Every academic unit has a culture—it shows up in how colleagues disagree, who gets heard in meetings, how workload gets shared, and whether new faculty feel like they belong. In many units, that culture is inherited and left to chance, even though it shapes retention, collaboration, and the student experience. Academic leaders care deeply about collegiality, shared governance, and the mission of their institutions, but sustaining those values takes deliberate, visible leadership from the people in the roles of chair, associate dean, and dean.

This workshop helps you to take that role on more intentionally. You’ll start with the Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment to understand how your own style shapes the climate around you, in everyday situations and under stress. Then, working as a mock department, you’ll practice a process for naming the cultural features your unit wants to prioritize, identifying the behaviors that support them, and making commitments to one another. You’ll also see how a team’s collective leadership profile influences the way it makes decisions and handles pressure, then apply what you’ve learned as consultants to the mock department’s leader. You’ll leave with a process you can run in your own unit, along with an action plan for getting started.

More details about dates and times can be found by clicking Learn More and Register, but session descriptions of the two days follow below:

Understanding Your Leadership Style through the Five Paths to Leadership®
You’ll be asked to complete The Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment, which deepens self-awareness by identifying four intuitive leadership styles—Critical Thinker, Relator, Visionary, and Warrior—and the fifth style, Sage, which is explored during the debrief. The assessment offers insight into how you show up as a leader in everyday situations, and how your style may shift under stress.

Reframing the Leader’s Role
As a leader overseeing a group within your unit, you play a critical role in inviting participation and shaping how your team understands what it means to contribute to a healthy departmental culture. This short exercise will help you to identify the role you play in leading and cultivating a healthy culture for your unit.

What is a Departmental or School Culture?
We’ll start by introducing you to a cultural department exercise that introduces the seven key axes of departmental or school culture. You will explore how these axes manifest within units and evaluate your relevance and impact in your own contexts.

Culture-Building Exercise
Building on the previous session, this workshop models the first step in identifying a healthy departmental or school culture. You will work as a mock department, as if you were the faculty and staff of a single unit or school, learning to pinpoint three key cultural features that your department wants to prioritize. Then, in a continuing session, you’ll move through the next steps of the simulation and identify the individual and collective behaviors that support the culture you’ve defined. As members of this mock department, you’ll discuss and craft responses to three key commitment questions, intentionally guiding your unit toward the culture you wish to collectively shape. We’ll conclude this activity by walking you through how to conduct it in your own unit.

Leading Together: How Our Leadership Paths Shape Team Culture
How does a team’s collective leadership profile shape the way its members work together, make decisions, and respond to stress? In this interactive session, we’ll explore your mock department’s Five Paths Team Composite **to identify shared strengths, differences in perspective, and patterns that may influence team dynamics. Using this team composite, we’ll analyze both everyday tendencies and shifts under stress, uncovering the wisdom and potential areas for improvement within their group’s approach to leadership and how it shapes the culture within their unit.

Small-Group Activity: Leading Self, Others, and the Team
In this culminating activity, you’ll act out a role as a consultant to your mock department leader. Working in small groups, you will focus on one of three levels of leadership—leading self, leading others, or leading the team—and draw on the workshop’s concepts, tools, and insights to develop practical advice and strategies for leadership. Groups will share their recommendations with one another, creating a final opportunity to synthesize learning and exchange ideas.

Action Planning: Your Next Steps
As a final step, you’ll consider how to carry the workshop’s learning back to your own department. Working in your team, individually, or in pairs/triads, you’ll identify actionable steps that you can take to strengthen a healthy department culture, along with questions, concerns, or barriers you may encounter along the way.

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 ➞