Practice mindful leadership as a Chair by gaining perspective, making more intentional decisions, and setting clear boundaries with others.
Overview
When separated from its contemplative framework, mindfulness boils down to three core principles that are essential to effective leadership: gaining perspective, making intentional decisions, and setting clear boundaries with others. Department Chairs need all of these skills to be successful in their roles, yet amid today’s chaotic environment, the space and time to develop them can be hard to come by.
Join us for an online training designed to help you lead with a clearer mind and sense of intention. We’ll break the concept of mindful leadership down into practical, approachable terms and offer tools to help you navigate the daily challenges of leading as a Chair, such as:
- Clarifying issues with your faculty, diffusing emotions around them, and holding the line.
- Drawing clear boundaries around your role and what is and is not possible.
- Recognizing complex organizational challenges and putting them into perspective.
- Understanding the tensions inherent within your decisions.
Who Should Attend
This training is intended for any incoming or existing Department Chairs who want to develop a greater sense of control, agency, and personal efficacy in their leadership. The greater the scope of your leadership and responsibilities as a Chair, the more you will benefit from this training.
If You Can't Attend the Live Event
You can still register to receive a recording of the live session that you can access anywhere, anytime.
The Academic Impressions Online Learning Experience
Intentionally Designed
Online Learning
Our virtual trainings go far beyond just replicating PowerPoint presentations online: these experiences are intentionally designed to give you the kind of robust and dynamic learning experience you’ve come to expect from Academic Impressions. These trainings provide you with an active learning environment and an online space where you can explore ideas, get inspired by what your peers are doing, and understand the range of possibilities around a certain topic. You will leave these sessions with practical solutions that you can take back to your team or task force.
What you will get:
- A dynamic, interactive, and high-touch virtual learning experience designed to engage and set you up for growth
- Seamless online face-time, networking, group work, and Q&A opportunities from the comfort of your own workspace
- Practical takeaways and hands-on knowledge
- Guidance from vetted subject matter experts
- Unlimited access to all recorded online sessions
AGENDA
1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Eastern
We’ll begin our training by defining mindful leadership and explaining how its principles translate in practical terms to day-to-day Department Chair leadership.
One of the most difficult parts of being a Chair is that, all too often, faculty and staff want to walk in, dump their problems on you, and then walk out, leaving you to solve or carry them. If you don’t know how to manage this, it can be massively overwhelming. In this section, we’ll offer tools for:
- Effective listening
- Perspective taking vs. agreeing or having an argument
- Responding vs. reacting
- Diffusing emotions and holding the line
- Drawing boundaries around your role and the actions you can or cannot take
As a Chair, you’re responsible for helping to overcome numerous organizational challenges. These are often complex in nature, and it can be difficult to know how to tackle them and where to begin. In this section, we’ll offer strategies to help you put challenges like the following into a broader perspective:
- Balancing (often resource-poor) budgets
- Negotiating faculty teaching loads and staffing classes equitably
- Navigating bureaucracy
- Balancing the need to innovate with the academy’s reliance on convention
You’ll learn how to identify the various tensions and choice points inherent within your organization’s functioning, as well as how to set long-term goals and objectives consistent with the broader context of your unit and college.
SPEAKERS
Sharon Kruse
Academic Director and Professor, Educational Leadership Chair, Educational Leadership and Sport Management, Washington State University
Sharon is the Academic Director and Professor of Educational Leadership at Washington State University Vancouver and Chair of Educational Leadership and Sport Management for the WSU multi-campus system. Her scholarship broadly addresses two concerns: (1) to help teachers and school leaders better understand the key role leadership plays in K-12 schools, and (2) to explore how education, in K-12 schools and universities, is currently structured and influenced by social and organizational complexity.