Event Category: Virtual Training

Effective Leadership is Inclusive Leadership: A Series

Rather than looking to one engagement for a singular solution, this series provides a multi-pronged approach that would embrace a five-month commitment to both inclusion and leadership development for leaders across multiple units. While inclusive leadership content traditionally focuses on bias, education, and various interventions, our unique approach integrates the dimension of leadership development. This method has the benefit of helping all attendees connect the human element of inclusivity with practical elements of outcomes, fairness, and professionalism. This combination elevates the work of changing hearts and minds with the addition of meaningful understandings of individual impact and influence on systems.   The Academic Impressions inclusive leadership framework effectively aligns to the Mayo Clinic Values:   

Deans Success Program Discussion Circle

Each quarter, Academic Impressions will host a discussion for Deans participating in the Deans Success Program.  You’ll have the opportunity to: And the best part is – YOU get to help set the agenda.  We’ll survey the group in advance and use your feedback to co-create the agenda. These sessions are NOT recorded, so you’re encouraged to attend the live event. 

Reinvigorate Your Meetings and Workshops: A Training for Deans

Deans across higher education are tackling some of the biggest challenges yet.  Take, for instance, declining student enrollments (and the reduced budgets that follow) and the low levels of faculty morale and engagement (which, in turn, lead to high turnover). Let’s face it—these are big problems that take a village to solve. And yet, you probably feel like the responsibility to remedy these challenges falls largely on your shoulders. So how can you convene others across your college to become part of the village that can help you to tackle these challenges?  Join us online for a highly interactive experience where you’ll learn how you can elicit the best thinking in your unit. During this workshop, you’ll participate in a simulated activity which will demonstrate how you can design and facilitate a collaborative and interactive meeting or brainstorming session with your team. You’ll walk away with a detailed facilitation guide and tips for how to implement this practice on your campus. If you’re looking for ways to reinvigorate your meetings and workshops, this training is for you! 

The Art of Influencing Up as Academic Dean 

Influencing your Provost and other senior leaders is a key function of your role as academic dean.  It’s your responsibility to provide input and perspective on decisions that will shape your unit—as well as the entire institution. As leadership transitions become more commonplace in higher education, it becomes more difficult to know how to effectively influence “up.” Not only are you learning how to navigate newfound relationships, you’re also responding to emerging strategic plans and changing unit-level priorities. Some days, it may feel like everything is a moving target. In this environment, where everyone is experiencing a higher level of stress, and where attention is split in so many different directions, it can feel difficult to know how to develop trust and credibility with your senior leaders.  Join us online and learn how you can better engage with, support, and influence senior leaders such as your Provost. Using the Five Paths to Leadership℠ as our framework, you’ll learn how to:  This workshop will give you an opportunity to reflect on an existing relationship you have with a senior leader, and we’ll then share tips and strategies you can apply to that relationship to nurture trust. We’ve also designed this training […]

ENCORE + Live Q&A: Connecting Values to the Gift: Strategies to Incorporate Families into Your Fundraising Goals

The donor’s legacy and philanthropic goals need to be carried on through their gift to your institution. Before a formal proposal is presented, or prior to a meeting that focuses on outlining the gift agreement, you need to connect the donor family’s values to your institutional goals. This process begins by aligning family engagement strategies into your institutional fundraising goals. Join us in this third installment of our Family Giving Series to potentially unlock millions of dollars in giving by building upon your approach to cultivation and stewardship with your most loyal and engaged families. By drilling into the core value of what a family holds dear, you will be able to continue deep philanthropic partnerships with donor families for generations to come.

