Carleton Leader – “Strategic Leadership across the University”

You will be responsible for a large and institutionally significant work area, involving both soft and hard resource responsibilities. You will already be involved with the university’s governance systems in some way and will be at the head of your department or expected to assume such a position in the near future. You will have lead significant research groups or labs; undertaken special university wide projects; and/or academic initiatives in research or planning. Your stakeholders will be wide and varied – from your local departmental faculty/staff, to senior faculty/staff across the university, to national and international leaders in your chosen field.

You may already hold a deep understanding and awareness of leadership practice and theory, gained through either formal development or your own experience and research.

The aims of Carleton Leader:

  • Move beyond traditional models of leadership towards leadership that is based on building an adaptive sustainable community in which collective leadership, more than individual leadership is more likely to address the external complexity facing higher education
  • Bring a community of leaders together in an environment where what they have in common (around building and sustaining a world class university) is reinforced
  • Use the actual leadership challenges and experiences of participants as sources of learning and build dialogue around these
  • Involve outstanding leaders from industry and public life who are able to share their experience of leadership with participants and provide insights of leadership in a range of other organizations
  • Draw on input from eminent academics and speakers with an intimate appreciation of the challenges facing higher education 
  • Use self-organizing action groups as part of Carleton Leader. These will be designed to produce detailed proposals for specific organizational improvements based on the emerging challenges at Carleton. These action groups will also involve significant individual and collective learning for participants to demonstrate collaborative, adaptive leadership that is better able to address pan-institutional issues


What Carleton Leader “Strategic Leadership across the University” involves:

  • Launch Event (half day)
  • Module 1 (three days) Theme: “The World We Are In” – What kind of leadership do we need to address the unfolding issues of our time?
  • Reconnect 1 (lunch)
  • Module 2 (three days) Theme: “Leadership within Higher Education” – How can leaders create the environment for meaningful conversations that just might go somewhere?
  • Reconnect 2 (lunch)
  • Module 3 (three days) Theme: “The Authentic Leader” – Why should anyone be led by you?
  • Strategic Impact Group project will be conducted outside the formal time spent together as a cohort group
    • The Strategic Impact Group project work is selected and decided upon by each group
  • Leadership Exchange will be conducted outside the formal time spent together as a cohort group
    • The Leadership Exchange involves a day being “shadowed” by a partner in the cohort and vise versa
  • Landing Event (half day)
  • Post Landing Event Celebration & Reflection (lunch)