You are holding in your hands a preview of the COACHE Chief Academic Officer Report. The CAO Report data and design are the culmination of our work since 2003 with faculty focus groups, two pilot studies (for pre-tenure and tenured faculty), and ongoing dialog with academic leaders at our partner institutions.

While there are many approaches to report design, our choices at COACHE leverage our comparative data to help you, your leadership team, and your faculty move more swiftly from survey results into dissemination, engagement and action.

To the uninitiated, the CAO Report can be daunting. However, just a few minutes spent with the Results at a Glance and Benchmark Dashboard will unlock the broad themes of your survey results and the areas deserving of immediate scrutiny.

Your faculty's strengths and concerns will be revealed, layer by layer, as you follow the blue, grey, and red colors of your CAO Report. These colors illustrate your faculty's attitudes relative to peers of your own choosing and to a larger, labor-market cohort (e.g., women to women, associate professor to associate professor). The yellow and orange colors will identify gaps between groups within your own institution (e.g., women and men, associate and full professors).

This preview is just a glimpse of what lies within your CAO Report—a beginning, not the end. The digital files that follow this preview contain item-level analysis, faculty's qualitative opinions coded by survey theme, results disaggregated by school/college and discipline, and more tools for understanding the conditions faculty need in order to do their best work.

You are about to discover that many faculty concerns can be dealt with immediately and inexpensively, while others present themselves as opportunities for broad involvement in designing collaborative solutions.

The questions at the end of this preview should help you get this process of inquiry underway. Yet, at COACHE, we have learned that the most important analysis has yet to occur. Analysis is a social process of engagement with your colleagues and—most importantly—your faculty. The COACHE partners who succeed do so by inviting faculty to be agents of institutional improvement.

As you embark upon the next steps of "collective sensemaking" and action, we have many examples to share. Your research-practice partnership with COACHE continues beyond this report delivery for many months of advice and networking. Allow us to develop your capacity for evidence-driven leadership in the academy.

The following five pages offer a view of your faculty from 10,000 feet. Each survey theme is summarized by a “Benchmark,” the mean of several five-point Likert-scale survey questions that share a common theme. A Benchmark score provides a general sense of how faculty feel about a particular aspect of their work/life at your institution; your CAO Report delivers results for Benchmarks and for specific survey items.

In this preview, we compare your Benchmark scores, shown as diamonds, to the scores of other COACHE partners, represented as horizontal lines. Blue lines represent the top 30 percent of institutional means, red lines represent the bottom 30 percent, and grey lines represent institutions in the middle 40 percent. The circles locate the five institutions your team selected as most nearly competing with yours (or resembling yours) in the market for faculty. The black line represents your prior results from 2020.