Course Category: Free for All-Inclusive Members

Securing Transformational Gifts: A Conversation About Engaging Principal Gift Donors

Securing a principal gift can have an immense impact on the way an institution is able to meet its mission and serve students effectively. However, identifying and cultivating relationships with potential principal gift donors takes patience, intentionality, and compromise. In this useful question-and-answer virtual webcast, our expert instructor, Mitchell Spearman, will call upon his experiences working with philanthropic families who shared transformational gifts with institutions across the country. By engaging with participants and sharing his own insight and advice, Spearman will help advancement professionals to understand how to more effectively approach engaging principal gift donors and their families to secure transformational gifts. As a participant, you will have the opportunity to submit your questions in advance and we will do our best to incorporate these questions into the live event.

Deconstructing and Growing from Negative Past Work Environments

As you move between jobs or finish projects, it can be all too easy to carry negative past experiences and the habits associated with those experiences along with you to new roles. This can lead you to unknowingly reinforce counterproductive habits or perceptions that don’t contribute to your continued success or to new opportunities. While it is useful to learn from past experience, it’s important to not let those experiences cause self-doubt or an excess of caution in the new experiences to follow. So, how do you hold on to the lessons you want to take away while letting go of the past negativity? Join us for a two-hour interactive virtual training where you’ll learn how to unpack past experiences, take what you need from them, and focus on your future. Our interpersonal communication expert, Dr. Cié Gee, will walk you through some of the science of perception, professional identity construction, and emotional intelligence around your past experiences. By connecting the science to practical experience, you will learn how to set boundaries, develop a growth mindset, and focus on the lessons learned without bringing the negativity of that experience into your current or future interactions.

Leading and Influencing Change from the Middle: Change Management for Mid-level Leaders

Leading change requires involvement and engagement from people across a wide range of roles and functions, and oftentimes, change initiatives are tasked to people who must lead from the middle. Mid-level leaders serve as connectors, mediators, and navigators between the external stakeholders mandating a change or executive leaders initiating a change, and the faculty and/or staff who are responsible for, or impacted by, implementation. In sum, the team leaders and managers in the middle make change happen. How do you lead change authentically—especially when the change may not be one that resonates with you? How do you lead direct reports who may be resistant to the change? How can you be the voice for your direct reports when tasked with a change initiative? Join us for an interactive training that tackles some of these key questions for mid-level leaders. During this virtual training, we will take a case-study and consultative approach to leading change from the middle.

Advocate For Your Department by Using Data Effectively

Given the current context of higher ed, you are likely defending and justifying your department’s expenses relating to revenue, and you’re having to make important decisions, including budget cuts, that impact people across your department. You know that data can be a powerful tool to help you lead through these decisions and changes because data can help you paint a clear picture of how your budget supports the mission of the organization. However, analyzing and presenting data can be a tricky task, and it’s not always clear how to assess data in a way that helps you to identify the most impactful trends and patterns that matter most to your senior leaders, faculty, and students. Join us online, where you’ll learn how to acquire and assess data in ways that can help you to better advocate for the right changes and resources throughout your department. We’ll begin by highlighting some of the most critical data sets you should be looking at — those that matter the most to senior administration. Through a case-study approach, we’ll discuss how you can assess and understand your data to make more informed and mission-aligned decisions. Most importantly, we’ll explore ways you can effectively communicate […]

Women in STEM: Creating a Space Where You Can Thrive

Managing the more immediate demands of teaching and service while also staying on track with research and writing is a challenge for most faculty. But for many women STEM faculty, these challenges are often compounded by academic cultures of individualism and competition that result in sexism, academic bullying, and isolation in academic units that are insensitive to their unique needs and ways of working. In this course designed for early-career, women-identifying faculty in STEM fields at research universities, you will learn ways to better organize your academic life in order to foster focus and stay on track with your professional goals. This video course highlights a vision-driven approach for negotiating the challenges and pitfalls that often derail women STEM faculty during their early career. In this course, you will learn: How to craft and use a professional vision statement to set priorities and align your decision-making with your career goals; Strategies for identifying limiting beliefs, setting boundaries, and saying no; and How to build a support system in order to keep your professional goals front and center in your daily academic life. If you feel like you spend most of your time dealing with others’ “urgent” tasks to the detriment […]

