“Our development strategy is sound and sensible”

Klaus Jonas has served as the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences since 2017. With his dean duties comprising a full-time job, his scholarly pursuits have been largely placed on the back burner. “But in exchange, in my role as dean, I'm getting a lot of practical experience that is relevant to my field of study,” says Jonas. “The day-to-day business of running the faculty is closely related to questions that are of interest to me as a social psychologist: leadership, teamwork, communication, negotiation.” Jonas says that serving as a dean is a “holistic experience” and sees it as a kind of free-of-charge form of continuing education. “In what other job would you get to deal with so many exciting issues from sociology and the humanities?” he asks.

Jonas views the changes to the role of dean foreseen by the Governance 2020+ reform program – more responsibility and authority for managing faculty affairs – as sound and reasonable. “These duties have been transferred to the faculties bit by bit over a longer period of time,” he explains. “This transfer has taken into account the fact that today's universities are under immense pressure from international competitors and therefore have to be run and managed more professionally.” For Jonas, it is important that this development impacts not just the role of deans but the role of everyone in the office of the dean. “It's not just about the leadership abilities of one individual person but about the skillset of what is in our case a 40-person team,” he says.

One task on the agenda for the next few years is continuing to optimize internal organizational processes within the faculty. What thematic priorities does the faculty want to pursue? How can the faculty support projects with partner institutions and joint research initiatives? And how might the faculty be able to benefit from a moderate reorganization of certain units?

Jonas describes one of the coming changes within the faculty’s development strategy as “truly innovative”: the implementation of one-on-one touchpoint discussions between the dean and professors. “They definitely shouldn't be characterized as performance appraisals between a boss and an employee, but rather as a welcome opportunity to discuss issues that are politically relevant within the faculty and to have a mutual, face-to-face discussion on topics like research projects,” he explains. Jonas believes that he is well equipped for this dialogue with professors in his faculty. However, his job as dean comes with certain challenges that he feels less prepared to meet, particularly when it comes to managing the faculty’s spatial resources. Over the next few months, Jonas intends to do some catching up on certain legal ins and outs of public administration and financial management. Alice Werner