Student Leadership Library

TED Talks for Leaders Managing Remote Teams

Check out nine of the best TED Talks on challenges related to remote work and managing remote teams. Improve your communication, fight burnout, and strengthen connections.

The Sensitive Leader’s Guide To Managing A Remote Team

Being a leader is never easy, let alone during times of crisis. With the coronavirus pandemic, Sensitive Strivers across the nation and world are reckoning with a new reality: leading their teams from afar. Managing distributed employees might be completely new to you.

Tips for Emotionally Intelligent Managers of Remote Teams

As you lead a newly remote team through these uncertain times, you may need to rethink communication, deadlines, gossip, and forgiveness, for starters.

The New Dimensions of Workplace Wellbeing

A healthy, engaged and productive work environment starts with conversations about people’s needs. So whether you have always been on a co-located team or are a veteran of remote work, there are new circumstances and the old rulebook doesn’t quite help. The change has been sudden, in a sustained moment of uncertainty, and has disrupted employee routines and support structures.

Leadership Tips for Managing a (New) Remote Team

If you're suddenly managing your team remotely, these tips can help you communicate effectively, calm fears and keep your business running smoothly.

Strategies to Manage Your (Newly) Remote Employees

Effective remote working teams don’t just require the right technology—they require the right leadership. Prepared or not, you find yourself the manager of a fully remote team. It’s likely you have never worked 100%-remote, let alone managed a team in this setting. Add to that the overall unrest in the world, and this task can seem overwhelming and daunting.

Tips for Conducting a Seamless Video Job Interview

As companies around the globe make adjustments to prioritize the health and safety of their employees and communities amid coronavirus, many talent acquisition teams are reassessing how they conduct candidate interviews. In many cases, this means transitioning from in-person interviews to virtual ones.

Interviewing Strategies

Discover behavior-based interviewing designed to address the skills, expertise, and experience of candidates. Also called behavioral interviewing, it is built on the premise that past experience is the best predictor of future performance.

Developing Leaders

The ideal equipper is a person who can impart the vision of the work, evaluate the potential leader, give them the tools they need, and then help them along the way at the beginning of their journey. Consider 'mattering v. marginalizing' and a new paradigm for serving.

Dealing with Difficult People

Learn about essential communication and workplace skills for moving from conflict to cooperation. Strategize and review best practices.

Conflict and Alternative Dispute Resolution

Learn more about facilitating, or managing, conflict as a mechanism for individual and collective learning and change. Become familiar with conflict coaching, facilitated dialogue, mediation, and restorative justice.

Tips for Chairing Effective Meetings

Meetings can be an extremely efficient way to get things done quickly, to support building a team environment, and to enable collaboration among key people to produce a better outcome than possible working independently.

Lead Productive Meetings

1. Clearly define the objectives for yourself or the group if you are the person responsible for the meeting. To help you think through your objectives, ask yourself some key questions.
2. Learn how to get work done in meetings. By rethinking and changing the culture of meetings, they can move from being energy-sapping to energizing environments.

Robert's Rules: The Basics

Parliamentary procedure is the body of rules, ethics and customs governing meetings and other operations of clubs, organizations, legislative bodies and other deliberative assemblies. Learn more about Robert's Rules and how to fully engage during your meetings.

Setting SMART Goals | Intro to FAST Goals

1. Setting SMART goals means you can clarify your ideas, focus your efforts, use your time and resources productively, and increase your chances of achieving what you want in life.
2. To execute strategy (FAST), leaders must set ambitious targets, translate them into specific metrics and milestones, make them transparent throughout the organization, and discuss progress frequently.

Productivity | Habits of Highly Effective People

1. Develop your own system by applying some key steps to increase your productivity. From keeping to a routine to simplifying your project list, consider how you identify your most important tasks.
2. Habits are powerful forces in our lives. They determine our level of effectiveness or ineffectiveness. Consider an approach to being effective in attaining goals by aligning oneself with character ethic principles that are universal and timeless.

