Archives: Courses

University of Alabama Service Excellence Course

Session 1 — Foundations of Service Excellence (90 min) Objectives: Establish shared understanding of service excellence; introduce university-specific context and expectations. Pre-work: Session 2 — Service Excellence Competencies & Skills (90 min) Objectives:Build practical interpersonal skills to improve clarity, rapport, and trust. Pre-work: Session 3 — Improving Efficiency and Communication (90 min) Objectives:Prepare staff to improve and maintain efficiency while communicating effectively. Pre-work: Session 4 — De-Escalating Difficult Situations (90 min) Objectives:Prepare staff to handle complaints, difficult interactions, and high-pressure moments. Solidify learning and drive long-term behavioral change. Pre-work:

The Power of Delegation as a Department Chair

This course invites Department Chairs to use delegation as a strategic leadership tool to empower your team, manage your own workload more effectively, and create more sustainable leadership practices. By entrusting others with meaningful responsibilities, you can focus on advancing departmental goals, reducing burnout, and modeling trust for your faculty and staff. Ultimately, this approach strengthens the department and institution by fostering a culture of growth, innovation, and leadership development.

Leading Through Conflict: A Department Chair’s Guide 

This course helps department Chairs understand why conflict is a normal and unavoidable part of academic leadership—especially given the tensions of leading peers, balancing faculty and administrative expectations, and working within resource constraints. The course walks you through the major types of conflict you are likely to encounter, including task, relationship, values-based, process, and status conflicts, so that you can respond with greater clarity and confidence. It also reframes conflict as a valuable source of information, teaching you to look beneath surface positions to uncover the interests and needs driving difficult situations. Through practical frameworks and reflection, you’ll build skills in diagnosing conflict by examining factors such as self-awareness, trust, communication style, and collaboration tendencies. 

Using the Five Paths to Leadership® to Deliver Feedback That Motivates 

This is a raw recording. An edited version will be available in the future. You probably already know that giving feedback to your colleagues is a beneficial thing to do. But it’s also one of the trickiest things to get right. How many times have you delivered feedback to one colleague and it goes well, and then you deliver feedback to someone else, and it goes awry? The truth is, you cannot use a cookie-cutter approach to giving feedback. The way you communicate feedback needs to be tailored to the person receiving it, so that you can motivate them to put the feedback into action. Join us to explore how you can use the Five Paths to Leadership® model to adapt the way you communicate feedback so that it really resonates with the person receiving it. 

Data-Informed Resilience: A Blueprint for Thriving Amid Financial Constraints

Across higher education today, institutions are placing more emphasis on, and investing in, training leaders on data-informed decision-making as a way to make smarter budget decisions.    In this webinar, we’ll share a case study from Utah Valley University, which received a state legislative mandate that required them to cut $8.9 million from “underperforming programs” and redirect it to “high-yield programs” in just three years. Utah Valley University turned their challenge for budget reallocation into an opportunity that enhanced institutional resilience and competitive edge. The case study offers translatable and practical lessons on how you can apply data-informed decision-making to:   

UNLV Chairs’ Leadership Development Program

Overview:     Welcome to the inaugural UNLV Chairs’ Leadership Development Program.  We’re delighted that you’ve chosen to spend your spring semester with us to explore and enhance your leadership.  Whether you’re a new, current or aspiring chair, this program will help you:    

Self-Awareness for Department Chairs

This course invites Chairs to pause and reflect on how their values, habits, and leadership patterns shape their departments. Through real-world examples and the Five Paths to Leadership® framework, you’ll explore your strengths, awareness gaps, and stress responses and how these influence relationships, decision-making, and culture. The course emphasizes self-awareness as a leadership superpower, equipping you to lead with greater clarity, adaptability, and intention. You’ll leave with practical tools and reflective practices you can immediately apply in their day-to-day leadership.

CSU San Bernardino: Delivering Effective Customer Service & De-escalation Skills

 This mini-module  is a start to help you enhance your customer service skills including working with difficult customers, as well as how to effectively de-escalate challenging situations.    The videos on the course page will take you about an hour to review. Some lessons in the mini-module reference a Learning Journal, and we have created this workbook just for you to help you apply what you learn directly to your day-to-day work on-campus. 