Integrating Academic Program Prioritization into Your Current Shared Governance Structure

As a result of the pandemic, academic leaders are being forced to identify which programs are sustainable and those that are not. Program prioritization is not new; but given the pandemic, the changing social perceptions of higher education, the changing student demographics, and the context in which program prioritization is currently happening brings to light new challenges. With faculty today more burned out and disengaged than ever, it is crucial to identify ways to integrate program prioritization into the present shared governance system on your campus, so that faculty members feel empowered to lead the prioritization process, understand the decisions being made, and align their decisions with the mission of the institution. Join us online for an interactive training which combines a panel of instructors from four institutions, and includes a wide variety of case studies and role-plays. Through useful and illuminating group dialogue opportunities, you’ll discuss ways you can make program prioritization an ongoing and sustained part of your shared governance system on campus by addressing how to: Define the integrated role of program prioritization within shared governance. Collect and use qualitative and quantitative data to make decisions. Assess what’s working, what’s not working, and unintended consequences.

Managing Change as an Inclusive Leader

Inclusive leadership requires that today’s leaders think about and understand change differently. Change is no longer a once-in-a-while ‘initiative’ that needs managing but is instead a constantly occurring process. And not everyone sits on a level playing field along the way: inclusive leaders must develop a greater awareness of their own blind spots and attend to the process they follow when leading change. Whose perspectives are being sought and heard, and whose aren’t? Who is the change serving, and who is it impacting? How can you invite and productively navigate through disagreement and conflict as change unfolds? Join us online to explore what managing change looks like in today’s higher education context for inclusive leaders. You will come away with:

Mindful Leadership for Chairs

When separated from its contemplative framework, mindfulness boils down to three core principles that are essential to effective leadership: gaining perspective, making intentional decisions, and setting clear boundaries with others. Department Chairs need all of these skills to be successful in their roles, yet amid today’s chaotic environment, the space and time to develop them can be hard to come by. Join us for an online training designed to help you lead with a clearer mind and sense of intention. We’ll break the concept of mindful leadership down into practical, approachable terms and offer tools to help you navigate the daily challenges of leading as a Chair, such as: Clarifying issues with your faculty, diffusing emotions around them, and holding the line. Drawing clear boundaries around your role and what is and is not possible. Recognizing complex organizational challenges and putting them into perspective. Understanding the tensions inherent within your decisions.

Setting up the Supervisory Relationship: Understanding and Adapting Your Supervisory Style

Developing a strong supervisory relationship with each staff member goes a long way in ensuring future success for both the individual and the team. In order to accomplish this, you must understand and be able to articulate your own supervisory style—and learn how to adapt it to the styles and work preferences of your team. Having this shared understanding of styles on both sides will help to anchor the supervisory relationship and fortify it in the face of the challenges that naturally occur in our day-to-day work. You will leave this two-hour virtual training with a deeper understanding of your preferred supervisory style, of how and why you might adapt it for individual staff members, and how to engage in productive conversations with new or existing direct reports to build a strong supervisory relationship. You will also complete a useful pre-event exercise to better understand yourself as a supervisor to ground the work of the training. We will explore key questions like the following: How do you identify and articulate your own supervisory style? How can you come to understand the work styles of your direct reports? How do you have a productive conversation with a new (or existing) direct […]

Imposter Syndrome in Higher Ed: Examining the Self, the System, and Opportunities for Change

Too often, imposter syndrome is regarded as a deficiency of the person experiencing it. Rarely do we examine the system that created it and that allows it to thrive. For faculty, being in academia can seem like a never-ending quest for “more,” to prove you are “enough,” or that you are “worthy” of the accolades you achieve. For faculty who represent diverse and historically marginalized groups, the burden of imposter syndrome is especially heavy and inconducive to well-being and career success. This video course examines the experience of imposter syndrome in higher education from three angles: the self, the system, and opportunities for change. Our experts will help you to reflect on how you may experience imposter syndrome, understand its root causes, and enable you to change that narrative by understanding those elements of your career and well-being that you have control over. This video course has been designed specifically for faculty of all disciplines, both tenure-track and term faculty, although anyone who wants to better understand imposter syndrome and how it presents in higher education will also find value in this video course.

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