We believe everyone can be a leader. We invest in the growth and development of leaders in our community and place CLA staff and faculty in the center. That’s why we intentionally create spaces and opportunities for staff to come together as leaders to engage in meaningful conversations, group sense-making and crowd sourced solutions. You don’t have to wait for someone to identify you as a leader in order to participate. You can lead from wherever you are, right now. You don’t have to wait for your idea to be approved—start from a good idea and create a movement behind it.
We provide our staff and faculty with the ability to lead in complexity and increased capacity for Shared Equity Leadership by co-creating and cultivating community across CLA. We’re also committed to developing leadership skills and creating capacity for people to lead. One of our formal channels is the CLA Administrative Leaders Program (ALP). This signature program was created and tailored to staff in the College of Liberal Arts for personal and professional leadership development. Deb Ludowese, LATIS Administrative Director, designs and leads the program with co-facilitators and presenters from both within the college and across the University community. The program puts CLA staff and their leadership development goals at the center.
The key goals of the CLA Administrative Leaders Program:
- Build leadership capacity through the investment in key staff
- Strengthen relationships across CLA to foster collaboration
- Broaden understanding of challenges and opportunities facing the college
- Raise awareness about the role of diversity, equity and inclusion success as a leader
Additionally, participants who complete the program (ALP Alums) are given the opportunity to practice and strengthen their new leadership skills by participating in future ALP cohorts as panelists, presenters and by engaging in networking opportunities.
The Art of Hosting is another channel that scales up from personal leadership in the Admin Leaders Program to systemic leadership that addresses complex challenges.
The key goals of the Art of Hosting:
- Increase capacity for leading in complexity
- Using participatory leadership, dialogue and inquiry to create conversation that matter (and lead to systemic change)
- Facilitation focused on hosting conversations
- Address complex challenges and opportunities facing the college
LATIS also provides leadership services such as facilitation, trainings, and workshops on a variety of topics tailored to the unique needs of the CLA community. We work with several partners in CLA including the CLA Dean’s Office and the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as well as University Partners including the Office of Human Resources Talent Strategy Center of Expertise (OHR TS-COE) and the Office of Equity and Diversity (OED) and many others.
Examples of where LATIS has supported leadership development and participatory facilitation practices:
- CLA Corridor Implementation World Cafe (March 2015)
- CLA Data Day Conference (August 2019)
- Connecting and Learning Online Workshop (May 2020)
- Reflective Practice and Online Engagement Workshop (June 2020)
- Designing for Online Engagement Workshop (July 2020)
- Staff Burnout Listening Sessions
- CLA Covid Ad Hoc Committee
- Retreat on Retreats (July 2021)
- CLA Staff Community Social Gatherings
- Summit on CLA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committees (August 2020)
- Open Space Events
- Future of Work Workgroup (2021)