Starting Career Planning as Mid-Career Faculty

This is a raw recording and will be updated as soon as possible with an edited version. Mid-career is often a turning point for faculty—some aspects of the work still spark joy and fulfillment, while others feel draining or disconnected from what matters most. This webcast will invite you to pause and reflect:   Through guided reflection and examples, you’ll explore how these questions can open the door to intentional career planning. You’ll also get a preview of our Mid-Career Moves course, which provides a step-by-step framework for creating a career plan that aligns with your values and goals. Join us to discover how clarifying what brings you joy—and what doesn’t—can be the starting point for mapping a sustainable and meaningful next stage in your career. 

Best Practices in Faculty Development: Supporting Aspiring and Emerging Faculty Leaders

This is a raw recording and will be updated as soon as possible with an edited version. Universities recognize the importance of developing faculty leaders, but many face a common challenge: How do you sustain the momentum of leadership programs once a cohort finishes—especially when leadership opportunities on campus are limited?    In the first session of our Best Practices in Faculty Development series, join guest speaker Margie Ferguson as she shares how she partnered with Academic Impressions to design and implement a leadership program that supports both new and established leaders at Indiana University, Indianapolis. You’ll gain insights into:    Join us live for the chance to ask questions and learn about how to strengthen faculty development—especially for aspiring faculty leaders.

Supporting Neurodiverse Employees

Grounded in lived experience, this course shows how small supervisory shifts—such as clarifying the “why,” agreeing on preferred communication, and normalizing support—unlock the strengths of neurodivergent staff. Leaders leave with scripts, tools, and resources to build trust, reduce stigma, and translate inclusion into everyday actions. 

Advanced Supervision Certificate Reflection Assignment

Thank you for participating in the Advanced Supervision Certificate program! We hope you learned a lot from the courses and your cohort experience!   This reflection assignment is the culmination of your experience and your only requirement for receiving your badge for the program. Please take some time to reflect on what you’ve learned and how you’ve been able to apply your takeaways to your role. We’ve offered some suggested questions to help you. Once you’ve written your reflection, please hit Submit to earn your badge.   Note: If you’d like to save your reflection, please copy and paste it into a separate document before hitting Submit. We are currently unable to easily recover data from submissions once submitted. 

Building Accountability on Your Team

In the realities of higher ed, accountability isn’t punishment—it’s clarity, trust, and integrity in action. This course helps supervisors to model personal accountability, communicate expectations that stick, and create psychologically safe teams where people will be able to notice, own, and fix issues quickly. It also covers generational differences in accountability.

Building a High Expectations/High Support Supervision Strategy 

Supervisors play a key role in helping their teams to live out the institution’s values through action. This course explores how to clarify expectations, align goals with purpose, and provide meaningful support through coaching, feedback, and performance management. Participants will leave with strategies to strengthen accountability, foster growth, and sustain motivation in challenging times. 

Self-Care as a Supervisor

This course helps higher ed supervisors to strengthen their leadership by practicing mindful self-care and boundary setting. Through guided reflection, participants will uncover what gets in their way, build supportive networks, and learn to lead with balance and intention. The course connects personal well-being to professional effectiveness—highlighting why self-care is essential to leading others well. 

Crafting Your Supervisory Philosophy

Before you can effectively lead others, you must first understand yourself. In this course, you’ll explore your personal leadership philosophy and how it connects to your supervisory approach, using Academic Impressions’ leadership framework as a guide. You’ll leave with a clear sense of your guiding principles and how to translate them into action with your team. 

A Feedback Model that Fuels Leadership for Department Chairs

As a Department Chair, you play a pivotal role in shaping a culture of growth, accountability, and trust within your units—but delivering meaningful feedback can be challenging, especially when navigating complex peer relationships and institutional expectations. This course equips you with practical strategies to give and receive feedback confidently and effectively, moving beyond traditional annual evaluations to create ongoing, development-focused conversations. You’ll learn how to approach feedback with clarity, empathy, and professionalism, ensuring that it strengthens relationships rather than creating tension.  You’ll leave with actionable techniques for providing constructive, timely feedback in one-on-one discussions, written evaluations, or informal exchanges—and for responding to feedback with humility and insight. By grounding these skills in the realities of higher education leadership, you’ll be ready to create a culture where learning, growth, and teamwork thrive—even amidst institutional pressures.

Customer Service Skills Certification Exam

This exam is meant to accompany a Customer Service certification workshop. Once you have completed the workshop, please take the exam to earn your digital badge and certification. You need an 80% or 16 questions correct to earn your certification, and you are welcome to take the exam as many times as you need to pass.

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