Leadership in Advancement – The Solo Event in a Team Sport
10:30 AM - 2:00 PM EST
Speaker(s):
Fritz Schroeder, Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations, Johns Hopkins University
Topical Key Concepts
Concepts covered for understanding of a topic/mastery of a competency.
- Self-awareness
- Decision-making and Strategy Development – The Vision “Thing.”
- Team building and leveraging your team.
Topical Takeaways/Deliverables
Expectations for what should be learned from this session.
- Leadership is informed and empowered by self-awareness. It starts with you, your strengths and your potential blind spots. Part of being a successful leader is understanding yourself, your style and preferences, how you influence others, and how your own persona affects others. When you fully understand who you are, you can better understand how to lead others. You’ll understand positional power vs. true influence and leadership, and how the latter is more enduring and especially required in times of uncertainty. You’re not a leader if no one is following.
- People talk a lot about “strategy” but there’s a difference between strategic intent---what you say your organization is going to do---and strategy, which is where you invest your resources and what actually gets done. As a leader you have to make decisions both about the strategy and how to accomplish it. Resource allocation is a huge part of this – and your own time as a key resource.
- Management is about tasks and activities. Leadership is about people. Both are important, but as a leader the decisions you make about people and the support you give them are some of your most important decisions because you need to get things done through them. Putting together a great team and getting the best out of your team requires vision, insight and courage.
- Leadership is a journey, not a destination. It is a muscle that constantly needs work, effort, refinement and discipline. You’re never done as a leader, and you’re always working to stay on the varsity team. Great leaders in all industries seek input. They have coaches, mentors, networks of peers and a mindset of continuous learning.
- Your leadership is also about the values you signal to the organization. This concept is incredibly important today. Our organizations want to know of and see our passionate advocacy for equity and inclusion. Our organizations want to know that we recognize the individual struggles that the pandemic is bringing to the foreground. And as a leader, you must signal (and balance) a commitment to these values and bring a continued focus on doing this work in an unprecedented time
Topical Supporting/Additional Resources
Books, articles or videos that deepen/support the learning from this session.
- Campbell Leadership Descriptor Self Assessment. All participants complete this online assessment before December 2. Key highlights/insights about the group as a whole will be shared during the plenary and then some of the cohort discussion will be built around individual reflections on their reports.
- What Makes an Effective Executive, Peter Drucker in Harvard Business Review.
- The Focused Leader, Harvard Business Review.
Confirmed Panel
- Chris Clarke, Duke University
- Patti Hill Callahan, Ohio State University
- Kathryn Van Sickle, Columbia University