September 19, 2025 | The Five Paths to Leadership®
As a department chair, you play a pivotal role in advancing your department’s goals in partnership with your faculty, staff, and academic leadership. To lead effectively in this role, you need a clear understanding of yourself and how you show up as a leader. In this session, you’ll use the Academic Impressions Five Paths to Leadership℠ Self-Assessment to explore your leadership strengths and gaps. You’ll gain insight into how your natural leadership style surfaces in both everyday and high-stress situations, and learn strategies for adapting your approach to meet the needs of different individuals and contexts. By increasing your self-awareness and leadership agility, you’ll be better equipped to foster engagement, build alignment, and lead your department with confidence.
Location/Modality: In-Person and Virtual Instruction by Academic Impressions
Pre-Work: Complete the Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment (see button above on the top right corner of your screen to access the assessment)
October 17, 2025 | 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.
Location/Modality: In-Person
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. To access the workbook, click the “Course Resources” button in the top right corner of your screen and download your own copy (you must download the workbook and save it to your computer to edit)
Resources to Bring with You to the Session
Make sure you have: Your Embrace Your Leadership workbook
November 21, 2025 |The Anatomy of Trust
As a department chair, your leadership depends on your ability to build trust—within your department, with your dean, and across other units on campus. When trust is strong, collaboration flows more easily, communication is clearer, and your colleagues are more willing to follow your lead. When trust is weak, progress slows and relationships become strained. In this session, you’ll explore how trust is built, how to recognize when it’s breaking down, and how to strengthen it across the many relationships you manage as a departmental leader.
Location/Modality: In-Person
Pre-work: None
December 10, 2025 | On-Campus Workshop
This on-campus workshop is designed to support department chairs in intentionally shaping a healthy, inclusive departmental culture. The sessions introduce a collaborative, practical approach chairs can use to gather input from faculty and staff, surface both strengths and challenges, and engage their departments in meaningful dialogue about how they work together.
January 23, 2026 | Designing Your Department’s Culture: An Inclusive Approach to Creating a Healthy Workplace
As a chair, you play a key role in building a thriving departmental culture—but you can’t do it alone. With rising burnout and declining morale, this workshop demonstrates an approach to actively engage your faculty and staff in designing a culture that everyone can understand, support, and aspire to.
February 20, 2026 |The Secret to Great 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.
March 20, 2026 | Skillfully Resolving Conflict
As a department chair, you regularly face conflict with faculty, staff, and peers—and the shifts in how we work and connect have only heightened these challenges. This session will help you recognize how you internalize tension and understand the role of perception and miscommunication in fueling disagreements. You’ll learn practical approaches to resolving or reducing conflict in ways that benefit everyone involved. Walk away with strategies you can apply across all levels of your relationships—from other academic leaders s to colleagues to direct reports.
April 17, 2026| Celebrating Our Personal Leadership Philosophies
In this closing session, we’ll celebrate our leadership development journeys together and reflect on what we’ve learned during our program. You’ll have the opportunity to share with others your Personal Leadership Philosophy and Program Testimonial.
