It’s not where you are today that counts. It’s where you are headed. —Arthur Lenehan Introduction 1 E very year, hundreds if not thousands of people move into the position of college dean. In doing so, they inherit the organizational chart for the college,1 along with its personnel, job assignments, allocation of office space, and reporting lines. Very little has been published about how a new dean might effec- tively make sense of all that they come into, including how a dean’s office is organized and staffed, the tasks under its purview, and how the work of the office can be orga- nized to handle a dizzying array of responsibilities. Deans’ offices vary in the resources at their disposal, the size of their institution, and which responsibilities are handled centrally at the institution and which are han- dled at the college level. All these things matter. But regardless of resources, person- nel, and responsibilities housed within the dean’s office, an efficient college operation possesses clear assignments, job descriptions, and referral procedures to handle the myriad of issues and tasks associated with this level of the academic enterprise. Reorganizing the structure, staffing, and combinations of colleges, schools, and departments has accelerated of late, and leaders in higher education have had lit- tle time to study high-impact practices for how to effectuate change successfully. Sometimes the genesis of reorganization is imbedded in the vision a new president or provost brings to their office. In other situations, reorganization arises from a dean’s desire to make it easier for faculty to collaborate across programs that are tradition- ally siloed or to elevate the visibility of certain programs. Academics are generally too busy to conduct their own research on options for reorganization, especially when reorganizations are initiated rapidly by provosts and presidents. 1 A lowercase “c” is used for academic colleges within an institution, and an uppercase “C” is used to refer to a specific college. “Department chair” is synonymous with “department head.”