Strategies to address the problem of work and family balance have begun emerging in recent years. Many American college and universities have begun to adopt this "family-friendly policies," such as tenure-clock extensions. Each of the policies to enable work and family balance, however, is situated within the broader academic culture. Departmental culture is particularly important, since faculty lives are generally most directly affected by their immediate environment. In this article, the authors discuss the difficulties inherent in cultural transformation when policy implementation is carried out within departments headed by novice leaders. They recommend that colleges and universities offer leadership-development workshops for department chairs, with the following three goals: (1) To expose them to critiques of the academic norms related to gender, race/ethnicity, age, care-giver status, disability, and privilege; (2) To prepare them to be agents of change within their departments; and (3) To create a collegial network that will enable cross-departmental peer mentoring and dual-career hiring, as well as encourage new faculty to take advantage of important but infrequently used policies such as tenure-clock extensions. They offer the University of Washington's quarterly workshops for department chairs and emerging campus leaders as an example of an effective program. (Contains 9 resources.)