CMU Department Heads & Associate Deans (Faculty) Leadership Program

Last updated July 26, 2024

Course Length

42m

Last Updated

July 26, 2024

CMU Department Heads & Associate Deans (Faculty) Leadership Program

Last updated July 26, 2024

Overview

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-Work
Before the session:

  • Watch the following videos (in the Table of Contents section above):
    • Academia’s Anti-Leadership Culture
    • The Balancing Acts Model
    • Seesaw 1: Leadership Role (optional)
  • Complete the journal (pages 3 – 4) in the Embrace Your Leadership workbook The remaining worksheets in this workbook will be completed in person during the training.

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 session focuses on understanding your leadership strengths and gaps via Academic Impressions’ Five Paths to Leadership℠ Self-Assessment. Its purpose is to help you to understand how your natural leadership style shows up in both normal and stressful situations, and how you can adapt your leadership approach to different situations and people as needed, thus enhancing your leadership effectiveness.

Pre-Work
Before the session:

Resources to Bring with You to the Session
Make sure you have:

  • Your assessment results*

*Results will be emailed to you from noreply@alchemer.com as well as your results will appear at the top of your main profile page. 


November 20 | Feedback

Giving feedback to faculty and staff in a way that is both direct and respectful is a challenging thing to do, even for seasoned leaders. Most of us figure it out the hard way by fumbling, softening what we meant to say, or confusing the message.  In the long-run, this approach can delay or prevent the faculty’s development or pathway to promotion and tenure and, consequently, it impacts the department and university as a whole. We’ll explore the topic of providing feedback to faculty.  Specifically, you’ll learn and practice using a simple, yet effective, four-step method, which you can use to provide timely, constructive and meaningful feedback in a way that feels collaborative and engaging.

There is no pre-work for the November 20th meeting.


January 10, 2025 | 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM | Leadership Retreat

To kick off the new calendar year we will host an experiential and interactive leadership retreat to deepen our practice of leadership. We will revisit the Five Paths to Leadership℠ Self-Assessment to further deepen both our self-awareness and our ability to adapt and connect with others. We’ll also use model to learn how to delegate and run more effective meetings.

We’ll also dive into the topic of conflict management and emotional intelligence, helping participants first understand the emotions involved to manage both ourselves and the relationship in these difficult moments. We’ll also share a simple but effective model for productive resolution to conflict and will have to time to practice realistic scenarios.

Pre-Work
Before the session:

Resources to Bring with You to the Session
Make sure you have:

  • Your Five Paths to Leadership assessment results* from the October 23 session

*Results will be emailed to you from noreply@alchemer.com as well as your results will appear at the top of your main profile page.