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Keeping You Informed

Helping Your People Embrace Change
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

Helping Your People Embrace Change

People don’t have a problem with change; they have a problem with the uncertainty it creates. Change forces us not only to recognize that we can’t rest in our comfort zone, but that we need to confront the fact that we might not be able to look forward sufficiently to see where we will land. Let’s explore three common reactions to change in the workplace.

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Five Steps to Effectively Facilitating a Group
Pete Wright Pete Wright

Five Steps to Effectively Facilitating a Group

Want to transform your meetings from time-wasters to productive powerhouses? Discover the five essential elements that can elevate your facilitation skills and engage your audience like never before. Learn to unlock the secrets of effective facilitation and take your group discussions to the next level.

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A Bias Toward Action
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

A Bias Toward Action

What is a bias toward action? It’s moving quickly on an idea with a recognition that there is never enough information to guarantee success. It’s making time for conversation and, when the time is right, declaring the conversation to be over. It’s leadership delegating authority to someone who will pull the lever and begin the work.

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Innovation as a Social Practice: The Art of Making Offers
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

Innovation as a Social Practice: The Art of Making Offers

Social practices can also be applied to innovation. Across organizations, individuals are responsible for taking care of concerns and bringing awareness to problems that affect how work gets done. Recognizing these inefficiencies, however, is not the same as addressing them. In order to bring new ideas into being, consider the action of making offers.

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Exercising Power in Higher Education Leadership
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

Exercising Power in Higher Education Leadership

Leadership is about exercising power, but not as force or domination. We increase our personal power by engaging authentically with others in the mission while exercising the authority we’ve been granted to improve outcomes. What allows some to lean in and make unpopular decisions?

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Repairing Trust
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

Repairing Trust

A complaint is simply a manifestation of unresolved dissatisfaction that lingers over time. Each one of us has experienced this at work as well as in our personal lives. One way to address a complaint is to name your concern and turn it into a request.

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Breaking Down Silos; It's Not Rocket Science
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

Breaking Down Silos; It's Not Rocket Science

Colleges and universities, corporations, local government — pick any organization with two or more departments — have got a silo problem. What would have to change to tear down these artificially constructed walls that create misunderstandings, gaps in communication, all leading to rampant inefficiencies?

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Navigating Shared Governance
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

Navigating Shared Governance

Shared governance is the decision-making model that guides leaders across all higher education institutions. There is much written about this model of authority being delegated from the board to administration, and then from administration to the academy. In a perfect world, the Board oversees and guides, the administration develops tangible strategies to fund and execute, and the academy provides the intellectual rigor and evidence that validates the strategy.

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Leading Culture Change
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

Leading Culture Change

Culture is your greatest strength and greatest weakness. When leaders put new processes, systems or structures in place, the reaction is often some form of resistance. Your people do not have a problem with change, they have a problem with uncertainty.

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Teams that Focus on Results
Newsletter Pete Wright Newsletter Pete Wright

Teams that Focus on Results

What is Patrick Lencioni's major premise on how groups develop into high-performing teams? In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, it comes down to five qualities that people bring to group dynamics: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and a focus on results. When these qualities are present, groups are able to accomplish extraordinary things. In the absence of these qualities, groups become mired in personality and political distractions that take away from achieving their goals.

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Conducting a Difficult Conversation
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

Conducting a Difficult Conversation

Anticipating a difficult conversation in your education institution can be challenging, uncomfortable, and anxiety-provoking. Whether it's delivering bad news, addressing a sensitive issue, or confronting a direct report about their behavior, there are practices you can build to increase your confidence and produce the result you’re looking for.

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A Voice, A Vote, or A Veto
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

A Voice, A Vote, or A Veto

Campus leaders explain how a shared governance process can achieve genuine buy-in among decision makers, resulting in innovative strategies for both academic and administrative efforts.

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Becoming a Resilient Listener and Speaker
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

Becoming a Resilient Listener and Speaker

The workplace is full of opinions. When one is expressed, others react with automatic responses (I like, I dislike, I agree, or I disagree). Then counter-opinions are given. We learn nothing from these exchanges except who is good at dominating others.

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Shifting from Power to Collaboration: Realizing the Vision of Shared Governance
Elise Kietzmann Elise Kietzmann

Shifting from Power to Collaboration: Realizing the Vision of Shared Governance

Missing in the literature on shared governance is a recognition that in the absence of collaboration, these groups execute by power over people or activities. Breakdowns of trust, lack of transparency, or an incomplete understanding of roles end up driving boards, administrators, and academics to act in unproductive manners.

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Practicing Resiliency
Pete Wright Pete Wright

Practicing Resiliency

As we approach the spring of 2022, we face another period of uncertainty. What if we could transport ourselves into the future and discover this uncertainty only increased over time?

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Pete Wright Pete Wright

Looking Beyond the Enrollment Cliff

While this past year has been one of the most difficult in the history of higher education, there is beginning to be a growing light at the end of the tunnel. The emergence of the COVID-19 vaccine has brought a renewed sense of optimism. University leaders around the country are planning for a majority of their students to be vaccinated by the end of the summer or earlier, and fully reopening their campuses come fall.

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Guest User Guest User

Webinar: The Future of Higher Education and Leading through a Crisis

Teibel Education’s President Howard Teibel; Rutgers University Executive Vice President — Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer Michael Gower; and University of Colorado Boulder Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Russell Moore have a Webinar discussion on the Future of Higher Education and the roles we can play to navigate through this crisis.

COVID is a revealer of and accelerant of how we need to change as institutions. Academics, administrators, and boards need a new framework to meet these challenges as we look out over the horizon.

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