Leading from the Middle: Essential Skills to Drive Success

Leading from the middle is a complex task. You must understand, communicate, and operationalize strategy while staying attuned to the needs and expectations of your supervisor, your team, and other partners with whom you collaborate.   Join other experienced middle and senior managers to explore such critical topics as leveraging your scope of influence, deepening your self-awareness, building effective relationships, and the intersection of agency and followership. We’ll use our leadership framework to guide you from personal mastery to interpersonal and team mastery, helping you to:   Extend Your Stay to Enhance Your Skills with Additional Training Stay an extra day with us and experience our Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable: Engaging in Difficult Dialogues in the Workplace workshop taking place December 11, 2024. At this event, you’ll dive deeper into managing the feelings around difficult conversations, focusing on creating an orientation around fairness. By attending both events, you’ll gain valuable insights and strategies to strengthen your team dynamics. Register for both workshops and save $500!  

Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable: Engaging in Difficult Dialogues in the Workplace

Difficult conversations often trigger defensiveness and discomfort—even for seasoned faculty and staff. Without reflection on how personal feelings shape our actions, it’s easy to fumble. In this one-day intensive workshop, you’ll confront that discomfort through reflection and explore how favoritism can surface. You’ll discover how fairness strengthens relationships, morale, and trust. With a workbook of activities, tools, and resources, you’ll move from simply understanding tough conversations to navigating them with confidence. Specifically, you’ll unpack four key concepts and how they come into play during conversations around topics that are deeply personal: 

Next-Level Leadership: An Institute for Current and Aspiring Women Leaders

Are you looking to take the next step in as a woman in leadership but aren’t sure of where to start? Would you like to connect with other women leaders in similar roles to help develop your network? Join us for this powerful two-day leadership experience that will help you to achieve both individual and systemic change. Whether you are an administrator, faculty, or staff, this conference will help you increase your self-awareness and knowledge of your leadership tendencies, create your leadership narrative now and into the future, and face coming leadership challenges head on. Unique features of this event include: 

Fostering Growth and Building Strong Teams: A Summit for Leaders in Advancement Talent and Team Development

Advancement work is evolving, and so must your team. Developing future leaders doesn’t just boost performance; it strengthens retention, fosters fulfillment, and builds a thriving workplace culture. But creating leadership pathways and growth programs can be challenging. That’s where the Summit for Advancement Talent and Team Development Leaders comes in! Join us to learn how to design your leadership program, address individual growth needs, and implement proven strategies for team development. To help preserve a practical and interactive environment, attendance for this program is capped at 30 participants.  

Supervision Certificate Program – September 30 Cohort

Often in higher education, individuals move into a supervisory role without the necessary tools and skills to be successful. Particularly in today’s challenging environments, effective supervision is key to building an effective culture where each individual can contribute to team success. Join us online for a four-week cohort based program leveraging both asynchronous and synchronous learning specifically designed for higher education supervisors who are new to their roles, looking to deepen their skills, or for those who aspire to supervisor roles.

Setting Boundaries 

During your early career, you may feel pressure to make career decisions that don’t align with your personal or professional goals. Being able to set and maintain your boundaries and knowing when to be more flexible with them can help you achieve your ideal career trajectory without sacrificing too much. In this session, we’ll discuss how to set your boundaries based on your personal and professional goals, and how to maintain those boundaries while balancing competing priorities. 

Strategic Growth in Higher Education: The Role of Data and Artificial Intelligence

Come join us to learn about the immense power of artificial intelligence and how it can be harnessed to your school’s advantage. If you’re looking to make informed decisions about which academic programs to stop, start, or grow, this event is for you. Specifically, you’ll explore how artificial intelligence can help you to: 

Polishing Your Professional Persona 

Who you are as a person and who you are as a professional can be similar but not exactly the same. As you navigate different organizations, you’ll encounter a wide range of professional norms and standards, and you’ll have to decide how you can fit in with your organizational culture and how you may want to make different choices. In this session, we’ll explore what you want your professional persona to be, and how you can make choices that support developing and maintaining that persona.   We recommend coming to this session having taken a personal assessment to better understand your leadership style. One option to take ahead of time is Academic Impressions’ Five Paths to Leadership℠ self-assessment. You could also attend the debrief session in August or September to deepen your self-awareness.

Creating a Personal Leadership Philosophy 

Your leadership philosophy encompasses your core values and beliefs that frame how you make decisions. Although you may not see yourself as a leader in your early career, building your leadership philosophy from the start of your professional life can help set you up to make intentional choices about your career trajectory. In this session, you’ll examine your personal leadership style, along with your values and goals, to come up with what you want from your journey as a leader and a professional.   We recommend coming to this session having taken a personal assessment to better understand your leadership style. One option to take ahead of time is Academic Impressions’ Five Paths to Leadership℠ self-assessment. You could also attend the debrief session in August or September to deepen your self-awareness.  

Advocating for Yourself and Managing Up

In your early career, you may not have a lot of power to enact changes or drive the direction of your projects. However, knowing how to advocate for what you need in your professional life and managing your relationship with your supervisor can help you better achieve your goals. In this session, we’ll walk through how to work with your manager effectively and champion your interests diplomatically.