Building and Maintaining a Positive Culture in an Academic Department

Developing a departmental culture may sound like the epitome of a fuzzy, non-engineering soft skill, but the long-term differences between organizations with positive and negative cultures can be astonishing. I will reflect on tactics for building a culture that is positive for faculty, staff and students in an academic engineering department. In this environment, it is important to be sensitive to the time pressures faced by people at every level in the organization and the competitive nature of academic research and success.