Custom Leadership Development Programs for Higher Education
Create the leadership development experience your institution needs without having to build the full program internally.
Colleges and universities often know which people they want to develop and what responsibilities those leaders are preparing to assume. What they may not have is the internal time, staffing, curriculum, or facilitation capacity to turn that need into a sustained developmental experience.
Ilene Crawford designs and facilitates leadership development programs for colleges, schools, divisions, and institutional cohorts. Programs are built around the people being developed, the responsibilities they are preparing for, and the institutional setting in which they will lead.
Leadership development built for the institution
A custom program might support emerging leaders across a division, faculty considering administrative leadership, newly appointed chairs or directors, a leadership academy, or a cohort brought together around a particular institutional priority. Some institutions need an external partner to provide most of the program-design capacity; others have their own leadership-development or organizational-development staff and need additional expertise or facilitation for a particular initiative.
Ilene can work in either setting. The institution brings its goals, context, participants, and relevant professional or institutional requirements; Ilene builds a developmental structure that connects those needs to leadership practice.
More than a series of workshops
A sustained program creates opportunities that standalone sessions cannot. Participants can return to important leadership questions over time, try new approaches in their actual work, compare experience with colleagues, and use what happens between sessions as material for further learning.
Depending on the purpose of the program, Ilene typically combines seminar discussion, assessments, leadership tools, reflective practice, applied projects, peer learning, individual or small-group work, and between-session experimentation. The structure should give participants repeated opportunities to develop judgment as well as practical skill: understanding what a situation calls for, deciding what belongs to them, acting effectively, and learning from the results.
Programs can be built around specific leadership needs
The content and structure will depend on the cohort and institutional purpose. Programs might address areas such as:
moving from faculty or professional expertise into broader leadership responsibility;
developing chairs, directors, associate deans, or other emerging leaders;
decision-making and judgment in situations with competing responsibilities;
communication, feedback, conflict, and difficult conversations;
collaboration and leadership across organizational boundaries;
leading change and improvement;
coaching, mentoring, delegation, and developing others;
sustainable leadership practices and the conditions required for good work;
institutional perspective and responsibility beyond one unit.
A program can also be aligned with an existing competency framework, professional development requirement, or fellowship program when that serves the purpose of the cohort.
Designed and facilitated by Ilene Crawford
Ilene brings experience as a former provost, faculty member, classroom teacher, International Coaching Federation (ICF) Associate Certified Coach (ACC), and higher education consultant. She understands leadership as it is actually practiced in colleges and universities, where responsibility may exceed formal authority, how decisions affect multiple constituencies, and that a leader often has to work through relationships rather than simply issue instructions.
That perspective shapes both the curriculum and the facilitation. Ilene asks questions that help participants examine their own situations, connects leadership concepts to institutional realities, and creates opportunities for participants to learn from one another.
An extension of your leadership development capacity
Some institutions engage Ilene because they do not have a dedicated leadership development function. Others have internal organizational development, faculty development, or leadership development staff but need additional capacity, Ilene’s assets-based perspective, her cabinet-level experience, or an external facilitator.
The scope can reflect the institution’s own resources. Ilene may concentrate primarily on program design and facilitation while institutional staff manage recruitment, scheduling, communications, assessment, and local logistics.
In person, virtual, or hybrid
Programs can be designed for in person, virtual, or hybrid delivery. A hybrid design may combine selected in person convenings with virtual sessions across the rest of the program.
What could leadership development look like at your institution?
A custom program begins with the people you want to develop and the responsibilities you want them prepared to assume. Ilene can help translate that purpose into a coherent experience that fits the institution rather than asking the institution to fit a generic curriculum.
Contact Ilene to discuss a leadership development program for your college, school, division, or institution.