Leadership Development Program for Nursing, Health Sciences, and Health & Human Services Schools
Bring an in-depth leadership development experience to your faculty and staff without building the entire program in-house.
Schools of Nursing, Health Sciences, Health and Human Services, and related professional programs often have faculty and staff ready for broader leadership responsibility. Developing those leaders across a school or college requires more than a series of individual workshops. It takes a coherent program, experienced facilitation, opportunities to apply what participants are learning, and a structure that can connect leadership development to the professional competencies and priorities that already guide the school.
Ilene Crawford designs and facilitates cohort-based leadership programs for that work. As an International Coaching Federation (ICF) Associate Certified Coach (ACC), she draws on her experience as a former provost, faculty member, and classroom teacher to create programs that help participants strengthen their judgment and practical leadership skills while working in the institutional context they already know.
The program can begin from an existing model and be adapted to your school’s priorities, participants, competency framework, and delivery needs. It can also complement funded fellowship programs or support continuing education requirements.
An academic-year leadership experience
A leadership development program can bring a cohort together across an academic year, giving participants time to learn, practice, reflect, and return to the group with experience to examine. The program can be adapted to the school’s participants, goals, professional context, and competency requirements.
A typical program may move through areas such as:
leadership strengths, values, and philosophy;
trust, feedback, and difficult conversations;
collaboration, teams, and conflict;
leading change and improvement;
managing up, influencing across organizational boundaries, and communicating under pressure;
coaching, mentoring, and sponsorship;
sustainable leadership practices;
integration, reflection, and presentation of applied work.
The sequence is intentional. Participants build on earlier work as the program progresses rather than encountering a list of unrelated leadership topics.
Leadership development tied to actual work
Participants learn most when they have opportunities to test ideas against real responsibilities. A leadership development program can combine seminar discussion with between-session practice, reflection, and an applied leadership or improvement project.
Participants may:
develop and revisit a personal leadership philosophy;
maintain a practice or reflection journal;
apply new approaches between sessions and examine what happens;
work on an institutional or unit-based project over time;
bring emerging problems and decisions back to the cohort for discussion;
reflect on both project results and their own development as leaders.
This reflection and practice gives participants a way to build judgment over time rather than simply accumulate information.
Designed for professional-school environments
Health-related schools often work with competency frameworks, continuing-education requirements, assessment systems, and improvement processes already embedded in professional practice. Leadership development can be designed to work within that environment.
Ilene has experience aligning program activities with relevant competency frameworks and institutional priorities while preserving a coherent developmental sequence. The school retains its own disciplinary and professional expertise while benefitting from Ilene’s leadership program architecture, facilitation, higher education context, and coaching perspective.
Designed for facilitated discussion
The program structure is only part of the experience. Ilene facilitates the sessions herself, creating the conditions for participants to think together, learn from one another, test assumptions, and connect leadership concepts to the situations they are actually facing.
Ilene’s provost experience gives her a working understanding of the conditions higher education leaders operate within: distributed authority, faculty-administration relationships, competing institutional priorities, cross-unit responsibilities, resource constraints, and decisions without obvious answers. Her teaching and coaching experience shapes how she works with participants, with enough structure to move the learning forward and enough room for the cohort to become active contributors to the experience.
A partnership with the institution
The strongest programs draw on both Ilene’s experience developing leadership development programs and the institution’s own infrastructure and context. Institutions with less internal administrative capacity can discuss a broader scope. The program should be designed around what the institution can realistically support.
Ilene typically provides
program architecture and curriculum design
session design and facilitation
adaptation to the cohort and institutional context
integration of relevant competency requirements
exercises, reflection prompts, and applied-learning structures;
consultation with program sponsors as the cohort progresses
The institution typically provides
participant recruitment and enrollment
scheduling and local communications
meeting space and on-site logistics
administration of a learning management system when used
administration of assessments and evaluations;
administration of any guest speaker stipends and logistics
documentation for continuing education credits
In-person, virtual, or hybrid
Programs can be designed for in-person, virtual, or hybrid delivery. Hybrid programs can combine selected in-person sessions with virtual meetings across the rest of the academic year. The delivery model should support the same underlying goal: an active cohort experience in which participants discuss, practice, apply, and learn together.
Inquire about bringing a leadership development program to your school or college
Interested in exploring what this program could look like at your institution? The first step is a discovery call with Ilene to discuss the cohort you want to develop and the kind of leadership capacity you want to build.