Become a more self-aware, effective, and inclusive leader.
Overview
New leaders often find themselves learning on the go—and often at the expense of intentional reflection on their leadership strengths, journey, or skill development. This leadership conference, facilitated by experienced higher education leaders, provides you with a set of tools for applying the key tenets of successful and equitable leadership. You’ll practice how to approach difficult and complex conversations through healthy and constructive dialogue so that you can increase trust, motivation, and engagement within your team. You will also gain the confidence and skills needed to become a more effective leader in higher education, rooted in both a deeper awareness of your core purpose as a leader and in your commitment to equity.
Highlights of the program include:
- Tips and Strategies from Our Expert Instructors: You’ll have the opportunity to practice the new skills you are learning alongside others in your cohort.
- Leadership Assessments: Through Academic Impressions’ Five Paths to Leadership℠ Self-Assessment, the Kraybill Conflict Style Inventory, as well as through group discussions, you’ll discover how you show up as a leader in both typical circumstances and under stress.
- Peer Connections: You will have the opportunity to develop a network of practitioners to learn beside and dialogue with during our conference, and beyond.
- Leadership Capstone: During our final conference session, you will share your leadership philosophy, as well as your commitments for the next steps in your leadership development.
Who Should Attend
This conference is highly beneficial for new or aspiring leaders who are:
- In the early stages of a university or college leadership position.
- Established in a leadership position but lacking formal leadership training.
- Seeking a training experience that allows for intentional practice and reflection on leadership skills.
Agenda
Your registration fee includes full access to all conference sessions and materials, breakfast, lunch, and access to the networking reception on Monday, breakfast on Tuesday, as well as refreshments and snacks throughout the conference.
Day 1
Understanding Your Core Purpose as a Leader
To be an effective leader, you must first know what calls you to leadership. A deep understanding of your purpose, values, and beliefs is critical for self-aware and effective leadership. In this session, we’ll work through various activities to help you to detect and refine your core purpose and values, which will effectively become both the north star and anchor of your leadership approach.
Defining Your Leadership Strengths
We will dive right into The Five Paths to Leadership℠ Assessment to identify your strengths. The Five Paths to Leadership℠ Assessment will help you to understand ways of achieving greater balance among five forms of intelligence so that you can improve your overall effectiveness as a leader. This assessment will ask you to assess your own leadership style under “normal” circumstances as well as under “stressful” ones. In order to get the most out of this session, we ask that you please complete a Five Paths to Leadership℠ Self-Assessment prior to your arrival to the conference.
Inclusive Leadership
In addition to impacting your core purpose and values, how you identify along a range of social identities (such as gender, race, age, sexual identity, etc.) also affects how you view yourself, as well as how others perceive you as a leader. In this session, we will unpack how those identities impact power dynamics and define equitable leadership, and we will also practice embodying equitable leadership.
Creating Equitable and Inclusive Spaces and Environments
We’ll begin this session by helping you to discover how your personal identity shapes the spaces you hold and the environments you help to create. We will practice critical communication skills (e.g., deep listening, genuine question probing, and suspending assumptions and judgments) in order to foster equitable and inclusive collaboration in a group setting. We will wrap up this session by identifying how to choose accountability partners who will provide honest feedback about the environments you create.
Networking Reception (included in registration fee)
This informal reception is your chance to decompress at the end of a long Day One, have some refreshments on us, and continue expanding your network of connections. Our programs are intentionally designed for smaller groups, so this is a great time to catch up with the speakers and other attendees with whom you may not have connected yet throughout the day.
Day 2
Navigating Conflict
In order to facilitate productive conflict within teams, it is essential that you first understand your own feelings and assumptions related to conflict. Using the Kraybill Conflict Style Inventory, we will unpack ways to approach conflict in different situations to build a resilient team.
The Coaching Leader
All too often, leaders will take action to resolve issues for their team members instead of empowering them to identify their own solutions. More than ever, leaders therefore need to know how to support team members where they are, and to coach them in individual ways to bring out their best for the betterment of the individual and the team.
Leadership Capstone
During our final conference session, you will share your leadership philosophy and commitments for the next steps in your leadership development. You will walk out with articulated next steps, a time frame for action, and ways to keep yourself accountable to continue this work.