2024 Leadership Institute Schedule (TBC)

Members of the 2022 Leadership Institute cohort enjoy a reception with faculty and guest speakers

The Institute will take place April 7-12, 2024 at the The Galt House Hotel in Louisville, KY. A working schedule is below:

Sunday April 7

1-5pm: Introduction and Reflecting Your Best Self

This opening session provides an opportunity for participants to clarify and refine a positive view of themselves. This view includes a better understanding of their strengths, core values, and public persona. This session provides participants with frameworks and strategies for evaluating their feedback and planning how to use that feedback to activate their best selves, both at work and in other contexts. It will also enhance their situational awareness and understanding of the need to focus on relationships.

Monday April 8

9am-12pm: Digging Deeper into Reflecting Your Best Self

Upon completion of this session, participants should be able to:

• Identify personal strengths and relational capabilities that add value to their work
• Understand which kinds of work situations bring out the best in people
• Apply insights from their feedback to better lead and/or manage their own career and personal development
• Apply insights from their feedback to better lead and/or manage others

12pm-1pm: Lunch Break (lunch provided)

1pm-5pm: Leadership Challenges

We will first share and discuss the specific challenges identified by cohort members. Come prepared to speak briefly about the specific leadership challenge you’ve identified in your application. We'll finish the afternoon session with an introduction to the importance and difference between strategic visioning and strategic planning for nonprofit organizations, link visioning and planning the process of building a case for support (for funding priorities), learn and practice how to build a compelling case for support (from the elevator speech to the foundation proposal, and understand the spokesperson as “shared leadership."

Tuesday April 9

9am-12pm: Building Inclusive Cultures

Too often, conversations about diversity and inclusion remain just that - discussions in which history is debated, stereotypes are invoked, frustration and outrage are aired, and confusion lingers. How can leaders facilitate generative dialogue that harnesses the power of inquiry, encourages learning from diverse experiences and fuels positive organizing? Decades of research on leveraging strengths and identity-based resources in diverse workplaces can help to address this question. In this session, we will explore this research through Seven Conversations (we should be having) about Diversity, Inclusion and Positive Organizing. 

12pm-1pm: Lunch Break (lunch provided)

1pm-5pm: Strategic Communication and Thinking

For the first part of the afternoon, we will continue to outline the importance and difference between strategic visioning and strategic planning for nonprofit organizations, link visioning and planning to the process of building a case for support (for funding priorities), learn and practice how to build a compelling case for support (from the elevator speech to the foundation proposal, and understand the spokesperson as “shared leadership." The second portion of the afternoon will explore the context for leadership today: VUCA, Complexity, ‘Wicked Problems’, and identify some critical skills for effective leadership in today’s VUCA world, and complete work sheets about ‘six skills’ fluency and discuss with peers. 

Wednesday April 10

9am-12pm: Adaptive Leadership

We will engage in ways to manage change and become acquainted with the steps of the Kotter model, discuss managing up, delve into “followership” as an essential complement to “leadership," and link to cohort challenges in discussion during daytime session.

12pm-1pm: Lunch Break (lunch provided)

1pm-5pm: Reflecting Your Organization’s Best Self - Fundraising

We will look at "History, Heritage, and Philanthropy" -- looking back at your past to fund your future, work through a reflection exercise linking history and stakeholders in an effort to uncover opportunities for philanthropic support, discuss "The Perfect Ask" - a participatory workshop which explores tried and true strategies for soliciting face-to-face to help understand why process is much more important than the outcome!

6pm-8pm: Louisville dinner (Optional) 

Thursday April 11

9am-12pm: Strategic Visioning and Planning

We will link strategic planning (also with some attention to that role in time of COVID-19), community engagement, systems thinking, and the role of partnerships in community engagement, engage in community mapping/stakeholder identification, discuss the following questions: Why partner and what are attributes of effective and successful partnerships? What about partnerships in an era of COVID-19 and addressing racial injustice? 

12pm-1pm: Lunch Break (lunch provided)

1pm-3pm: Reflecting Your Organization’s Best Self -Board Governance and Organizational Lifecycle

We will highlight the differences between board governance vs management (What is the business of the board), describe how emerging nonprofit leadership grows from volunteer-led to staff-led organizations, increase comfort levels in recruiting, managing, and “firing” board members, lead the board with clarity -- moving away from traditional job descriptions to specific job descriptions.

3pm-6pm: Reflecting Your Organization’s Best Self - Guest Panel and reception

We will hear from a guest panel of leaders in the museum field followed by a casual reception to continue the conversation.

7pm: Closing Banquet Dinner (location TBD)

Friday April 12

9am-12pm: Closing Reflections - Evaluative Thinking and Action Plan

We will engage in evaluative thinking and consider how your outcomes for the institute match with your previously stated measure of success, reflect on the statement, "I am a leader because...," and write an action statement, "with this leadership, I will..."