Dr. Marilyn Odom: Well, I have been department chair for a little over four years, and with many academicians, we move into these leadership positions without having any formal training in leadership, so I try to seek out opportunities where I can. I had attended a conference by AI and I was really impressed with it. So when I saw this opportunity, I thought it would a good experience for me. I approached my Dean, he said yes and we did it.

I thought it was probably one of the best experiences of my academic career. I'd learned so much, I reflected a lot, I pulled things out that I had not thought about in a while. I had not really thought about my leadership philosophy in eons. It gave me an opportunity to think about that, reflect on it, to really pull out my core values.

Now I have my new leadership philosophy printed out and it stays right here in front of me, between my two monitors and at my keyboard, and I look at it. Especially when I'm about to have a meeting with my faculty, I will look at it and I will read it and I will remind myself what my philosophy is, and remind myself to stick to that philosophy. Whether that means I'm about to have a good conversation where I'm going to build them up even more, more, more, or if it's going to be a not so good conversation where I have to hold them accountable. But I have that, and that is probably the most significant impact that I took away from the bootcamp.

Other than the leadership philosophy, one thing that I know that I probably had not been as attentive to is really telling my faculty how great they are. Because I chair a department, and I probably had not just applauded them enough. I did do some, I will not say that I did not do any, but to recognize that.

Just do it. Go in open-minded. Be prepared to work, be prepared to think, be prepared to reflect, but just do it. I told my Dean that this money was well worth it, it was a good investment.

Dr. Jeffrey Malanson: The way the experience was structured, it provided a tremendous amount of flexibility to self-pace a lot of the material in a way that made the most sense for your schedule. But then you had the weekly structure of the Thursday and Friday face-to-face, in-person sessions, which were much better and more effective than I was expecting given everyone's Zoom fatigue these days.

I generally think of myself as being a pretty reflective person, a self-reflective person, but was really impressed with the degree to which some of the activities we did made me confirm things I'd already thought about myself. But a lot of the activities really opened my eyes to the strategies I use in crisis situations and the way I communicate with other people, and the way maybe I need to do a better job of communicating with other people. A better understanding of the different buttons leaders can push to get better results out of their teams and to get better buy-in from the people that are working with.

One of the hard parts about a conference is you want to pack as much learning and as much experience as you can into the time you're there. So by halfway through the second day or after lunch or whatever, you're feeling pretty tired, maybe not as engaged with the material. So the online workshop really allowed you to engage with material on a timeline when you were prepared to do that when you're prepared to learn the most, and really engage in, and then, you can ramp up for those weekly sessions each week and make sure you were fully prepared.

One of the nice parts is that the way they structured our bootcamp is that whenever we did little breakout sessions, they tended to put us with the same smaller group of people. So you had an opportunity, even if it was just in 10 or 15 minutes increments, to start building a longer-term relationship and to learn more from each other, rather than needing to essentially do new icebreaker events or get to know each other for the first time each week. You really got to build some relationships over time, which was really nice.

The focus on leadership philosophy that came from the bootcamp has really been eye-opening in terms of really thinking carefully about each experience I pursue, each opportunity I pursue, each interaction I have, "How is this confirming who I am, or how is this deviating from who I want to be? How is this getting me to that next step in my career?"

The two pieces of advice are one, make sure you really have the time to engage with the material each week. Then two would be to make sure you come to the participatory sessions ready, able, and willing to engage. It's not the kind of experience where you can passively sit back and just absorb what others are saying and really fully benefit from it. You need to be willing to do the work, engage with the material, talk to your peers because that's when you will fully be able to benefit from the experience.