Course Category: Free Course

Overcoming the 5 Key Challenges to Sustaining a Positive Culture of Service Excellence

You’ve embraced the idea of enhancing customer service on your campus, you’ve provided training for your team, and now the hard part begins—maintaining momentum! This free webcast will discuss five key challenges to sustaining a culture of service and how you can overcome them. The five challenges are:  Join us for this virtual learning experience developed for higher education professionals who lead service efforts and supervise leaders on the frontline. Whether you are just beginning a customer service initiative or your efforts have lost steam, gain the insight you need to build momentum and increase customer satisfaction!  Watch our expert faculty talk about why getting customer service right is key in higher education:  

An Introspective Look at Higher Ed Leadership’s Impact on Trust, Morale, and Retention

Political interference, campus protests, demographic cliff(s), rising costs, and campus closures are all contributing to the public’s declining trust in higher education. But it’s not just the public. Respected and “star” faculty and administrators are also losing faith and continue to show signs of disenchantment, anxiety, and mistrust. In fact, 57% of faculty and staff said they were likely to leave their position next year, and 42% reported clinical symptoms of burnout.   Our reflexive reaction in the face of such numbers is often to externalize the blame, but there are proven strategies to combat the very real impact to faculty and staff morale, trust, and engagement. It’s time to stop looking through the window to the outside for answers and start looking in the mirror.  Join us as we showcase five proven strategies that leaders at all levels can employ to improve job satisfaction, build trust, and positively change the trajectory for many faculty and staff—and for the institution itself.  If you would like to receive the Resources for this recording, please contact john@academicimpressions.com to request them.

Elevate and Energize: 4 Key Strategies for High Impact Leadership Retreats

Many higher ed leaders organize leadership retreats to jump-start planning and build cohesion among their senior teams, but few retreats are as effective as they could be. In this free webcast, we’ll help you design a retreat that is more purposeful, that builds trust through collaboration, and that engages all voices and perspectives on your team thanks to the 4 key strategies below:   You will leave with the practical tools for planning your next retreat and will tap into the ideas of other leaders across the country who are also facilitating their own.   

Collaboration: The Secret to Breaking Free from the “Do More with Less” Mindset

Most institutions today are struggling with budget and enrollment challenges. When leaders compete for limited resources, it often creates a “zero-sum” mindset where some people are winners and others are losers. This dynamic causes people to protect themselves and their “turf” rather than working together to address hard problems.   This hour-long webinar will delve into the transformative power of collaborative practice in higher education settings, which can: 

Achieving your Career Goals with an Executive Coach

Are you seeking strategies for challenging conversations and getting buy-in from stakeholders? Are you trying to plan for career advancement but struggling with learning new skills and how to position yourself? Are you looking to develop yourself as a professional but are challenged by a new role and little guidance? Come learn how working with an Academic Impressions executive coach can help you to “unlock” the key to solving the myriad challenges of working in higher education.   By attending this free webcast, you as a leader will understand how working with an executive coach gives you that “ace in your pocket” to stretch yourself for the career you were meant to have. We’ll highlight the benefits you will realize with a coach, including strategies to align personal aspirations with career goals, and how to capitalize on your strengths. 

The 3 Critical Elements to Include in Department Chair Training

Chairs occupy an essential position on our campuses, sitting at the intersection point that connects our faculty to institutional strategy, context, and culture. They also make some of the most impactful decisions that shape the university, overseeing decisions related to hiring, promotion, and curriculum. Yet for most institutions, the support and training available to chairs is minimal.   Most of the training provided to chairs is limited to topics like how to work with HR, budgeting, and promotion & tenure. But what truly separates effective chairs from ineffective chairs are their leadership skills, such as:   Academic Impressions has been trusted to effectively train department chairs across the U.S. and Canada for over ten years. In this free webcast, we’ll discuss the keys to our success, what works and what doesn’t, and create a space for others to share their best practices.   If you need to start or enhance chair development at your own institution, we invite you to join us for this program.  

The College of The Future: Academic Program Innovation for Tomorrow’s Student

With the rapid pace of changing student demand, shifting institutional priorities, and ballooning costs today, it’s more challenging than ever to compete for enrollment. In this webinar, we’ll share a rubric for evaluating new program opportunities and discuss how to use a portfolio management approach to innovate your academic offerings while lowering departmental costs. We’ll also share examples of how 85+ institutions are leveraging this model to increase enrollment and improve student outcomes.

Academic Program Management: Making Data-Informed Decisions

Decision-making around academic programs is too often driven by gut feelings or internal interests. While institutional judgment is important, program decisions ultimately need to be anchored in data to ensure the program is viable and competitive in today’s market. Join us for a webcast that will help you make more data-informed decisions around your academic programs. Whether you are looking to launch new programs or grow or cut existing ones, our expert presenters from Gray Associates will help you:

Courageous Gardening: Equity Minded Leadership in Higher Education

In Courageous Gardening: Equity-Minded Leadership in Higher Education, authors Susan C. Turell and Maria Thompson invite you to become a master gardener of your campus or departmental landscape—and provide a practical workbook for doing so. There are no easy tips and tricks here; instead, this workbook guides you to building and sharpening the tools you will need in any situation: an equity mindset. Using the book as a backdrop for this guided conversation, panelists will engage the authors in deconstructing their metaphor of the campus as a garden to develop more equity-minded teams. Whether you’ve read the book or not, this conversation will offer wonderful insights into meaningful approaches to increased cohesion and professional development.   Using the metaphor of the campus as a garden, authors and readers will discuss ways to break down the challenging task of dismantling inequities to create more inclusive teams. By sharing their experiences, Drs Altheia Richardson and Katie Lampley will engage the authors in a more detailed discussion on effective ways to both weed and nurture your workplace garden in order to maximize team outputs through intentional engagement and development.  

Demo for Ops

Dogs, often hailed as humans’ best friends, have been the topic of many scientific studies looking into how they might boost our well-being. In this Spotlight, we’ll explain how your friendly pup can benefit your health across the board. According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), an estimated 78 million dogs are owned as pets in the United States. It is unclear when dogs were first domesticated, but a studyTrusted Source published last year claims that, at least in Europe, dogs were tamed 20,000–40,000 years ago. It is likely that humans and dogs have shared a special bond of friendship and mutual support ever since at least the Neolithic period — but why has this bond been so long-lasting? Of course, these cousins of the wolves have historically been great at keeping us and our dwellings safe, guarding our houses, our cattle, and our various material goods. Throughout history, humans have also trained dogs to assist them with hunting, or they have bred numerous quirky-looking species for their cuteness or elegance.