Assertiveness and Communication

1. The key is assertiveness: a worldview, behavior strategy, and set of techniques that enables its users to get more of what they want by acknowledging, respecting, and accommodating the needs and wants of others.
2. Dispel limiting beliefs by being clear about what you want and need while also recognizing your own value. Use these excercises to reflect upon the differences in passive, aggressive, and assertive communication.

Selecting a Support System

Most of us have a support system by default. Certain people have always been around and they automatically become the ones that we talk to. But, what if we put as much thought toward selecting our personal board as we would in selecting a corporate board?

Powerful Ideas for Building a First-Class Team

1. We must work collaboratively to utilize the collective talents of our campus stakeholders. And learning to build high performing teams is one of the most effective ways we can meet the many challenges that confront us.
2. What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter.

10 Articles Every Leader in Higher Ed Should Read

A list of key articles on leadership, curated by Patrick Sanaghan & Amit Mrig, from Academic Impressions.

Developing & Assessing Learning Outcomes

This brief guide provides an overview of the student learning outcomes (SLO) assessment cycle and presents a framework to use in order to improve student learning through evidence-based assessment and analysis. All who interact with students and desire to foster student learning can benefit from the methods and practices presented in this booklet.

Shared Governance

The key to genuine shared governance is broad and unending communication. When various groups of people are kept in the loop and understand what developments are occurring within the college, and when they are invited to participate as true partners, the institution prospers.

Expanding Your Circle of Influence

1. Based on 'Seven Habits' by Stephen Covey, this concept is crucial to anyone wishing to have greater impact on their world. No matter who you are or where you are located in your system, you have a circle of influence.
2. Learn about the five influencing styles, how to build influence, and how to be assertive.

On the Road to Champion

Deborah S. Willis gives advice for how to become a diversity, equity and inclusion leader.

Practice and Inclusion | Meaning and Action

1. Interpersonal practices to support inclusion require both a commitment to engage with another who may see the world in a way different from one’s own, and the capacity to do so. This paper discusses three frameworks that support interpersonal practices for inclusion—empathy, emotional and social intelligence, and mindfulness.
2. How does a leader engage others to create meaning and facilitate action? What are some methods that leaders can use to accomplish this task? How can leaders evaluate and develop skills in engagement and mean-making? One approach that has been used effectively in the field of therapy and organizational development comes from communication theory.

Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Ed

While highlighting the Obama Administration’s efforts to promote diversity in institutions of higher education, this report shows the continuing educational inequities and opportunity gaps in accessing and completing a quality postsecondary education.

Making Excellence Inclusive

Making Excellence Inclusive is AAC&U’s guiding principle for access, student success, and high-quality learning. It is designed to help colleges and universities integrate diversity, equity, and educational quality efforts into their missions and institutional operations.

Ways to Meaningfully Support Social Justice Movements

Getting involved in social justice can be overwhelming. There are so many causes you can get behind, varieties of movements, tricky vocabulary words and big names to know — and that can make it difficult to know where to start.

Social Justice or Sanctuary?

There are important intersections between social justice work and sanctuary, with youth expressing a desire to impact change from protected and affirming spaces that are liberating and allow them to take risks.

Racialized Realities: The Need for Activist Leadership

Activist leaders and scholars communicate a clear message of institutional values of diversity, equity, and inclusion to constituents on and off campus. They also hold themselves and others accountable for being culturally proficient and deliver culturally relevant and responsive curriculum and programming to the campus and surrounding communities.

Key Transitions that Shape Leaders

This paper proposes a new, identity-based model of leader development that focuses attention on the key transitions that shape leaders' careers, specifying processes and moderating conditions for identity transformation. Implications for designing experiences and training that take identity processes into account are drawn.

A Multilevel, Identity-Based Approach

In developing collective leadership identities, processes that involve participants in engaging across boundaries (functional, hierarchical, geographical) are recommended.

Are Leaders Born or Made?

Helping people make identity transitions—allowing them to shed outdated identities that hinder change and creating opportunities for them to practice (and make mistakes with) new identities is a key component of leadership development.

Connecting Leadership Accomplishments to the Job Search

The advantages of student leadership experience in the workforce. Discover the benefits and development areas of student leadership and how they relate to employability.