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.
