Strategies to Create or Implement New Initiatives



















18. Pose alternative interpretations, not corrections.

19. Actively connect people with like-minded goals.



22. Identify and involve champions for the cause.





27. Welcome new or even unanticipated participants or contributors.



30. Focus on other people’s strengths, never inadequacies.


32. Treat every communication with others as special.


34. Publicly celebrate even small accomplishments.


36. Use all assessments as a means to make improvements.



Fifteen Suggestions for Developing a Successful Immersion Program

What does an immersion program look like?








Here are fifteen suggestions for developing a successful immersion program:






6. Create a relevant ice-breaker activity.

7. Incorporate a relevant team project into the experience.



10. Invite diverse, but relevant contributors.




14. Require a project presentation before an esteemed audience.


Advice for Developing Leadership Skills and Opportunities

The following four strategies and fourteen skills should help any faculty member achieve a rewarding life of leadership.

Increase your visibility. Most campuses offer plenty of opportunities for faculty to venture beyond their departments. Join the faculty senate. Request assignments that require you to meet cross-campus colleagues. Apply for inter-departmental professional-development programs. Volunteer to help with campus-wide events. Diversify friendships and stay visible.

Identify role models and learn from them. Certain people demonstrate admirable skills, behaviors, or attitudes that warrant careful study or even selective emulation. Buy them coffee. Socialize with them. Learn from them. If they’re historical figures, read about them. Never under-appreciate life’s many models for success.

Assume challenging, but not overwhelming responsibilities. Specifically, seek responsibilities that encourage you to read about and develop the following fourteen skills:

1. time-management skills: leaders organize their complex schedules to decrease strains on their working memories and increase their workflows, with scheduled times to reflect.

2. stress-management skills: leaders first and foremost apply intentional strategies to reduce the likelihood of stress on the front end, scan for early warning signs, and then have tactics ready to lower stress in the moment.

3. interpersonal skills: leaders interact positively with others, even when disagreeing with what they say.

4. listening skills: leaders go out of their way to truly understand what others need and want.

5. collaborative skills: leaders ensure everyone has a voice, role, and stake by appreciating differences and emphasizing commonalities in pursuit of co-authorship.

6. teamwork skills: leaders utilize their personal strengths to complement the strengths of others.

7. motivational skills: leaders interpret others’ motives and harness their vision by appropriating their language and values when articulating project or organizational goals.

8. conflict-management skills: leaders manage the conflicts that can yield positive changes and either mediate unproductive conflicts or coordinate more productive arrangements.

9. mentorship skills: leaders help others develop and reach their goals.

10. ceremonial speaking skills: whereas not all leaders give speeches, most routinely introduce others and say a few poignant words in public settings.

11. research skills: leaders investigate pre-existing models and other points of comparison, as well as the project’s history, context, stakeholders, and their needs and concerns.

12. project-management skills: leaders organize long-term responsibilities into clear stages, processes, benchmarks, and deadlines with equally clear communication structures and scheduled updates.

13. budget-management skills

14. fundraising skills

The first nine skills do not require a formal position to acquire or use, and they can help you access opportunities to develop the rest. They are the foundation for success.

Venture out, to bring more in. Leadership opportunities and their many intrinsic rewards extend far beyond campus. They are in your disciplinary fields and local, regional, state, national, and global communities. Moreover, off-campus connections and insights can broaden your range of problem-solving skills and resources on campus. They make you a more knowledgeable and skilled resource to the university.

The success of the students, campus, and community depends on your success. Improving yourself improves the lives connected to you. Take the time to be the best you can be — for you, for them, for everybody.

Unbundling Higher Ed: An Insider’s Perspective





























Perception Management in the Campus Workplace

Higher education thrives on debate. Faculty and staff have diverse expertise, and the resulting conflicts force campus representatives to reevaluate their positions and develop broader frameworks for their actions. In the end, different understandings yield stronger operations and more effective services. Ultimately, interpretive differences strengthen an institution.

University employees who assert opposition, however, run the risk of not only making enemies, but also sabotaging their career opportunities. Far too often, I encounter faculty and staff who have irked enough colleagues that their careers hit walls. These employees routinely offer their services, but no one takes them up on their offers. They apply for administrative positions, but they go nowhere.

Faculty and staff have to manage how their colleagues perceive them. But perception management does not mean avoiding conflict. The university system depends too much on conflict for its employees to avoid it. Instead, perception management means offering a different perspective without others feeling attacked.

How do you do that?

