferably to Italy), and do not take your laptop. The only activity that I have found truly restorative in my years as chair has been going to a place where my sensory experience was radically changed. Only by getting away can you forget about all the things that seemed so important just a few days earlier and a few time zones away. This is important to your sanity.

Your relationship to your body. There is a standard joke (that I have forgotten) on the effect of administrative duties on hairline and waistline. Running a department leads to a sedentary lifestyle; one is not called "chair" for nothing. You will be tired by the end of the day, and you will have little energy for exercise. But as chair you will need those endorphins more than ever, and you should try to structure your day to allow for exercise.

Also as chair, you will have many more lunch and dinner meetings than you had as a faculty member. Try to limit those, to reduce both the consumption of empty minutes and empty calories. This problem becomes particularly acute during the recruiting season when you will need to meet with job candidates. I make sure that I do not attend any candidate dinners, instead taking each applicant out to breakfast alone, where I provide basic information and engage in informal conversation over a limited period of time. I always order oatmeal.

Your relationship to your scholarship. Some years ago, when I was sitting at an orientation for new department heads, I wanted to raise my hand and ask, "What about my own research?" But I was afraid to ask, thinking that it would suggest something less than a full commitment to the mission of the university.

Being chair requires a markedly different mentality from that of a professor. In my case, my area of research is Buddhism, so that prior to becoming chair I spent most of my waking hours contemplating the transcendent. I now spend my waking hours (and much of my dream time) contemplating the quotidian.

As a member of the faculty, you are master of your own time. As chair, you are at the beck and call of others. The image that comes to mind is that of a fireman, waiting for the alarm to ring, at which point you put on your fireman's suit, slide down the pole, and go put out the fire. As chair, you will find yourself innocently answering the e-mail, when something utterly unexpected comes up that you must fix. The fire may take a minute to put out just by throwing a bucket of water on it, or you may have to call in the helicopters to put out a forest fire that lasts for weeks. This obviously wreaks havoc with your research.

In my first year as chair, I got nothing done on my own research. There was just so much to learn and do, so many acronyms to memorize. In the second year, I learned one of the maxims of time management, "Every task takes all the time allotted to it." I learned that if I came in first thing every morning, I would be in the office all day. But if I came in at noon one day, and sometimes even two days a week, I got the same amount done even when I went home at the same time in the evening. You should therefore make some time for yourself.

But even when you do, you have to accept that as chair, something happens to your brain, making it difficult to read more than five pages of a scholarly article without falling asleep or getting up to check e-mail. One thing that I have found useful is turning my limited attention to projects that can be done in spare moments. For example, I was asked by the Encyclopaedia Britannica to review all of its entries on Buddhism and mark each in one of four ways, "as is," "revise," "replace," or "kill." That was the kind of tedious work I would never have considered before I became a chair, yet as a chair, I found writing "kill" deeply satisfying. I took to writing all manner of prologues, forewords, and prefaces—the kinds of things that I could compose without having to use my Sanskrit dictionary.

During your tenure, in the hours of administration and the minutes of scholarship, I hope you will find the time to delight in what the job is all about: solving problems, getting things done, and helping others get things done—all in service to the greater good of allowing your faculty, staff, and students to do their best work.

Donald S. Lopez is chair of the department of Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.