ELI Leadership Projects: TED-like Talks from Emerging Faculty Leaders
Purpose:
The purpose of the ELI fellowship program is to improve leadership skills that will facilitate change to advance the physical therapy profession. Bolman and Deal’s leadership frames (Bolman & Deal, 2013) are used by the ELI fellows throughout the program to provide a template for understanding organizations: structure, people, politics, and culture. The structural frame is focused on strategy: setting goals, determining tasks, creating systems. The human resource frame emphasizes people’s need for personal growth and job satisfaction. The political frame acknowledges the importance of building coalitions and addressing conflicts related to limited resources. The symbolic frame focuses on inspiring people and creating a vision. All four frames are useful in addressing different problems or situations faced by academic leaders (Bolman & Gallos, 2011). These leadership “frames” will provide a unifying theme and be applied to case examples in academic physical therapy programs from recent ELI fellows. The overall purpose of this presentation is to describe how different leadership frames can be applied by leaders in academic physical therapy therapy programs to address important needs at their institution.
Methods and/or Description of Project:
This presentation will include an overview of the ELI program and the purpose of the leadership project. A total of 5 distinct leadership projects will be presented from recent ELI fellows. Each presentation will be in a TED-like talk format, with a short, powerful and engaging summary of the problem and solution. Participant learning will be facilitated by a panel discussion at the end that emphasizes how audience members can apply the leadership project process and solutions to address issues at their own institution.
Schedule:
15 min Introduction of topic / Overview of ELI
50 min 5 10-min presentations (see below)
25 min Panel discussion (discuss the process of developing and completing a project, how to work within your current institutional environment for success, Q and A)
The following topics will be included in the presentation: • Mentoring New Faculty: We are facing a changing demographic within academia with a number of faculty retirements and openings as developing programs continue to come into existence. The transition from clinical practice to academia can be exciting, yet challenging and stressful. This presentation will describe resources for orientating, onboarding, and mentoring of new faculty.
• Developing A Workload Policy: Workload policies occasionally need to be revisited to better align with university policies while remaining fair and equitable to faculty. Often this can lead to stress amongst faculty concerned about workload changes in an already busy environment. This presentation will describe the process of creating a new workload policy, utilizing the four leadership frames as a way to navigate conversations across faculty and administration.
• Development of an Interprofessional Spine Center: This presentation will describe the intersection of the four leadership frames in the planning of an interprofessional spine center. Specifically, we will explore how the development of a new clinical enterprise is influenced by a visionary leader, internal talent, political environment, and financial reality.
• Activities-based Costing (ABC): This accounting method examines where resources are utilized at the departmental level, and could provide data for decision makers during across-the-board budget cut discussions. Department Chairs and Deans likely already have much of the necessary data for the ABC model, and we will show how to use that data for your own department. This presentation will apply the structural and political frames.
• Professional Behaviors Monitoring System: Professionalism encompasses standards for values, behaviors, and practice within a profession and measuring and monitoring this aspect is an invaluable part of the determination of a student’s readiness for clinical internship (McGinnis et al 2016). Social media introduce many legal, ethical, and professional considerations thus, professionalism in the digital age should be monitored by colleges and universities and competencies should be developed (Gagnon et al 2015; Lie et al 2013). One of the main objectives of this project is to create a monitoring system for students’ professional behaviors and try to explore the factors associated with a student’s professional misconduct, which is related to the structural frame of leadership.
Results/Outcomes:
Through participation in this session, attendees will be able to describe the four frames of leadership and consider how to apply them to issues and situations at their academic institution
Conclusions/Relevance to the conference theme:
The process of developing and completing leadership projects could apply to many different situations relevant to academic administrators, faculty, and clinical leaders. This session is directly relevant to the conference sub-theme of “Building Bridges for the Future Through Curricular and Clinical Innovations”, as the projects could lead to important new areas for educational research, IPE innovations, and collaborative models in clinical education.