1) Provide sufficient opportunities for others to speak. Many refuse to interrupt when they can’t find significant pauses or other conversational cues. They need opportunities to enter the conversation gracefully. Also, people process information differently. Whereas some process verbally — that is, by discussing — and jump quickly into conversations, others mull-over new information or translate it into a more familiar framework before responding. They need more time. A simple solution would be to ask periodically for others’ thoughts or questions and to sit back quietly until they finish responding.

2) Acknowledge what others say. Simply rephrasing others’ statements before developing or changing a topic can improve the social dynamic. So too can validating others by openly appreciating their ideas.

3) Help develop ideas before arguing against them. Arguing about minutiae kills ideas before they develop, and nobody likes a serial idea killer. Instead of starting with why not, first explore how to.

4) Smile and laugh. Smiles and laughter are contagious and feel good. If you want to promote positive feelings about you, then you have to promote positive feelings while people are around you, especially during disagreements.

5) Focus on people’s strengths. In higher education, we work with the same colleagues for decades. In an environment where so many people can’t get fired, finding fault with others gets old fast.  Search for positive characteristics in every single one of them, or risk a lifetime of a hostile work environment.

Many of us have advanced degrees in fierce autonomy and contentiousness. Professionally, we identify flaws and propose alternatives. Those are our strengths. Those are our institutions’ strengths. Ironically, the very characteristics that strengthen the institution can weaken its sense of community. Our professional strengths can cripple our careers.

These five simple tactics can help us manage our colleagues’ perceptions of us. They allow us to provide alternative perspectives without others feeling attacked. They synchronize both professional and institutional success.

Higher Ed Faces Daunting Challenges, and Opportunities


Higher education faces daunting challenges. It struggles to meet the demands of an economic crisis in which people need jobs and employers want higher-quality job candidates. Our computer-infused work environment requires greater technological, visual-thinking, and critical-thinking skills for even entry-level jobs. Globalization necessitates not only enhanced critical thinking, but correspondingly, the capacity for sustained engagements with ideological and cultural differences. Also, both citizenry and a growing number of work environments require the skills to navigate an increasingly rhetoric- and statistics-based world. In the face of rising student debt, students and their parents, legislators, and potential employers, however, now question the value of higher education. They most overtly question degrees in the humanities — which foster many of those skills, only without a clear career path. This conflict has resulted in new entrants in the market who then compete with at least the public colleges and universities, which have had to raise tuition to replace diminishing state funds.

This conflict reinforces the ongoing transformation of faculty in the university system. Especially to circumvent administrative bloat and its costs, faculty have had to harbor more and more administrative responsibilities, part of a growing trend of reframing faculty as academic professionals with a growing number of non-teaching responsibilities. These responsibilities demand a new social architecture, and we can achieve it only through innovative professional development.

Social architecture has two goals: distribute responsibilities and “integrate diverse efforts in pursuit of common goals” (Bolman & Deal, 2013, p. 44). The social architecture of higher education effectively distributes responsibilities, but it also creates silos. In fact, the extreme specialization by which higher education distributes responsibilities also creates the silos. Compounding this problem, a myth of solitary genius betrays reality: knowledge and innovation are not individual pursuits, but rather the result of collective practices. Extreme specialization and its resulting isolation permeate the culture of higher education and impede integrative initiatives that can facilitate common goals. To meet the demands of today’s challenges, the social architecture of higher education needs reform.

Higher education needs more diverse partnerships and collaborations. Whether in teaching, problem-solving, or creating new ventures, partnerships and collaborations diversify knowledge and expertise; expand the available human, technological, spatial, or financial resources; and distribute and diminish risks (Eddy, 2010, p. 21). Partnerships and collaborations can conserve resources, mend overextended departments, and improve sustainability and effectiveness.

Far too often, however, university representatives confine collaborations to a single division, like Academic Affairs, rather than explore collaborative opportunities between university divisions or with community partners. Pedagogically, many faculty look only to each other, particularly within their own departments, for collaborators. For new initiatives, some turn solely to their chairs, deans, or the provost for funding. In the end, stretched human and financial resources limit success.

Campus stakeholders reside in all university divisions. Student Affairs houses an array of departments that focus on developing student capacities for time- and stress-management, personal health and wellbeing, diversity awareness and appreciation, civic engagement, global citizenry, teamwork, and leadership. Under the direction of Human Resources, student employment can expand the range of immediate stakeholders for student development and success to the entire university.

The call for collaborations between university divisions is not new. At least since George D. Kuh’s 1994 keynote, “The Student Learning Imperative: Implications for Student Affairs,” student-affairs professionals have called for student- and academic-affairs collaborations that can produce what Kuh (March/April, 1996) calls “seamless learning environments” (p. 135). The term refers to curricular and co-curricular learning objectives working in tandem to overcome an otherwise fragmented learning process in order to foster lifelong learning.

