News

Five Things Department Chairs Need to Know About Fundraising

According to a January 2010 Academic Impressions survey of department chairs, 64 percent of department chairs felt that they were not adequately prepared to assume the role when they first began chairing their department. And of the various duties and responsibilities of the academic chair, 43 percent felt least prepared to address advancement and fundraising […]

Four Tips for Managing the Brand Launch

June 9, 2011. Competition for visibility continues to pressure institutions of higher education to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. In order to stay competitive, maintain enrollment levels, and meet advancement goals, your institution needs a unique brand strategy that carefully defines who you are in the minds of stakeholders. Often, though, marketing professionals and institutional leaders […]

Make Your Alumni Board Effective

June 9, 2011. During a series of interviews with leaders in alumni relations earlier this year, Academic Impressions found that many alumni relations offices are struggling with their alumni boards or alumni association boards. While a working board can offer institutional leaders partners to aid in achieving institutional goals for engagement and giving, most boards are […]

Meeting Adaptive Challenges: The New Leadership Skill Set

  NOTE: For an updated and much deeper look at new leadership skills in higher education, based on years of intensive research, read this complimentary paper from Academic Impressions and Pat Sanaghan. To define the leadership skill set needed to meet adaptive challenges, we turned to Larry Goldstein, president of Campus Strategies LLC, and Pat […]

Building an In-House Leadership Development Program

Once you have clarity on the leadership skill sets your institution is seeking — and a commitment to look beyond the “usual suspects” when identifying future leaders — the next challenges involve offering meaningful opportunities for your institution’s “stylistic invisibles” to become visible and providing an intentional and deliberate process for developing your high-potentials as future leaders. There […]

Rethinking Higher Education’s Leadership Crisis

America’s higher education enterprise is facing multiple challenges — increasing demands from students and government; changing demographics; structural fiscal challenges; and technologies that are disrupting how information and education is delivered. Not to mention an aging workforce and an uneven track record for developing leaders. Without investing in identifying and developing the right talent at […]

Identifying Leadership Potential in Your Staff

Once you have identified the skills that are essential in tomorrow’s higher ed leaders, you will need ways to identify the staff within your institution who demonstrate those skills — these are the people whose leadership development you want to invest in, and whom you want to entrust with greater responsibilities and opportunities to contribute meaningfully […]

Deepening Your Talent Bench: Horizontal Career Ladders

Historically, the pathway to the presidency in higher education has been through traditional academic ranks — tenured faculty or department chairs becoming a dean, and then later a provost. But as Academic Impressions president Amit Mrig notes, “the competencies required to ascend the academic hierarchy don’t necessarily match those required to lead increasingly complex organizations […]

Report: Developing Leaders in Higher Education

June 2011. Nearly one-half of higher-ed administrators gave their institution a C, D, or F letter grade when assessing their campus’s commitment to their development as a leader. Higher ed institutions are facing impending waves of retirement at all levels of the institution and across all sectors of our industry. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, […]

Locally Sourced Foods on Campus: Thinking Outside the Box

June 2, 2011. The University of Winnipeg has been praised in the media lately for a dramatic turnaround in the quality and profitability of their food services operation; Macleans’ 2009 University Rankings had taken the university to task for poor food and poor service, and the institution’s dining operation was seeing attrition in its student customers. In […]