ENCORE + Live Q&A: Equipping Gift Officers to Facilitate Conversations Among Multi-Generational Families

The exercise of facilitating philanthropic conversations around values with the families you engage with is essential for the long-term philanthropic viability of your institution. However, gift officers are often not trained for this unique approach to fundraising that focuses on the family. Instead, they may often feel a natural hesitation to insert themselves into these intimate conversations—especially when there are unknowns involved, so as a result they end up forgoing relationship-building among multiple generations of the same family.    Equipping a gift officer with the knowledge of why this approach is important—and not extraneous work—can lead to more creative and meaningful gifts, trusted relationships, and a wider variety of natural opportunities for follow-up.  Join us in this second training within a three-part Family Giving Series to learn how to navigate the different perspectives and unique goals among a multi-generational family by helping them align their values to benefit your institution and increase philanthropic engagement. 

ENCORE: The Role of Philanthropic Conversations in Families

Transferring values, not just dollars, is the essence of philanthropic conversations in families. These conversations rarely occur with families who have the actual capacity to give, however. Whether your alumnus identifies as middle-class or is part of a family with a long-storied history with your institution, cultivating conversation among their closest familial ties is often the missing link when developing strong and sincere relationships with multiple generations. Join us in this first of a three-session series on family giving. In this training, you will gain insights into the role of philanthropic conversations within families and why it is important to bring institutional values into the familial relationships you’re stewarding.

Encore: Keys to a Successful Relationship Between Deans and Development Officers

Philanthropy is critical to helping institutions meet their academic missions, and at its core, it is all about building and maintaining relationships. Although fundraising is just one of the myriad responsibilities overseen by an academic dean, the development officer is a key partner in assisting the dean in achieving those fundraising goals. To find success in academic fundraising, the relationship between an academic dean and a development officer must be one built on mutual respect, trust, and clear communication. Successful fundraising teams develop complementary skills that, when combined, are more effective than the skills of one individual. Through this three-hour virtual training, you will be able to better prioritize fundraising goals as a dean and development officer team. You will learn how to build trust and set expectations with mutual fundraising goals in mind, establish a process to effectively move donors through your pipeline, and practice essential skills such as making an ask.

Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable: Engaging in Dialogue About Freedom, Favoritism, and Fairness

During this two-hour virtual workshop, Dr. Sandra Miles, Head of Practice for Team Development at Academic Impressions, will lead us as we explore the ways feelings of defensiveness and discomfort can be very common when engaging in conversations around favoritism and unfairness. Even those who have done extensive reading on topics related to conflict management can find themselves fumbling if they haven’t yet reflected on how their personal feelings may impact the ways they show up in the world—and in these difficult conversations. To get more comfortable engaging in these dialogues, we must first lean into the discomfort of individual reflection and actions that prepare us to enter into them in an open and effective way.  Join us for a two-hour virtual training where we will explore four key concepts and how they come into play during conversations around topics that are deeply personal:  You will be given a workbook of activities, tools, and resources to help you move beyond simply understanding these key concepts. Throughout the workshop, you will begin the hard work of interpreting how favoritism can show up in every aspect of the work we do, and how an orientation around fairness improves relationships, morale, and trust. 

Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable: Engaging in Dialogue About Freedom, Favoritism, and Fairness

During this two-hour virtual workshop, Dr. Sandra Miles, Head of Practice for Team Development at Academic Impressions, will lead us as we explore the ways feelings of defensiveness and discomfort can be very common when engaging in conversations around favoritism and unfairness. Even those who have done extensive reading on topics related to conflict management can find themselves fumbling if they haven’t yet reflected on how their personal feelings may impact the ways they show up in the world—and in these difficult conversations. To get more comfortable engaging in these dialogues, we must first lean into the discomfort of individual reflection and actions that prepare us to enter into them in an open and effective way.  Join us for a two-hour virtual training where we will explore four key concepts and how they come into play during conversations around topics that are deeply personal:  You will be given a workbook of activities, tools, and resources to help you move beyond simply understanding these key concepts. Throughout the workshop, you will begin the hard work of interpreting how favoritism can show up in every aspect of the work we do, and how an orientation around fairness improves relationships, morale, and trust.