An essential competency for leaders of any size Advancement program is the ability to form and lead high performing teams. From understanding your specific strengths, to creating a clear understanding of what success looks like, and navigating change today’s Advancement leaders must master the ability to get people wearing many different hats to work seamlessly across the organization. If it’s true that Advancement is the ultimate team sport, valuing the diversity of the team, coaching team members to achieve audacious goals, and ensuring organizational integrity is key to ensuring that your team is successful.

Strong and effective development leadership requires self-awareness and constant attention to assess and build skill-based competencies that will contribute to long-term success.  At the same time we are building a broad range of skills, we must also remember to create a clear personal leadership brand.  In this session faculty will help you understand how to interpret your CliftonStrengths® results and determine how your strengths are showing up in your current work and leadership style.

How many of us have spent months developing a detailed strategic plan, only to see it languish somewhere deep within our website, never to be looked at – until it’s time to develop a new one? This session will provide strong approaches to strategic planning to advance your vision, map directly to the goals of the university, and drive annual and campaign strategies. Central to our planning culture is a simple, but powerful concept – the commitment to a set of annual “Vital Few Goals.” This will be an interactive session, covering our own successes, challenges, lessons learned, and ideas to share about how you too can bring strategic planning to life, and make it both a visionary and practical tool to achieve success. Come learn how you can embrace strategic planning in your organization and “Live the Plan”!