Leadership Skills for New Academic Administrators
As new academic administrators begin and advance in their academic careers, they will need new skills and strategies for leading complex initiatives, programs, and tasks. New academic administrators will be expected to guide their higher education institutions through change and ensure continued focus on related vision, mission, and goals. They...
Managing by Meeting
Academics manage by meetings. Half of the day in the life of a department chair is spent in formal meetings (average length: 50 minutes), and another 22 percent in informal meetings. Thus, department chairs find themselves in meetings 70 percent of their day. For deans, the number of meetings exponentially...
Emotionally Intelligent Leadership That Empowers, Moves Culture, and Creates Engagement
The core of these beautifully powerful and elegantly simple concepts on the neuroscience behind emotionally intelligent leadership is the happy wedding of over 40 years of teaching and leading experience with the current research on motivation, learning, and empowerment. My leadership roles as a teaching professor, head college basketball coach,...
New Approach Breathes New Life into Leadership Development Program
About 10 years ago, the academic deans and academic directors that make up the University Council on Teaching and Faculty Development at Tufts University noticed a problem. Academic leaders weren’t given the training and support they needed to excel in their positions. It was not a particularly unique problem—lots of...
Leadership Development: One College’s Solution
A recent Inside Higher Ed article discussed the need for leadership training for faculty and academic staff as a way to prepare them for higher education’s ongoing challenges, such as competition for students, equity issues, and financial pressures (Cano & Whitfield, 2019). As faculty members in the Touro College and University...
Becoming Stewards: Transforming New Leaders through Reflective Practice
Whether one subscribes to the notion that leadership is simply one of several roles a manager plays in an organization (Mintzberg, 1989) or that management and leadership are two distinct processes, with the latter being the more visionary and inspiring of the two (Kotter, 1990), one cannot dispute the plethora of research on...
Pure Heart Leadership
Pure Heart Leadership™ is a leadership approach that recognizes the individuality and strengths of leaders. This model that draws on my more than 20 years of professional experience within higher education and blends the ideas of Maslow, Rogers, and Bandura with a mindfulness approach to developing talent. We all have a...
Checklists As an Academic Leadership Tool
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on July 31, 2015. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. There are probably few tools we can use in academic leadership that seem less interesting than a checklist. We may sometimes even refer to checklists as though they were akin to sleepwalking our way through our...
The Role of Emotions in Developing Trust: Why Charisma Is Not Enough
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on January 2, 2019. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. What does it mean to be a leader? Interest in the study of leadership continues to grow, and colleges and universities are taking notice by rolling out new programs. Current degree plans include majors and...
Seven Big Ideas for Academic Leaders: How You Lead Matters!
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on May 2, 2018 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. During my time as a dean, I’ve learned a lot about budgets, fundraising, strategy, recruitment, retention, and personnel matters, but I’ve also discovered seven big ideas about how my outlook and approach influence my leadership....
