Serving as a department leader requires you to constantly evaluate and decide between a series of trade-offs. For instance, you may 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?”  

• “Am I a colleague or a supervisor?”  

How you choose your position is largely dependent on your natural leadership style and how well you understand the impact of your leadership choices on others.  

In this course, you’ll be introduced to the Balancing Acts framework, which is a set of questions you can ask yourself to help you to navigate these inherent trade-offs. Specifically, you’ll explore the following three balancing acts, which will help you to understand how to make deliberate decisions on how you show up as a leader: 

1. Leadership Role: Reflects whose interests you represent 

2. Management Style: Reflects your source of influence over people 

3. Leadership Comfort Zone: Reflects the leadership mode you feel most comfortable operating within 

By learning how to intentionally adjust your leadership style to the situation, opportunity, or problem at hand, you can maximize your influence as a department leader.