Department chairs and department heads are essential positions on campus, making the most impactful decisions that shape the university including decisions related to hiring, promotion, and curriculum.
Yet for most institutions, the support and training available for these roles is minimal.
At Academic Impressions, we provide specialized training, resources and coaching to help department chairs enhance their leadership skills, going beyond typical topics like HR, budgeting, and promotion & tenure.
Get access to a proven and dynamic curriculum that includes self-assessments, videos, tools, discussion guides and activities.
Our trainings offer a practical, hands-on appraoch that are designed specifically for busy department chairs and department heads.
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Get guidance as to how to set your department chairs and department heads up for success.
What Makes Our Approach Unique
Our training and resources help chairs and department heads to:
Sample Monthly Curriculum for Chairs and Unit Heads
This curriculum can be customized to your needs. This sample program is based on Academic Impressions’ leadership development model. Chairs and department heads should focus their energies primarily on the first three levels.
What do you need to learn to be a leader?
Part 1: Personal Mastery
Improve Self-Awareness, Understand Your Leadership Style, and Explore the Balancing Acts of Academic Leadership.
Month one: Developing your Leadership Superpower: Improving Self-Awareness
You’ll begin the course by exploring four common archetypes of self-awareness, and you’ll use this framework to reflect on how you approach your own self-awareness, as well as the ways you can deepen your practice of self-awareness.
Month two: Understand Your Leadership Style: The Five Paths to Leadership℠ Assessment
To deepen your understanding of your strengths and gaps, you’ll complete the Five Paths to Leadership℠ Assessment. Its purpose is to help you understand how your natural leadership style shows up in both normal and stressful situations, as well as how you can adapt your leadership approach to different situations and people as needed, thus enhancing your leadership effectiveness.
Month Three: Embrace Your Leadership: The Balancing Acts of Academic Leadership
Leadership requires the constant evaluation of a series of trade-offs including your role as faculty leader versus administrator, convener or decider, etc. How you choose your position is largely dependent on your natural leadership style and how well you understand the impact of your leadership on others. You’ll also be introduced to the “balancing act” or “seesaw” as a framing device that will help you to navigate these inherent trade-offs.
Part 2: Interpersonal Mastery
Focus on conflict management.
Month Four: Conflict Management: A Practical Workshop for Leaders
Learn the strategies to help you effectively manage and respond to various conflicts within your department or institution. You will be introduced to practical tools that address conflict in its earliest stages before it becomes a formal dispute. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to resolving conflicts so multiple methods (framing, facilitation, other dispute-resolution tools) will be covered.
Part 3: Team Mastery
Create equitable and inclusive meetings, learn the deliberative decision making model, and foster psychological safety on your team.
Month Five: Creating Equitable and Inclusive Meetings
In this session you’ll engage in self-reflection and to begin practicing communication skills that will positively impact group dynamics. You will hone your skills around listening, modeling, and question-asking. You’ll also receive guidance on how to choose an accountability partner who will help you preserve a culturally inclusive meeting environment.
Month Six: Improving P&T Reviews by Using a Deliberative Decision Making Model
By participating in promotion and tenure reviews, faculty make the most consequential decisions they will ever have to engage in on behalf of their colleagues. Without adequate training and preparation, departments often have a reputation of unfair decisions, power dynamics, and lack of transparency that taint the process going forward and impact culture and morale. In this session we’ll explore a model that is highly practical and can be easily learned to improve fairness and equity in decision making.
Month Seven: Fostering Psychological Safety in your Team
Psychological safety is the belief that you will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. In order to navigate increasing pressures and encourage new ideas and growth, leaders need to ensure a high level of psychological safety within their team. In month six, you’ll learn critical practices to cultivate psychological safety and complete an assessment to measure the psychological safety of your current team.
Part 4: Optional Month Eight - Special Topics
Chairs, unit heads and associate deans are not a homogenous group. Periodically we recommend a special topics session that enables each leader to explore a topic that is relevant to their needs.
Popular topics include:
- Actualize your Purpose: A Workshop on Improving your Well-Being
- The New Department Chair’s Dilemma: Learning to Manage Commitments To Yourself and Others
- Your First Semester as an External Chair: A Roadmap for Success
- Foundations in Budgeting for Department Chairs
- Assessing the Strategic Position of Your Department
- Strategies to Run a Successful Lab as a Chair
- Charting your Course as a Woman Chair
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3,000+
Department Chairs have been trained by Academic Impressions.
100+
Institutions Chose Academic Impressions Exclusively for Chair Development.
Set Your Department Chairs Up For Success