Gender discrimination is real. The gendered wage gap is real. The mommy tax is real.

It’s bad for straight white women.

It’s much worse for women with brown and black skin; for lesbians and queer, bi, and trans women; for women whose first langauge is not English; for women who are entering professions as the first in their families or social circles and don’t have allies to support them.

So let’s take a lesson from Machiavelli: look the monster in the face, and determine our best course of action given the lay of the land. Let’s strategize. Not to be brutal, but to lift each other up. 

To set the groundwork for this I take a peek into Machiavelli for Women by Stacey Vanek Smith. In particular I share the four archetypes of nasty female colleagues she identifies, and suggest actionable strategies you can practice this week to protect yourself, and the women around you, by being a mentor and an ally — especially for women who inhabit less privileged positions than you do.

Then join us for the rest of the month as my guests discuss supervising and mentoring from intersectional and intergenerational perspectives. 

Joy. Activism. Feminism. Love of teaching. Optimism. Let me introduce Elise Robinson!

As Provost and faculty member in Leadership Studies at Fort Hayes State University, Jill Arensdorf believes democracy is a creative practice that calls for situational and contextual awareness as folks move together toward a shared goal. As a leader, Jill has “a lot of faith and hope in people,” which she expresses both through her […]

In this episode of The Uplift Susi tackles the “bodacious question” of whether teaching public health can model democratic citizenship. A medical anthropologist by training, Susi Keefe approaches her teaching, like her research, by focusing on people and their stories. She shares stories about her students claiming their identities while learning to advocate for community public health…and discovering themselves as leaders along the way. Susi also discusses teaching evals — and if you stick around, you can catch her rowdy dog Tater making his first podcast appearance.

“Changing the world – changing the civic existence – is completely central to what Dominican University does.”

Now more than ever higher ed needs to model the tenets and tensions of a liberal democracy: one that promotes fact-based debate from multiple perspectives in order to find a communal way forward. In this episode I ruminate on how I came to care about this question in the first place.

In this final episode of our “back to school” theme for September, I encourage you to take a fresh look at caring for yourself. I redefine self-care as intentional life-sustaining practices that protect well-being, enhance overall health, increase happiness, and promote empowerment, and, for women leaders in higher ed, also produce vitality by making space […]

Alienation is a natural outcome of systemic accretion: the ongoing increase of small tasks and assignments that seem individually manageable but taken together become impossible. It’s easy to see how this could contribute to disengagement and burnout. Institutions that engage in habitual systemic accretion may be unintentionally “quiet firing” their people by giving them work that is designed to leave them feeling undervalued and unwanted. The solution? Leaders can rebuild the connection between people’s purpose and their work. 

“The power to trust and be trusted is an essential prerequisite to enhancing the department climate.” Mary Lou Higgerson wrote that 26 years ago, and it’s as true now as ever before. 

From “Soulless Opening Year Academic Speeches” to “Calling it Quits” to “Why 2022 is the Year of Workplace Culture,” US employees are hyperfocused on the need for inspiring leadership that fosters vibrant cultures at work. How to get there seems elusive, and so we spend time and money on surveys, 3rd party vendors, and expensive consultants to help us through. 

A large body of research is clear, though, that trust is the key to unlocking a healthy work environment: one that celebrates growth, coaches mistakes, and never resorts to fear, shame, or retaliation. This is not some made-up fantasy: I have lived and led in environments like this, and you can too. In this episode I share my favorite strategies, proven over more than 10 years of experimentation, for infusing your leadership and your team with deep and rewarding trust. 

In the US we host approximately 55 million work-related meetings a week. 71% are considered unproductive and 65% of employees agree that meetings prevent them from completing their own work. This is expensive, and soul-crushing, and I think we should knock it off.  

I’m betting you also would like to kick “meeting malaise” to the curb on your campus. In today’s episode I talk about the differences between traditional meetings and meaningful gatherings, and list four steps you can take to combine them in order to bring purpose and meaning to your campus meetings.