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,...
Double Deaning: Reflections in a Mirror
Nearly everyone finds twins interesting. That is so, in part, because twins are relatively rare, with only three or four out of 1,000 births producing twins and only about 25 percent of those being monozygotic—the technical term for “identical twins.” Even more rare are those identical twins who are known...
Student Engagement: The Key to Retention
As Steven C. Howey (2012) pointed out years ago, educators across the US are “frustrated with the challenge of how to motivate the ever increasing number of freshmen students entering college who are psychologically, socially, and academically unprepared for the demands of college life.” For the past 40-plus years, the...
Partnering with Student Organizations to Build First-Year Student Engagement: Special Olympics Young Athletes and Merrimack College
Every day, academic leaders make decisions about what kinds of programming college first-year students will find attractive and engaging. Many colleges’ ideas, however, fail to connect to student interest and experience. Part of the reason for this disconnect is generational. The staff and administrators planning these programs are at least...
Celebrating Memories on Social Media to Engage Alumni
Take a moment to think back to the most vivid memories from your college experience. Do it right now: close your eyes and see what comes to mind. OK, what did you see? Maybe it was a high-profile sports game you went to, a graduation ceremony, a girlfriend or boyfriend...
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...
Seven Key Questions for Improving Communication with Your Dean
Being a department head is one of the hardest jobs on campus. Representing both the unit and the administration can be a real balancing act, and your most vital partner in this complex role is likely to be your dean. New department heads may never have worked closely with the...
Collective Terms Perpetuate Stereotypes and Biases: Change Begins with Leadership
It was a sweltering July morning when an email from one of my librarians arrived in my inbox, its subject line proclaiming, “THE LIBRARIANS ARE HOT!” I had recently taken over management of library faculty and staff, and this was my first crisis. The library’s air conditioning unit had failed,...
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...
Where Advocacy and Sound Leadership Must Part Company
The world of higher education is one where advocacy plays out on a daily basis. We see it at the lowest professional levels of our institutions, where faculty are advocates for students, academic programs, policy, colleagues, and curricula as well as for themselves. At the highest level, our presidents are...
