Problems in interpersonal interactions, communication patterns, and outcomes often reveal team dysfunction. While it’s easy to spot problems when all three break down, identifying issues in just one or two areas can be more challenging. Join us in person to explore how to recognize dysfunctional team dynamics and practice strategies to build trust, clarify purpose, foster positive group dynamics, and prioritize learning—ultimately transforming your team into a high-performing, cohesive unit.

More details about the event schedule can be found by clicking Learn More and Register, but session descriptions for the two days follow below: 

Clarifying Hopes and Aspirations
In this session, you’ll learn how to guide your own team in identifying a shared “North Star” that reflects its hopes and aspirations. What impact do you want to have? What kind of team do you aspire to be? This session creates clarity around purpose and direction so that the work ahead is anchored in something meaningful and forward-looking rather than reactive.

Building Self-Awareness, Personal Agency, and a Shared Language for Leadership
This session equips you to build deeper self-awareness and personal agency within your own team using our leadership model and the Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment. We’ll show you how team members can connect their individual leadership patterns—under normal conditions and stress—to overall team performance, and how to establish a shared language that strengthens communication and reduces misinterpretation.

Surfacing Team Dynamics: How We Show Up in Meetings
Most collaboration in higher education takes place in meetings, yet few teams pause to examine how they function within them.  In this interactive session, you’ll learn practical techniques to surface visible and invisible dynamics on your own team. The goal is to make the implicit explicit so the team can make conscious choices about how it wants to operate.

Identifying Performance and Dysfunction: The High-Performing Teams Assessment
This session explores the characteristics that define high-performing teams and the common signs of dysfunction that hinder collaboration. Using the Academic Impressions High-Performing Teams Assessment (HPT), designed specifically for higher education leaders, we’ll demonstrate how it can structure a candid but constructive conversation about performance. You’ll reflect on your team’s current state and consider how to use this diagnostic as a practical tool to spark productive dialogue and continuous improvement.

Shared Sense-Making and Working Agreements
In this session, you’ll learn how to guide your team through a disciplined sense-making process that translates reflection and data into clear, actionable working agreements. We’ll share facilitation techniques for synthesizing themes, prioritizing behavior shifts, and co-creating team agreements.

Putting It to Work: Advancing a Shared Work Product
To ensure this work drives visible progress, you’ll learn how to integrate team development directly into a live strategic priority, initiative, or decision your team is facing. We’ll show you how to structure a facilitated work session that both advances a tangible outcome and reinforces new team norms, ensuring your development efforts translate into forward momentum rather than sitting on a shelf.

Coaching to Sustain Momentum
Sustainable change requires reinforcement. In this session, you’ll explore how to incorporate individual or team coaching conversations to maintain progress over time. You’ll learn how coaching can structure follow-up conversations that reinforce commitments, address emerging dynamics, and deepen accountability—helping your team sustain the gains made during your development work.

Case Studies: Best Practice in Team Development
In this session, we’ll examine a real team development engagement and extract the elements that made it successful. You’ll identify strategies, design decisions, and facilitation approaches that you can adapt for your own team context, helping you strengthen your internal leadership capacity over time.

Action Planning and Commitments
As we close, you’ll create a concrete plan for how you’ll implement these tools and frameworks with your own team. You’ll identify specific next steps, key conversations to initiate, and commitments to practice, ensuring you leave not only inspired but equipped to act.

Past Attendee Breakdown

Academic Impressions workshops provide the opportunity for quality conversations and relationship-building through both formal and informal networking opportunities in an intimate setting. Our in-depth and hands-on approach to learning provides you with actionable takeaways.

Learn More About the Academic Impressions Workshop Experience ➞