Managing Difficult Faculty and Staff

Difficult people rob us of our time, energy and well-being. They can undermine the health and effectiveness of an entire department. It has to stop! This workshop takes you through a four-step process of managing chronically-difficult faculty and staff, including underperformers, bullies, no-shows, trouble-makers and other types. The presentation includes specific tasks and language to use as well as practice exercises to help you develop your skills.

Challenging Conversations & Radical Candor

This workshop introduces the concept of “radical candor” as a communication device that is necessary, kind, and effective. Radical candor clarifies why conflict avoidance undermines performance and collaboration. We apply radical candor to a series of difficult- conversation prototypes. We role-play conversations between supervisors and subordinates and between peers. Participants leave with language and skills to begin addressing those conversations they've been avoiding.

The Balancing Acts of Academic Leadership

Embrace your role as a leader! This workshop delves into what it means to be a leader and the series of balancing acts that a chair must continually manage, e.g.,

• Am I a boss or a colleague?
• Am I faculty or administration?
• Do I focus on the day-to-day or the long-term?
• Which decisions are mine and which should go to a department vote?

The workshop then helps you tailor your leadership approach to the problem or issue at hand.

Building and Sustaining a Healthy Department Culture

A healthy academic department is defined by inclusive communication, transparent decision making, and equitable sharing of responsibilities and rewards. Members feel part of a community who values them. The department chair is the most important individual in developing and nurturing a healthy department culture. No dysfunctional department can improve without a chair willing to take on the role of change agent. This workshop aims to support department chairs in this challenging and important work. It includes presentation, role-plays, and small-group work.

The Department Chair’s Essential Duties

This workshop covers the major duties of a department chair, including:

• Daily Task Management – chairs ensure and directs the smooth operation of the department
• Personnel management – chairs are departments’ leaders of people, which requires a mix of management, role-modeling, mentorship and formal evaluation
• Membership in the College/School and University leadership teams – chairs are critical members of the broader units’ leadership

Building and Executing an Effective Faculty and Staff Evaluation System

Chairs often self-identify more as peers than as leaders and are therefore reluctant to exercise their evaluative role. This workshop helps you build a robust evaluation system that interfaces with the University's established practices. It introduces strategies to overcome the many challenges to effective evaluation. The session includes practice opportunities and case studies.

Leading and Influencing with the Professional Relationship Account

This session introduces the “professional relationship account” as a means to grow your influence with those below, beside, and above you in the institutional hierarchy. We discuss the difference between power and influence and examine the multiple opportunities for individuals to grow their influence no matter where they sit in the power structure. The workshop also introduces key skills for growing your influence with those who report to you and those to whom you report. Each participant begins a plan to grow his/her professional relationship account.

Strategic Thinking and Planning

This session introduces what strategic thinking is, what it is not, and why “strategic planning” is so important despite its bad reputation among academics. The session engages chairs in a proactive exercise aimed at building a strategic department culture and examines questions including:

• How do I engage faculty in this exercise?
• What is my role as a leader in this process?
• How do we “think big” and creatively without being unrealistic?
• How do we leverage our department’s strengths with those of the College and University?

Daring to Disagree: Building a Culture of Dissent to Enhance your Institutional Effectiveness

Dissent enhances effective decision-making. Disagreement, skepticism and questions help teams evaluate issues from all angles and avoid potentially disastrous mistakes. Yet, most workplaces discourage dissent, relying instead on hierarchies that inhibit people from speaking up. This workshop introduces dissent as a critical part of team effectiveness and describes how to build a culture that encourages genuine exchange among team members, including staff and faculty at all ranks and categories.

Career Mapping for Academic Leadership

This session engages you in an exercise designed to imagine and plan for different career paths you may take in and beyond higher-ed. It includes identifying the skills sets, costs and benefits associated with each path and maps out a trajectory that you can follow to achieve career and personal goals.

Time and Task Management: How to Handle Competing Priorities and Stay Emotionally Healthy

Academic leaders could easily fill 12-hour days with work and still have items left on their to-do list at the end of the week. This workshop introduces five steps to help you manage your time, prioritize appropriately, delegate effectively and preserve enough time and energy for your personal life.

The Department Chair’s Essential Duties

This workshop covers the major duties of a department chair, including:

• Daily Task Management – chairs ensure and directs the smooth operation of the department
• Personnel management – chairs are departments’ leaders of people, which requires a mix of management, role-modeling, mentorship and formal evaluation
• Membership in the College/School and University leadership teams – chairs are critical members of the broader units’ leadership