Essential Leadership Skills for Department Chairs

• Learn who you are as a leader and explore the balancing act you must perform as chair.
• Gain coaching skills to improve your communication and effectiveness with your faculty.
• Design more effective department meetings using the Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment.
• Address conflict and give feedback confidently, with practice built on emotional intelligence.

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

Embracing Your Leadership: The Department Chair’s Balancing Acts
Leadership requires the constant evaluation of a series of trade-offs. For instance, you might 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?” or “Am I a colleague or a supervisor?” This session introduces you to the “balancing act” or “seesaw” as a framing device that will help you to navigate these inherent trade-offs. You’ll learn to orient your leadership choices while also learning how to customize your choices to the situation, opportunity, and problem at hand.

Enhancing Your Leadership Effectiveness: The Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment
Self-awareness lies at the heart of effective leadership. To deepen your understanding of your strengths, areas for improvement, and leadership style, you’ll complete the Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment before the workshop. We’ll then review your results at the event to help you to understand how to adapt your leadership approach to different situations and people, enhancing your effectiveness as a leader.

Designing Effective Meetings: Applying the Five Paths to Leadership®
As a department chair, leading effective meetings means understanding that faculty and staff may have different expectations, needs, and preferences for how meetings should be designed and facilitated. In this interactive session, you’ll reflect on your current meeting practices and identify practical ways to create more engaging, effective, and inclusive meetings where everyone can contribute and thrive.

Using Coaching Skills to Enhance Leadership
Department chairs are often called upon to support faculty and staff as they navigate challenges, work through competing priorities, and grow in their roles. In this session, you will learn and practice simple, practical coaching techniques that strengthen communication and active listening, help others to think more expansively about challenges and possibilities, and encourage greater ownership of solutions. You’ll leave with strategies you can apply in everyday conversations to build trust, support professional growth, and empower the people you lead.

Part 1: Navigating Challenges with Emotional Intelligence and Well-Designed Feedback
Navigating challenges requires emotional intelligence as well as the ability to provide effective feedback and engage in difficult conversations. During this session, you’ll have the opportunity to assess your emotional intelligence and practice a simple 4-step model for effective feedback.

Part 2: Navigating Challenges by Leaning In to Difficult Conversations
Building upon the previous session, we’ll continue to explore strategies and techniques to navigate difficult conversations and practice in pairs or small groups with a variety of scenarios.

Leading from the Middle: Finding Agency in Your Leadership
You serve in a critical and visible leadership role as department chair. You’re the first line of support and direction for faculty and staff within your department. And you’re also a conduit who translates and executes institutional plans and priorities across your department. These roles require you to lead up, down, and across effectively, which is a new and larger scope of responsibility compared to serving as faculty. In this session, we’re going to dig deeper into understanding what it takes to be successful in these new capacities by discussing tips and strategies that will help you to effectively meet the challenge of leading up, down, and across.

Closing Activity
We’ll close our time together with a reflective activity designed to recap your key insights. You’ll identify how you can apply these insights to your own leadership choices when you return to campus.

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 ➞