Category: Blog

How Leadership Actually Develops in Higher Ed

by Amit Mrig (opens in new tab), Beth Rotach (opens in new tab)

Higher ed is full of people who never had to learn leadership before they were suddenly doing it. You became department chair because your scholarship was strong. You moved into a VP role because you understood the budget model better than anyone in the room. Then, almost overnight, you were responsible for leading people, and the skills that got you promoted were not the skills the job actually required. That gap is not a personal failing. It is a structural one. Higher education trains people deeply in their discipline and rarely in leading other people. The good news is that leadership is learnable, the same way any complex skill is: through a framework you can build on, and a method you can practice. A Framework That Scaffolds Leadership At Academic Impressions, we organize leadership into four levels, each one building on the one below it. Systems Mastery Teams Mastery Interpersonal Mastery Personal Mastery Personal mastery: self-awareness, knowing your strengths and gaps, and defining what leadership means to you. Interpersonal mastery: communication, collaboration, and working through conflict, the level most people picture when they hear the word “leadership.” Teams mastery: psychological safety and the kind of trust that makes a group […]

Fix the Meetings That Are Draining Your Team 

by Terry Coleman (opens in new tab), Sarah Adams, PhD (opens in new tab)

Sophia Meetings Resource – Intro Most leaders know which meetings aren’t working. There’s the standing weekly that could be an email, the decision-making session where nothing actually gets decided, and the all-hands where half the room has checked out before anyone even reaches the first agenda item. The problem isn’t that higher education leaders don’t care about running good meetings. It’s that there’s rarely time or space to step back and think critically about them. Poorly structured meetings don’t just waste time — they erode trust, fragment team culture, and signal to people that their time isn’t valued. In environments where faculty and staff are already stretched, that signal lands hard. This is a good use of Sophia. Watch the video below for more on how to log in and use Sophia. Sophia Meetings Resource – Prompts How the Activity Works Sophia is your AI leadership coach inside My Path. She’s built to think through real leadership challenges with you, not to offer generic advice — and meeting design is exactly the kind of applied, context-specific problem she handles well. Here’s how to approach it: 1 Identify your meeting pain point. Look at the categories below and pick the one […]

Career Growth Action Plan

Leadership Development Career Growth Action Plan A 6–12 Month Roadmap Employee Manager How We Will Use This Worksheet This worksheet is designed to guide our one-on-one conversations regarding your career growth over the next 6–12 months. We will work through the sections together, with you, as the employee, leading the reflection, and me, the manager, serving as a thought partner and coach. We agree to: Engage in a conversation that is focused and distraction-free. Dialogue with candor. This is a planning and learning tool, not an evaluation. Capture ideas, thoughts, and answers in real time. Imperfect notes are better than no notes. Revisit this plan often and at the agreed check-in points to learn together and adjust as needed. Print a copy to fill out together, or work through it on screen. Print This Plan 1Reflection 2Goal Setting 3Development Plan 4Check-ins 1 Reflection Before setting goals, take time to look inward. These three subsections build on each other, moving from who you are today, to where you want to go, to the specific skills that will get you there. Do not feel you need to rush through this section in one conversation or meeting; take your time to reflect on […]

The Leadership Development Gap 

Higher education employees want more than ever. Institutions are delivering less than they think.   Something significant is happening in higher education, and it shows up clearly in the data.  For the seventh consecutive time, we surveyed nearly 2,000 higher education professionals, including faculty, staff, administrators, and senior leaders, on professional development, leadership, job satisfaction, and engagement.   Year after year, the findings tell a consistent story. This year, one chapter stands out: 84.9% of employees said they were at least moderately interested in additional leadership development, up from 75% in 2023. This ten-point swing in just two years reflects a meaningful shift in employee sentiment, one the sector would be wise to take seriously.    A Gap With Real Consequences  It would be easy to treat this as a satisfaction gap, a case of employees wanting more than institutions can realistically provide. But the data suggests something more consequential is at play.  In this year’s survey, we included a new question asking employees to rate their institution’s effectiveness at developing leaders. We expected it to correlate with satisfaction. But it does more than just that. The data found that effective leadership development didn’t just improve job satisfaction (r = .52, a positive relationship). It also reduced burnout (r = -.39, a […]

Summer Is a Gift. Don’t Let It Slip By.

by Corinne Nicolas, PhD, PCC (opens in new tab)

A Quick Activity to Make the Most of Your Summer as Faculty   You’ve made it to the end of the year, and you’ve earned the exhale. Take it.  But here’s the thing about summer: that open calendar can feel like freedom and then, quietly, like drift. The weeks blur, the to-do list grows, and by August the breathing room is gone.  A little planning now—not a lot, just enough—changes that. Not to pack summer full, but to make sure what matters to you actually happens.  That’s the idea behind this simple Summer Planning Activity. It takes about 30 minutes, and it’s designed to help you do three things: get concrete about your goals, take stock of where you are right now, and map out what it will actually take to close the gap.      Want to Go Deeper? Try These Prompts in Sophia  Sophia, Academic Impressions’ AI leadership coach, is a good thinking partner for the kind of reflection this activity asks for. Once you’ve worked through the document, consider bringing one or more of these prompts into a conversation with Sophia:  These prompts work best when you’re specific. The more context you give Sophia, the more useful the conversation will be. Sophia is a member-exclusive tool, so make sure you’re logged in to your Academic Impressions membership to access her through My Path.   […]

50 Conversations to Have with Sophia

by Amit Mrig (opens in new tab)

