A New Engineering School Dean’s Guide to Life: 14 Strategic Considerations for Your First 100 Days and Beyond

Experience tells us that great beginnings matter for these reasons:

• a clear purpose calms the winds of change
• seeing early wins becomes believing
• strong messages invite loyalists
• trust takes root

The number and variety of decisions, opportunities and challenges that come with assuming leadership of a major engineering school require a steady hand. Increasingly, your success will depend on your ability to pivot from a traditional “academic manager” to a strategic orchestrator of interdisciplinary ecosystems.

Focus your first 100 days on listening aggressively, mapping the real power networks (formal and informal), and quickly aligning your agenda with a few visible “early wins” that matter to faculty, students, and industry partners. At the same time, explicitly architect governance and incentives that support curricular innovation, faculty development, industry collaboration and donor development so your college can stay locally relevant and globally competitive as engineering and technology shift.

Below, we’ve put together 14 strategic considerations for your first 100 days to help you navigate from analysis to synthesis.

1. Establish “Zone of Objectivity”

As the new Dean, you will play many roles: listener, evangelist, storyteller, fundraiser, communicator, recruiter, relationship-builder, visionary, strategist and a leader. Above all, always be nice while you play the roles of a dove, a dragon and a diplomat.

To be successful, you must create a clear distinction between being a peer and being the dean.

• The “Dean Hat” Rule: Explicitly signal when you are speaking as a colleague versus as the institutional leader. This creates a “zone of objectivity” that is essential for making tough, data-informed decisions.
• Step Away from the Lab: While it is tempting to maintain your personal research, the deanship requires a shift toward “extroversion” — spending your natural curiosity on building relationships with students, faculty, and donors rather than technical compilers.

2. Define A Strategic Vision

Involve the faculty, staff, alumni, donors, corporate partners and funders in establishing a few major priorities that will make your school a school of consequence. Priorities could include things like becoming an innovator (e.g. in quantum computing, AI-pedagogy, interdisciplinary initiatives), positioning the school as a thought-leader in both established and emerging spaces, and championing a meaningful societal cause that is rooted in your school’s strengths. Then devote most of your energy in realizing the priorities.

3. Assemble Your Team

You will be more successful with a trusted administrative assistant and competent associate deans and other senior administrators for marketing, fundraising and corporate relations. Choose people with complementary strengths who will both support you and challenge you. Find people who will be selflessly devoted to the success of the school.

4. Articulate Your Brand

In the sea of sameness, brands win. A brand is the sum of all experiences. It attaches a memorable idea to your school.  It creates expectations and a core promise while creating strong to impenetrable differentiation in the marketplace.

5. Foster an “Interdisciplinary Imperative”

No single engineering discipline can resolve 21st-century challenges like climate change, healthcare pandemics, and cybersecurity threats.

• Create “Communities of Knowledge”: Your goal is to move faculty beyond simple “multidisciplinary” work toward true interdisciplinary collaboration, where team members synthesize diverse methods into a completely new knowledge system.
• Reimagine Talent Cultivation: Shift the focus of engineering education from discipline-specific expertise to “systems thinking”, preparing students to understand how a single part integrates into massive, complex ecosystems like autonomous grids or digital twins.

6. Grow Reputation

Bring a “content is destiny” perspective to the school, and turn all publishing — academic, research, alumni, general audience — into a reputation-building, Google/LLM-dominating cooperative enterprise that powers enrollment, reputation and fundraising. Craft a Keyword Lexicon containing clusters of thought leadership, innovation and intellectual capital keywords that are rightfully yours and instruct your marketing team to weaponize all new content with it.

Empower your communications, development, alumni, recruiting, and corporate/government relations teams to transcend outdated silo thinking and embrace the integrated nature of reputation building in the age of digital channels and content.

7. Shape the Incoming Class

Look beyond broad measures — school-wide and department-wide enrollment trends — and arrive at a more granular and precise assessment of your ability to achieve predictable and reliable enrollments for the school, and attract increasingly robust, motivated and diverse students.

8. Build a “Full-Stack” Corporate Engagement Model

In the age of declining government research funding, traditional “corporate relations” and “career services” offices are no longer enough; you must build deep, “interwoven” industry partnerships and global connections.

• Centralize Engagement: Move toward a corporate engagement office that cultivates flexible, multi-organization consortia. This allows your school to co-invest with industry in high-demand fields like health-tech, quantum computing or sustainable manufacturing.
• Industry-Agile Curricula: Re-engineer the curriculum to anticipate change rather than react to it. Embed new competencies like AI-driven simulation into the standard engineering track to ensure graduates have immediate industry impact.
• Cultivate Industry Advisory Board: Invite aspirational influencers to your advisory board and involve them in charting your curriculum and the school’s future.

9. Establish an Office of Public Programs

Encourage your Public Programs officer to create high-content events (lecture series, symposia, conferences) that engage the broader academic, corporate, government and regional community.

10. Nurture Donor Relations

Build a culture of shared beliefs and purpose across the school (advisory boards, key corporate partners, alumni leaders and emerging stakeholders). Balance annual and long-term fundraising priorities. Inspire others to create next generation alumni activities and constituent relations programs, and train thought leaders and more visible/influential representatives.

11. Build Relationships Across University Departments

Build relationships within and across the university system. Foster a diverse faculty, their productivity and intellectual capital all of which are essential to the larger strategic goals.

12. Benchmark and Measure KPIs Periodically

Keep a pulse on operating, brand, enrollment, giving and reputation metrics.

13. Embrace The Roles You’ll Play

Listener. Evangelist. Storyteller. Fundraiser. Communicator. Recruiter. Relationship-builder. Visionary. Strategist. Leader. Above all, always be nice while you play the roles of a dove, a dragon and a diplomat.

14. Establish KPIs and Quantifiable Goals

You can only manage what you can measure.

If you are seeking a strategic planning agency, marketing agency, or a branding agency for your engineering school, view our capabilities and consider partnering with us.