Higher education leaders are increasingly asked to collaborate across academic, financial, enrollment, and advancement functions to ensure institutional sustainability and relevance. Yet, despite shared goals, collaboration can break down under pressure, competing priorities, and misaligned incentives.
This session invites participants to move beyond surface-level collaboration and examine what truly gets in the way of cross-functional leadership. Participants will explore how urgency, siloed accountability, and role-based pressures lead to individualized leadership, where leaders carry responsibility in isolation rather than sharing it collectively.
Drawing on the Liberated Leadership framework, this session introduces co-design and empowerment as practices that support more integrated, strategic, and sustainable leadership. Participants will explore how co-design can align academic, financial, and enrollment priorities through shared ownership of decisions and trade-offs, and how expanding participation to include faculty and students can strengthen relevance and institutional impact through design-informed approaches.
Through structured reflection and interactive exercises, participants will:
- Identify common structural barriers to effective cross-functional collaboration
- Examine how urgency and individualized accountability undermine sustainable leadership
- Practice co-design approaches that support shared vision, decision-making, and accountability
- Explore ways to engage faculty and students as partners in institutional innovation
Participants will leave with practical frameworks and tools to shift from siloed leadership to collective accountability, supporting more aligned, sustainable, and future-ready institutions.
Chinyere Oparah, CEO, Center for Liberated Leadership
Interactive seminars cover important issues that currently impact independent higher education. They are designed to be practical and hands-on with clear learning outcomes. Each will include examples of replicable models for participants to use when faced with the situations covered by the seminars.
These interactive seminars are free of charge and do not require pre-registration, but they have limited capacity. Space is available on a first-come, first-served basis.