Course Category: Free for All-Inclusive Members

Embrace Your Leadership: The Balancing Acts of Academic Leadership 

Serving as a department leader requires you to constantly evaluate and decide between a series of trade-offs. For instance, you may ask yourself questions like:  How you choose your position is largely dependent on your natural leadership style and how well you understand the impact of your leadership choices on others.   In this course, you’ll be introduced to the Balancing Acts framework, which is a set of questions you can ask yourself to help you to navigate these inherent trade-offs. Specifically, you’ll explore the following three balancing acts, which will help you to understand how to make deliberate decisions on how you show up as a leader:  By learning how to intentionally adjust your leadership style to the situation, opportunity, or problem at hand, you can maximize your influence as a department leader.    

Five Paths Course GOW

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Develop Your Leadership Superpower: Improving Self-Awareness 

Self-awareness lies at the heart of effective leadership. A self-aware department chair understands why they lead the way they do because they pay attention to their own attitudes, behaviors, and motives. However, the most effective department chairs also practice “other-awareness,” which means that they study the impacts of their attitudes, behaviors, and motives on others. This kind of awareness can turn out to be your superpower, because it increases your effectiveness in developing meaningful relationships with your stakeholders, including your dean, faculty, staff, and students.  In this course, you will start building your self-awareness superpower.  Specifically, you will accomplish the following: 

Officials with Authority and Responsible Employees: Helping Mandatory Reporters Comply with 2020 Title IX Regulations

Whether you have the designation of “Official with Authority” (OWA), “Responsible Employee,” or “Mandatory Reporter Employee” under your institution’s Title IX policies and procedures, you have a responsibility to report to your Title IX Coordinator any alleged incidents of sexual harassment. This includes witnessed harassment and incidents shared with you by students, faculty, or staff. Failure to report as an OWA can trigger legal liability. This video course will prepare you to comply in your role as a mandatory reporter of sexual harassment. We will clarify your reporting duties under the new Title IX regulations, and we’ll roleplay a conversation in which a student discloses to her professor an alleged incident of harassment. You will leave with 6 strategies for ensuring safe and productive conversations when students and employees share details of sexual harassment with you.

Your Inner Critic is Lying: Active Strategies for Combating Imposter Syndrome

Whether you want to admit it or not, at some point in your career—maybe at many points—you will experience “imposter syndrome.” It’s a phenomenon that we all struggle with, and it causes us to believe that our success or position is due to oversight or luck instead of our own merit. We encourage you to turn down the voice of your inner critic. Rather than hide or resist your talents and accomplishments, own them! Academia can be a competitive environment to work within. Resisting your inner critic means you’ll be better able to navigate through the competition and find even more ways to thrive. It will promote your long-term vitality as faculty. It will prepare you for leadership roles big and small. And it will allow you to serve your students, peers and administration with greater confidence.In this video course, you’ll be introduced to several research-based tactics you can use immediately to help you: Did You Know? There are 5 types of inner critics—find out which one(s) speak to you the most!

CMU Department Heads & Associate Deans (Faculty) Leadership Program

August 28 | Embrace Your Leadership: The Balancing Acts of Academic Leadership Leadership requires the constant evaluation of a series of trade-offs. For instance, you may ask yourself questions like, “Do I lead as a faculty member or as a department head?” “Do I focus on the immediate or the long-term?” “Am I a colleague or a supervisor?” This session introduces the “balancing act” or “seesaw” as a framing device that will help you to navigate these inherent trade-offs by orienting your leadership choices and helping you to customize your choices to the situation, opportunity, and problem at hand. Pre-WorkBefore the session: Resources to Bring with You to the Session Make sure you have: September 18 | Understanding the Anatomy of Trust Trust is at the heart of leadership; you cannot lead those who do not trust you. In this session, we’ll explore two factors at play: someone’s propensity to trust (those who give it freely or those who expect you to earn their trust) as well as specific behaviors that that can build and even repair trust if it’s broken. There is no pre-work for the September 18th meeting. October 23 | The Five Paths to Leadership℠ Our third […]

Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable: Engaging in Dialogue About Freedom, Favoritism, and Fairness

During this two-hour virtual workshop, Dr. Sandra Miles, Head of Practice for Team Development at Academic Impressions, will lead us as we explore the ways feelings of defensiveness and discomfort can be very common when engaging in conversations around favoritism and unfairness. Even those who have done extensive reading on topics related to conflict management can find themselves fumbling if they haven’t yet reflected on how their personal feelings may impact the ways they show up in the world—and in these difficult conversations. To get more comfortable engaging in these dialogues, we must first lean into the discomfort of individual reflection and actions that prepare us to enter into them in an open and effective way.  Join us for a two-hour virtual training where we will explore four key concepts and how they come into play during conversations around topics that are deeply personal:  You will be given a workbook of activities, tools, and resources to help you move beyond simply understanding these key concepts. Throughout the workshop, you will begin the hard work of interpreting how favoritism can show up in every aspect of the work we do, and how an orientation around fairness improves relationships, morale, and trust. 

Respectfully and Confidently Engage in Difficult Conversations: A Dialogue Workshop Series for Advancement Professionals 

As an advancement professional, you engage with alumni, volunteers, donors, and colleagues from different backgrounds, lived experiences, and perspectives. At times, you may receive unsolicited or angry opinions about institutional decisions, or inquiries about national and global news or events as they unfold. These comments or questions can sometimes be polarizing and catch you off guard. For some of us, our natural tendency in these situations is to shut down, disengage, and become defensive. However, a critical requirement of the relationship cultivation process with internal and external constituents is staying present in these challenging moments and allowing the conversation to continue despite political, religious, or social differences. It is also just as critical to know when to exit these conversations safely and professionally, depending on the intensity of the situation and/or other factors.  Join us for this four-part online workshop series, where you’ll learn how to respond professionally to difficult conversations with alumni, volunteers, donors, and colleagues. In community with other Advancement professionals across the nation, you will learn simple yet powerful techniques and practices to help you to stay present in difficult dialogues. The workshop series will also give you an opportunity to practice having difficult conversations through a variety of […]

2024 Title IX Educational Series: Athletics and Final Q&A

As Title IX Coordinators, you have likely already started to brace yourself for the anticipated sweeping changes to the Title IX regulations. As the designated Title IX leader for your campus, you are responsible not only for updating your policies and procedures, but also for communicating those changes thoughtfully and effectively with students, faculty, staff, and members of your Title IX team.   Join us for an engaged discussion about the practical steps you can start implementing right away as the clock starts ticking—before you need to ensure compliance with the law. Our expert panel will share practical recommendations and their analysis of the new law, as well as how they effectively prepared their campus communities for the changes that lie ahead.