A chair calls me with a familiar version of the same problem. There is a senior tenured faculty member in the department whose behavior is creating issues. The faculty member outranks the chair in seniority. They cannot be fired. The chair has the institutional authority of the role but minimal personal leverage. What does the chair do?
This is one of the harder situations in academic leadership. It is also one of the most common. Some of what I tell those chairs has hardened, over the years, into a small set of moves that tend to work.
Why It Is Different
Coaching a junior faculty member is straightforward, relatively speaking. The dynamic is clear. The senior coaches the junior. The junior has institutional incentive to listen. The senior has institutional leverage to make their feedback consequential.
None of that applies when the chair is coaching a senior tenured colleague. The chair has the formal authority of the role, but the colleague has tenure, often more years in the institution, and frequently more standing in the department. The traditional senior-coaches-junior dynamic is reversed and the institutional hierarchy does not quite resolve it.
What does work, in my experience, is to drop the coaching framing entirely.
The Mistake of Acting Like Their Boss
Newer chairs often default to a managerial posture when addressing a senior colleague's behavior. They schedule a meeting. They prepare talking points. They communicate concerns in directive language.
This rarely works. The senior colleague is not used to being managed. They were a senior faculty member yesterday and they are a senior faculty member today; the only thing that has changed is that one of their peers is now their formal supervisor. The peer-turned-supervisor framing is structurally awkward, and acting it out at full volume guarantees the conversation goes badly.
The senior colleague is much more likely to respond to a different framing: equals discussing a problem they both share.
The Mistake of Acting Like Their Friend
The opposite mistake is to soften the conversation to the point of meaninglessness. The chair, uncomfortable exerting authority, frames the issue as a small concern, asks gently, and accepts whatever response they get.
This is also a failure, in a different direction. The senior colleague leaves the meeting with no clear sense that anything is at stake. The behavior continues. The chair, having tried, has used up their first attempt without producing change.
The trick is to be candid without being authoritarian.
What Works
A few moves tend to make these conversations productive.
First, frame the issue as institutional, not personal. "I need to talk about something that has come up in the department" is different from "I need to talk about something you are doing." The first invites the colleague into a problem; the second positions them as the problem. The first is also usually more accurate.
Second, ask before telling. "How are you experiencing the dynamic with X?" is different from "Your dynamic with X is becoming a problem." The first elicits the colleague's view; the second hands them a verdict. With senior colleagues, the verdict mode usually fails.
Third, name the institutional stakes plainly. The chair does not have personal leverage with a tenured peer. The chair does have institutional context the colleague does not always see (HR concerns, dean's awareness, climate signals, governance implications). Surfacing those, neutrally, lets the colleague decide what to do with the information.
Fourth, use third parties when appropriate. If the conversation needs to land, sometimes the best move is to bring an outside coach or facilitator into the room. The dynamic between the chair and the senior colleague has too much history. A neutral third party with no stake can hold the conversation in a way the chair cannot. (Confidentiality becomes the foundation of whether that third party can work.)
None of this guarantees the conversation produces change. Some senior colleagues do not change. But these moves significantly improve the probability that the conversation is productive, rather than further entrenching the situation it was meant to address.