Leadership: Key Skills

One of the sessions I attended at NCSPOD asked an interesting question. What are the 10 key skills required of academic leaders?

Granted that ten's an arbitrary number, try asking yourself to identify what skills you really expect in someone who's assuming a leadership role at your college or university. One of the first challenges that arose in the session was distinguishing between leadership and management, and what the relationship is between those two domains of skill and knowledge. (We decided that a leader has to have both sets, absolutely.)

It's easy enough to do a Web search for lists of these key characteristics, but what was most useful to me in this session was first to compose my own list. The session leaders suggested that the exercise of generating these lists, done as a group, makes a great workshop for hiring committees, advisory groups, etc. I'd have to agree: what sounds like a pretty simple task elicits many different opinions and assumptions, and without such a discussion those remain implicit--and possibly clashing with one another.