Blog

Washington University invited us do bring our Academic Leadership Journey to the USA for the first time.

The Academic Leadership Journey is a leadership program for professors. Graduates from level 1 can dive even deeper during level 2. In September 2021 both levels were organized at the same time at the same location.

The return to physical presence in the office is upon us. This poses various challenges for managers. We give you tips on how to deal with them.

What if we were to take even more responsibility ourselves?

Last year we organized our 10th “academic leadership journey” for professors coming from universities within the BeNeLux. One could think that this journey is so familiar to us that we encounter few surprises or unexpected circumstances along the way. Nothing could be less true!

After 10 successful editions of our Academic Leadership Journey Level 1, the first Academic Leadership Journey Level 2 was a success! It was a sequel, one step beyond, deepening and most of all a real journey of four days where we went on a trip together with 13 professors of KU Leuven, University of Antwerp, UGhent, VUB, VIB en Luxemburg Institute of Health. We gathered four days to immerse them into co-creation around their strategic narrative, stakeholder management, decision making, installing a sound feedback culture and gaining more visibility.

Personal leadership and how we attune our internal dialogue to our choices and challenges are very often an important topic to work on during a fuel session (link). Do I give myself the mandate to expect things from my organisation, the team, the co-worker, the boss? Do I allow myself to let go and to live with a ‘just-enough’ approach or result? Am I not too demanding to my colleagues or to myself? Or do we avoid crucial conversations (link) because we are afraid of the reaction, afraid of the other not willing to work together anymore or being angry because we addressed something in his or her behaviour, … Very often we shoot ourselves in the foot … we restrain ourselves or we push too much out of our carefulness, exaggerated conscientiousness, demands to the world or ourselves, our perfectionism or confrontation avoidant behaviour. We put ourselves under an unneeded pressure, we’re sometimes very unhappy with how we dealt with a situation, even getting angry that ‘again’ we did not succeed. Or being frustrated because the others won’t do what we find normal. Therefore, it can be a liberating, clarifying and normalising exercise to put that part of yourself on the empty chair and you aside to it. Just to have a good chat with yourself. A chat full of curiosity for the underlying reasonings, needs and interests (what’s the difference that this part of yourself is willing to make). And very often this will help you to find ‘a golden mean’, a more helping and constructive way of expressing what means a lot to you. A chat which leads to a more workable internal dialogue, positive and helping thoughts, less ‘have-to’s’ – away irrational beliefs and wrong reasonings (disaster thinking, fanatic perfectionism, love junk, demands to the world, …)

“Thanks a lot! Before this phone call, I could only see how irritating this whole thing is. But than you point out that this is also interesting & fascinating… and that is really helpful”. This is the closing sentence of a phone call I just had with a project leader.

Does this phenomenon sound familiar to you? Everybody in the team knows there is interpersonal tension between team members, but nobody addresses it or talks about it. Why? Often because we are worried that talking about tension would lead to conflict within the team. But the so-called harmony in such a scenario is no real harmony. While the tensions are not addressed in the team openly, they are discussed at the coffee machine, in small groups, on a whispering tone.

Regularly, we coach “teams in trouble”. For multiple reasons, conflicts have emerged, even escalated, people make strong statements, there are winners & losers (sometimes these tend to switch), … and most of the time, this has been going on for a quite a while before an “external facilitator” is involved. Often, the team we meet is rather pessimistic.