Deborah Borman glanced at her schedule for the day with a wave of anxiety. She was starting on one of the scariest tasks of her new department chair duties, a day of conducting annual reviews with her faculty with no idea how to prepare for these meetings, other than reading the professors’ self-evaluations. As a faculty member for 12 years, she had dreaded her own annual reviews with previous chairs because the conversations seemed so stilted, formal, and unhelpful. Now as a new chair herself, she kept thinking that there had to be a better way to help faculty monitor their job performance and achieve their dreams.
![](http://s26601.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/10.02_creating-an-academic-culture-of-working-to-live-300x144.jpg)
Creating an Academic Culture of Working to Live
I’m often asked how I succeed at managing work-life balance—or as I call it, “life-work balance”— and it stems from my childhood. My parents both worked as educators, and