One of the lessons learned by many academic leaders is that all the insight and guidance provided by management books written for the corporate world don’t really work very well in an academic setting. The ...
We live in a world of distraction. Technology bombards us with new information every second of the day, making it hard to focus on any one thing. Yet one of the most critical leadership skills ...
Over the last two decades there have been occasional conference presentations and articles in the higher education literature about collectives of academic department chairs that meet to discuss a variety of topics. These groups are ...
Strategic planning needs to be seen as a change process with a time horizon of three to five years. Anything less than three years is to be defined and acted upon through sensible budgeting. Anything ...
We can’t predict with certainty how changes in technology, student demographics, funding or government regulation will affect higher education institutions, but the need for certain leadership skills and traits will endure. In an interview with ...
In his role as vice president of learning and student success at John Tyler Community College, Bill Fiege faces a wide variety of issues—dealing with student concerns, allocating resources, and managing change. All issues have ...
Beginning a position as an academic leader can be challenging under any circumstances. But those challenges increase exponentially when you’re hired into an institution from the outside. You enter a world where nearly everyone knows ...
Last November, I gave an invited plenary session at the Lilly International Conference on College Teaching on how we transformed Sierra Nevada College (SNC) to embrace active learning, undergraduate research, and the scholarship of teaching. ...
An amazing metamorphosis sometimes affects academic leaders between the time they interview for the job and the time they begin their position. As candidates for the position, prospective administrators are usually overwhelmed by the quality ...
According to organizational life cycle theory, institutions and units within institutions progress through a sequence of stages—inception, growth, maturity, and decline or revitalization. Understanding the challenges specific to each stage can help leaders be more ...