Senior Leaders Institute Sessions

Effective leadership becomes crucial in higher education in times of challenge and uncertainty. Leaders must embrace core elements of leadership to navigate conflicts and steer their institutions toward recovery and success. This session delves into leadership strategies by examining the experiences of two higher-ed leaders with diverse backgrounds, including government and military expertise. They will share an innovative decision-making model designed to navigate conflict effectively by considering the leader's role, the context, and the situation.

By the end of this session, participants will be equipped with a robust decision-making model that helps them effectively navigate conflicts in higher education settings. They will gain practical insights and engage in meaningful exercises that align the model with their unique leadership visions, ultimately fostering resilience and recovery in their institutions.

Navigating complex change with sensitivity to people and culture requires flexibility, leadership resilience, personal energy, and political capital. As leaders work to strategically position our institutions in a tumultuous higher education landscape, the call remains to care for ourselves and our teams as we stand in service to students. These three leaders will explore tools and strategies for bringing a campus culture through change, underpinned by case stories as diverse as the optimization of academic and administrative units at multiple universities, the integration of two linked but separate institutions, and oversight for a rapidly-evolving 70,000+ student community college district.

Today’s higher education leaders are increasingly called to exemplify authentic and collaborative leadership and to facilitate the deep work of transformative change. How might embodiment and critical thinking aid academic leaders in navigating high stakes contexts, and persevere in transforming systems that impede equitable progress, curtail open dialogue, or hinder thinking and decision making? This interactive session engages participants in realistic and relatable case studies informed by the pressing issues and novel problems that higher education leaders are grappling with on today’s college campuses. Participants will have the opportunity to discover and to understand their own thinking mindset, practice critical and reflective thinking, and explore embodiment techniques that work for individuals and teams at all levels of an organization.

Whether participants are considering a career move in the near term or may look to take a next step in the future, this session will elevate the ability of senior leaders to advance in executive roles. Participants will delve into career mapping and gain a comprehensive understanding of the executive search process. The session aims to equip attendees with the knowledge of best practices in executive search, including:

• Creating a Strong Application Package: Learn how to craft a compelling application that stands out to search committees and the hiring authority.
• Preparing for Semi-Finalist Interviews: Gain insights into the semi-finalist interview stage. Discover techniques for demonstrating your suitability for the position, along with tips for articulating your leadership style.
• Finalist Campus Visits: Understand what to expect and how to best prepare for campus visits as a finalist candidate. We’ll cover what to expect during these visits, how to interact with various stakeholders, and the best ways to leave a lasting positive impression.
• Contract Negotiations: Understand the critical elements of contract negotiations.
• Transition Planning: Once you've accepted a new position, the next step is to develop a transition plan. This session will highlight the importance of a well-thought-out transition strategy to ensure a smooth changeover and continued success in your new role.
• The Importance of Executive Coaching: Learn about the role of executive coaching in fostering professional growth and leadership development.

Women and gender diverse individuals, and particularly women of color and those who identify as LGBTQ+, have faced inequities in academic leadership for decades (Bilimoria & Stewart, 2014; Johnson, 2016) and the disproportionate weight placed on these groups has only been exacerbated in recent years (Gonzalez & Griffin, 2020). Providing intentional support for these individuals is necessary if we are to build a valuable and equitable future for academia. This session will focus on both why peer networks are valuable for collaboration and intentional leadership and how to build, sustain, and prioritize them as leaders who support other women and gender diverse individuals.

Peer networks have been shown to enhance agency for women and gender-diverse professionals at all ranks in academia, and can be especially valuable for historically marginalized groups, including women of color and non-tenure track faculty (O’Meara et al., 2019; Templeton & O’Meara, 2018). They have also been shown to serve as ‘third spaces’ outside of home and work where individuals can process challenges (O’Meara et al., 2019). Understanding the value of peer networks as third spaces and how women and gender-diverse leaders can build and sustain these networks as a form of support is thus an important endeavor. This session will explore the benefits of internal and external peer networks for women in academic leadership as spaces to thrive, consider challenges facing higher education, and support the well-being of historically marginalized faculty and staff. The presenters will also discuss specific strategies for intentionally building peer networks with examples from organizations focused on supporting academic leaders in practice.

Higher education needs leaders who build and illuminate new spaces rather than reproduce the status quo. Further, we need systems that are reconfigured to support that transformational leadership.

Within this keynote address, Dr. Riddell will invite us to imagine educational structures as “hope circuits,” places that accommodate wonder, curiosity, and new ways of knowing and being. She will encourage us, as leaders, to re-wire our mindsets, perspectives, and behaviors, to, in turn, re-wire and renew the educational systems within which we learn, live, work, and lead. She will provide conceptual tools to help us rethink higher education systems for the better by creatively putting university-design theory into practice. These conceptual tools engender local, embodied, and embedded solutions to some of the academy's most pressing issues.