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....
Mind Your Ps and Qs: A Guide for New Administrators
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on August 1, 2019 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Have you ever been told to mind your Ps and Qs? The expression is often used to admonish children to be on their best behavior, to be polite. Thus, some say the P stands for...
Surviving a Leadership Transition
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on May 14, 2016 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Leadership changes in the upper administration can be stressful for chairs and deans. We’ve all seen situations in which a new chancellor or president arrives, and between six months and a year later, there’s an...
Transitioning from Faculty to Chair
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on November 15, 2018. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Many of us either are asked to serve as chair of our department as a cyclical rotating chair or have made the decision to pursue the chair position on our own. Regardless of the path...
Petty Principles for Women in Higher Education: Realistic and Practical Advice for Success in Higher Education Leadership
According to recent research, women in higher education continue to consistently be underrepresented at the administrative levels of dean, chief academic officers, provost, and president (Gallant, 2014). There are numerous motives identified by researchers for the persistence of the underrepresentation of women in the top ranks of leadership in higher...
Assessing the Impact of Leadership Development, Part 2: The Holton Model
Elwood F. “Ed” Holton III, former director of the School of Human Resource Education & Workforce Development at Louisiana State University, recognized as early as 1996 that the Kirkpatrick Model of Training Assessment, although so widely adopted that it has become virtually an industry standard, had several serious drawbacks (Holton,...
Assessing the Impact of Leadership Development: Part 1, The Kirkpatrick Model
With all the investments that colleges and universities make in trying to develop their academic leaders—sending them to conferences and workshops, creating their own in-house professional development programs, assigning new leaders to mentors, and so on—institutions want to know whether they’re getting any return on their investment. In short, does...
A Conversation with Barbara Lawton, Continued
Lawton recently sat down with Academic Leader Editor Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti to discuss the increasing influence of fundraising in higher education. Read the first part of this interview in the October issue of the newsletter.
