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”!

Strategies to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion across advancement from hiring to employee engagement are essential tools for institutional leaders. In this session, we will define what belonging means in a team context and highlight how strong DEI practices contribute to a sense of belonging in your team. We will discuss how to use your position to create an environment that fosters belonging. You’ll learn how to evaluate and make change to policies and other systemic practices that hinder progress and what you can do to create a workplace that allows your employees to thrive.

This session is designed to build on the CliftonStrengths opening plenary. Now that you understand more about your strengths and how they apply to your work, this workshop will focus on defining your personal leadership brand. You’ll learn how to apply your strengths intentionally to enhance your capacity and effectiveness as a leader.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of highly engaged employees has decreased. Why do we care? Highly engaged teams outperform the rest in outcomes critical to the success of your organization. Salary and benefits account for most of our budgets, so our competitive edge is based on the success of our people. Research shows that engaged employees have higher productivity and wellbeing, better retention, and lower absenteeism yet we spent little as leaders engaging staff in meaningful ways. This session will explain the competencies important to employee engagement and share tools you can use immediately.

Advancement organizations are in a continuous state of change. Change Management is a complex field full of psychological studies and detailed research. Putting the research in to practice for your team is another thing entirely! Too much change management can have a negative effect, so striking the right balance between theory and deliverable actions is key to implementing change and achieving goals. In this presentation, we will introduce some of the key concepts but provide ‘Just Enough’ tools for you to manage and lead through change.

Advancement plays a strategic role to enable excellence at our institutions. Leaders are expected to have fluency around the business of advancement and engage in strategic conversations about using philanthropy to enable key institutional initiatives. This requires us to develop radical candor in our communications skills and learn how and when to say no for institutional and philanthropic sustainability. We will utilize role play and case studies that will give you the tools you need for informed engagement in these conversations at your institutions.

Over time, the quality of decision making plays a major role in defining the success of Development leaders. Just as they are in life, problem solving and decision making skill are important for managers and leaders to develop and refine, often through trial and error. In this session the presenters will share a framework for decision making for both complex and simple decisions that will help improve the quality of your approach to solving problems.

Some of the most effective leaders are also excellent at coaching their teams. Effective coaches empower and guide team members, creating partnerships built on trust, communication, and support, and create an environment where individuals can grow and thrive. Coaching also requires that you understand how to work with each of your team members to provide ongoing feedback and priority review, guide goal setting, and track progress. This session will review these and other key characteristics of workplace coaching to drive your team to outstanding performance.