The more faculty and staff interact, the better they can get to know each other, overcome inter-departmental or -divisional communication barriers and misunderstandings, foster a greater sense of campus community, collaborate, share knowledge and resources, innovate …. With shared imagination and support, a university’s faculty and staff can accomplish anything.

But partnerships and collaborations have to extend beyond the campus. The surrounding community also has a stake. The educational attainment of local citizenry can attract national employers, raise the competitiveness of local businesses, increase local tax revenue, improve community problem-solving skills, and in general expand both the pool and circulation of available resources. Imaginative administrators, faculty, and staff can identify and raise the awareness of potential stakeholders, collaborate with them, harness their vision, and empower, motivate, and mobilize community champions for student success.

Each university digs deep channels into the community that ferry students, workers, funding, and other resources back and forth for mutual sustainability and growth. Service-learning has enabled universities to formally explore, beyond internships, how to expand educational oversight and credit to community practices, but that and other integrative concepts need greater exploration. The university system’s further integration with the community can only benefit both it and the community.

Even to develop the skills and venues for partnerships, collaborations, and intentional explorations, faculty and staff and even community partners need innovative professional development. Differences in reward systems, norms for communications, reporting and authorization structures, and organizational objectives can convolute the incentives, decision-making process, documentation and assessment process, and expectations. Research indicates, on the one hand, that obligatory partnerships do not last past their mandates; on the other hand, partnerships that spring organically from pre-existing relationships foster mutual understanding, shared expectations, and more sustainable practices (Eddy, 2010, p. 21). After those human relationships yield collaborations, offices or personnel who maintain relationships with partnering organizations can nurture them and develop organizational bridges. But the human element has to happen first.

Here at Austin Peay State University, the Faculty Leadership Program (FLP) fosters campus interactions that can lead to student, faculty, and institutional success, and we’re expanding its framework to integrate faculty and staff through a Women’s Leadership Program (WLP). Unlike other universities’ leadership-development opportunities, the FLP and WLP do not cater to administrators. They do not support “leadership” as an official position. Nor do they promote campus success as a managerial responsibility.

Instead, the FLP and WLP promote leadership from the ranks. Adrianna Kezar (2001) reminds us that anyone, regardless of position, can serve as a change agent (p. 7). Through wide and deep personal networks, any individual can draw from diverse resources and knowledge to solve problems and develop campus innovations (Eddy, 2010, p. 29). At very least, a person can serve as a “node to connect disparate networks” (p. 64) in problem-solving and innovation.

Wide and deep personal networks expand personal awareness and influence. Diverse relationships enhance a person’s “cognitive flexibility” in an academically and operationally complex environment (p. 30). Close relationships improve that person’s influence in leveraging changes. A campus of change agents has the power to transform and strengthen the university, but it demands heightened faculty and staff awareness and interconnectivity.

Leadership from the ranks also responds more effectively than administrative managerialism does to external calls for change. Faculty and staff agency enables the “flexibility and adaptability that are particularly important in meeting external demands” (Kezar et al., 2006, p. 111), like those imposed by disruptive technologies, changes to the state funding formula, rising tuition during an economic downturn, social calls for increased accountability, decreased availability of state and federal grants, and the increased role of private donors, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Educause, Complete College America, educational entrepreneurs …. The current climate demands heightened individual awareness and collective adaptability.

So long as state contributions fail to meet budgetary shortfalls, let alone continue to shrink, the public university system will need dynamic faculty and staff who can lead rapid changes in response to powerful external pressures, particularly those tied to monetary incentives. In an environment where only consistent, large-scale change initiatives can attract the funding for even essential university operations, strong faculty and staff leadership can shield students from harmful trends while developing and implementing bold practices that truly lead to student, institutional, and community success.





Bolman, L. G. & Deal, T. E. (2013). Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, & Leadership; Fifth Ed. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Eddy, P. L. (2010). Partnerships and Collaborations in Higher Education. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

Kezar, A. J. (2001). Understanding and Facilitating Organizational Change in the 21st Century: Recent Research and Conceptualizations. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Kezar, A. J.; Carducci, Rozana; & Contreras-McGavin, Melissa. (2006). Rethinking the “L” Word in Higher Education. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Kuh, G. D. (February, 1996). The Student Learning Imperative: Implications for Student Affairs. Retrieved from

Kuh, G. D. (March/April, 1996). Guiding Principles for Creating Seamless Learning Environments for Undergraduates. Retrieved from