by Todd Benson
Today, higher education institutions are using more and more data to drive decision-making. This is a good thing, however, when leaders need to include faculty in decision making and execution offering the right amount of data is of paramount importance. Faculty are, by their training, critical consumers of data and not sharing everything could be interpreted as the administration spinning the results. On the other hand, sharing every single data point can lead to an unfocused discussion. It’s no surprise then that one of the most frequent, and challenging, questions that comes up as we work with our partners is “How much of the report should we share with faculty?” Our standard answer is “Everything!” but full transparency presents its own set of challenges and concerns.
... Read more about Sharing Data with Faculty: The Paradox of Transparency
A provost at a COACHE partner institution recently asked me about the best strategies for disseminating data to faculty. Her team was weighing the risks and benefits of sharing all of the comparative data available in their COACHE report. Some in the group...
One of the first action items for partners who are undertaking surveys with the Collaborate on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) is to form a COACHE team. Administering any campus-wide, data intensive project necessitates a diversity of skills, talents, and access that no single person at an institution can embody. Despite some people’s desires that the contrary is true, it’s just not realistic to expect a single person to manage a project of this scale.
When we ask our partners “What’s going to get in the way of working with your faculty around COACHE data?”, a frequent response is that faculty are questioning the results. But to ensure that faculty fully engage with data from the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), it is vital that everyone trusts the results — including any skeptics.
One of the hallmarks of COACHE’s work is listening. Perhaps the clearest example of COACHE listening to its partners is the development of our COACHE 
Since 
This post serves to offer some communications guidance for the COACHE partners with three weeks remaining in the 
With the 
COACHE research on the professoriate is shaping the future of higher education leadership, so we are eager to attend next week’s annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges & Universities, “
Recently I had the chance to speak with Berit Gundersen at the University of the Pacific. As the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs, Gundersen lead the initiative to bring the COACHE Faculty Job Satisfaction survey to the University of the Pacific in 2014. In our discussion, she mentioned that even years later, faculty and administrators are discussing the results - even during a dinner at the President’s home this past spring. It made me wonder what aspects of their approach allowed the work to sustain itself for so long, so Berit and I dug in to try to understand what worked. Some themes began to appear that might be valuable for other institutions that wish to engage their faculty in data driven discussions.