Your AI Leadership Coach for Higher Education Sophia is designed to meet you where you are and support you through the complexity of leading in higher education, where all of us have more responsibility than authority. She works best when you’re specific.   The more honest you are with Sophia, the better she’ll be. Sophia does not store your responses. Nothing you share is logged, tracked, or traceable back to you. This is a completely confidential space. You can bring the real situation, not the polished version.  To access Sophia, log into your Academic Impressions membership, and go to My Path. To give you a way to start, here are 50 conversations you can start with Sophia. Feel free to modify these to suit your context. Navigating Difficult People & Relationships  Team Dynamics & Culture  Leading Change  Communication & Influence  Career Development & Self-Awareness  Managing Up & Sideways  Faculty Relations & Shared Governance  Personal Leadership & Well-Being  Strategy & Organizational Effectiveness      Sophia is at her best when you bring her the real situation. The more context you give, the more specific and useful her guidance will be.  How will you use Sophia today? Go to My Path to use one of these prompts or ask another question. Reach […]

Five Skills We Need to Be Teaching Leaders Now to Prepare for an Uncertain Future 

If the last five years in higher education have taught us anything, it’s that disruption is no longer episodic; it’s continuous. Financial pressure, demographic shifts, changing public expectations, advances in artificial intelligence, and growing questions about the value of higher education are no longer distant threats but daily leadership realities.  We cannot predict exactly what higher education will look like in five or ten years. But we can predict this: that change will be constant, that ambiguity will be the norm, and that leaders will be asked to make high-stakes decisions with incomplete information and competing interests.  That future offers profound implications for leadership development. If we continue to prepare leaders only for today’s higher education landscape, we will leave them underprepared to lead our institutions into the future.  The future demands leaders who can think strategically and expansively, who can engage in anticipatory thinking, and who can navigate complexity without defaulting to fear, rigidity, or zero-sum thinking. Following are five skills that leadership programs should be teaching now.  1. Design Thinking: Encouraging “Possibility” Thinking  Design thinking is, at its core, a disciplined approach to problem-solving that prioritizes curiosity, empathy, experimentation, and learning. It emphasizes divergent thinking, generating many possibilities, before moving into convergent thinking, where choices are narrowed and decisions are made.  The sequencing […]

Why Well-Intentioned Leadership Development Programs in Higher Ed Fall Short—And What to Do Instead 

by Amit Mrig (opens in new tab)

Over the past two decades, I’ve had the privilege of designing and delivering more than 100 leadership development programs in higher education and supporting institutions as they launched dozens more.  These programs have ranged from single, cohort-based initiatives to multi-layered efforts designed to shape institutional culture over time. At Academic Impressions, we’ve worked with first-time department chairs as well as with presidents rebuilding senior cabinets. We’ve partnered with well-resourced research universities as well as with small and mid-sized institutions doing the best they can with very limited capacity.  The good news is that during this time, I’ve seen a growing recognition that leadership development is mission critical. More institutions are investing in helping leaders to build emotional intelligence, resolve conflict more productively, lead teams effectively, and navigate change with greater confidence. Many are also working intentionally to build pipelines for future leaders who will be ready when the moment calls.  And yet, because many institutions have limited experience designing leadership development programs, a predictable set of mistakes shows up again and again. Ironically, these missteps are usually rooted in good intentions—but they ultimately undermine the very outcomes these programs are meant to achieve.  Following are the five most common mistakes I see when institutions launch or attempt to sustain leadership programming.  1. Trying to Do Too Much  In an effort to be comprehensive, institutions often try to cover as much […]

Getting Back on Track: Ten Strategies for Successful Two- and Four-Year Institutional Transfer Partnerships

by Stephen Handel (opens in new tab), Eileen Strempel (opens in new tab)

Amidst the current upheavals in higher education, the needs of largely marginalized students attending community colleges garner few headlines. Last year, the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Columbia University, in partnership with the Aspen Institute, reported a national transfer rate of 16 percent—only two percentage points higher than a similar study conducted a decade earlier. Despite years of investment by federal, state, and local governments, colleges and universities, and the philanthropic community, we see no empirical evidence that we are broadly improving the odds for community college students attempting to complete a bachelor’s degree by transferring to a four-year institution. Yet the allure of a bachelor’s degree remains a powerful ticket to the middle class for these individuals. Despite the increased skepticism about higher education, as many as 80 percent of new community college students understand the long-term benefits, and express an interest in transferring in order to earn a four-year degree. Have we hit a transfer rate ceiling? Is the stratified structure of U.S. postsecondary education impervious to a fully effective transfer pathway as envisioned by education progressives over a century ago? These are difficult but necessary questions. The pathway between community colleges and four-year institutions will only become […]

Building Better Leaders: 7 Key Practices from High-Impact Leadership Programs 

by Nicole Pruitt (opens in new tab)

In today’s evolving higher education landscape, institutions increasingly recognize that strong leadership isn’t just essential for individual success—it’s vital for organizational resilience and transformation.  At Academic Impressions, after over twenty years of serving higher education, we’ve had the privilege of seeing how colleges and universities have strengthened their leadership benches in powerful, innovative ways.  When we launched the Best Places to Grow initiative, we aimed to highlight this incredible work. From major R1s to small private colleges to large public universities, we found outstanding leadership programs making a measurable difference. While every program has its unique identity, certain best practices clearly emerged across our nominee pool.  In this article, we spotlight seven practices that help leadership development efforts truly flourish.    1. Embracing Program Evolution and Iteration  Many leaders want to launch fully formed, polished programs right out of the gate. But lasting success often comes through agility and iteration. Programs that evolve based on feedback, shifting needs, and ongoing reflection often achieve the greatest impact.  Examples of Iterative Leadership Programs:  Takeaway: Start small, launch pilots, listen closely, and iterate often for continuous growth and relevance.   2. Making Coaching a Core Component  Leadership isn’t a one-size-fits-all journey. Personalized coaching […]

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