More details about the timing of the days can be found by clicking Learn More and Register, but session descriptions of the two days are below:  

Understanding Your Leadership Approach: The Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment 
Self-awareness is at the heart of effective leadership. We'll guide you through The Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment, which allows you to understand your strengths and natural tendencies when it comes to your leadership. The assessment can be helpful in deepening self-awareness as well as in helping you adapt your style to meet the needs of others, including administrative staff, faculty, chairs and provosts.  

Leading with Impact: Mastering Communication Strategies as a Dean  
Effective communication is necessary for successful leadership. In this session, we'll explore the critical elements of developing a personalized communication style and strategy to lead with clarity, influence, and empathy. You'll gain insights into how to communicate with faculty, staff, students, and external stakeholders, balancing authority with approachability.  By the end of the session, you'll have strategies to enhance your communication skills, foster trust, and create a positive culture. 

Exploring the Landscape of Conflict and Strategies for Success 
As academic leaders, Deans are often at the center of various types of conflict—whether between faculty, students, staff, or within administrative teams. We'll explore the different types of conflict Deans commonly encounter in higher education settings, including interpersonal, organizational, and strategic conflicts. Through case studies and interactive discussions, you'll gain proven strategies for managing and resolving these conflicts in a way that fosters collaboration, maintains morale, and upholds institutional values. You'll leave with practical tools to address conflict proactively, creating a more cohesive and productive academic environment.  

Fix the System, Not the People: Smarter Structures for Academic Leadership  
In this session, we’ll explore how academic leaders can escape the trap of reactive leadership by designing systems that work for them, not against them. From reducing email chaos and clarifying committee work, to improving faculty evaluations, onboarding, advising, and budgeting—better systems can eliminate recurring problems and free up your time for strategic thinking, innovation, and relationship-building. You’ll leave with practical tools, real-world examples, and a framework for identifying where your systems break down—and how to fix them for good. 

“What’s Keeping Deans Up at Night?” Moderated Speaker Panel  
To close our first day, we’ll assemble our speaker team to engage in a moderated panel discussion framed around the question, “what’s keeping Deans up at night?” We'll crowdsource topics from the group ahead of time to ensure the conversation is both focused and relevant. 

Courageous Leadership from the Middle  
As a Dean, you experience pressure from—and have accountability to—stakeholders in all directions: your peers, your Provost (and by extension, your institution), and the faculty and staff you lead. This has important implications for how you must build trust, communicate, and influence others. In this session, we’ll explore why this can be challenging, some of these unique pressures as they pertain to the Dean role, and offer corresponding tools and strategies.  

Leading Change through Collaboration  
In this session, we'll explore the benefits of collaborative leadership and how it can be used to enhance decision-making, problem-solving, and innovation. Specifically, we’ll explore the role of collaborative leadership in leading change, building effective communication, and strengthening trust and teamwork. 

Empowering Your Team: What Your Chairs and Staff Want You to Know  
Your charge as Dean is to build a productive and happy work culture. But you can’t do that alone. Your team, which includes both your department chairs and your staff, play a vital role in realizing this goal, so it’s important that you empower them to do their work effectively. And it’s also important you create the conditions that allow them to be successful. In this session, we’ll highlight some of the common feedback and insights we’ve learned from working with thousands of deans and their teams over the years.   

Bringing It All Together  
As we bring the two-day program to a close, we’ll recap key insights gained during the conference, and you’ll identify specific actions you can apply to your everyday leadership choices when you return to campus.