Traditional professional development in higher education falls short. You and your team deserve better.
Leadership Team Design and Executive Coaching that accelerates personal and institutional impact.
You and your leadership team face unprecedented pressures in today’s higher education landscape:
Budget constraints threaten institutional prestige, demanding painful choices between programs and people.
Declining enrollment creates an atmosphere of uncertainty, with shrinking revenue streams signaling a precarious future.
Plummeting engagement and morale erode workplace culture and productivity, undermining mission and outcomes.
Leadership turnover destabilizes critical relationships and fragments teams, intensifying institutional uncertainty.
It’s no wonder that traditional fixes like one-off coaching sessions or brief team workshops fail to address the fundamental needs of higher education leadership.
Effective leadership transcends individual development and isolated skill-building to focus on how leaders interact within the dynamic network of relationships, processes, and structures across an entire institution. My work with hundreds of presidents, vice presidents, deans, and department chairs has led me to conclude that leadership team design is key to addressing these systemic issues. It offers a holistic and sustainable approach to change for impact-focused individuals and institutions.
Leadership team design encompasses both executive leadership roles—presidents, provosts, and deans—and the critical work of emerging and mid-level leaders like department chairs and program directors. The approach extends beyond formal hierarchies to examine informal networks, collaborative practices, and feedback loops that ultimately shape leadership effectiveness.
We don’t just develop leaders. We transform entire leadership ecosystems to create environments where leaders at every level are empowered, supported, and equipped to meaningfully impact the institution.
In Leadership Team Design, we focus on three main areas:
1. Role Design: Redefining Leadership Potential
Align leadership roles with institutional vision
Design future-ready, sustainable role frameworks
Create clarity around purpose, priorities, and key responsibilities
Enable strategic job crafting and focused prioritization
2. Culture Design: Building a Solution-Oriented Culture
Establish collaborative norms and shared problem-solving practices
Develop frameworks for productive conflict resolution
Foster psychological safety to grow trust across teams
Build meaningful accountability systems
3. Systems Design: Optimizing Continuous Learning & Institutional Performance
Streamline decision-making protocols
Implement adaptive change management processes
Design innovative leadership development pathways
Create sustainable succession planning frameworks
By focusing on the entire leadership system, you create sustainable change that aligns with your institution’s mission and addresses daily challenges head-on. This systemic approach ensures your leadership team is purposefully structured to harness and leverage its diverse strengths, deepen collaboration, and accelerate collective success.
We unlock leadership teams’ potential by transforming siloed roles into dynamic networks that think, act, and innovate as one—converting fragmented bureaucracies into solution-centered cultures.
From department chairs to presidential cabinets, we create interconnected leadership teams that deliver:
Enhanced Strategic Impact: Break down barriers between academic, administrative, and student-facing leaders to drive unified decision-making and advance institutional priorities.
Adaptive Problem-Solving: Transform how leaders collaborate to address complex challenges from enrollment pressures and faculty burnout to resource constraints by leveraging diverse expertise and perspectives across the institution.
Sustainable Leadership Culture: Build robust leadership pipelines and mentoring networks that develop emerging leaders while strengthening institutional continuity.
Resource Optimization: Coordinate investments and align resources more effectively by enabling leaders to work as an integrated system rather than competing interests.
Increased Stakeholder Engagement: Generate faculty and staff buy-in through inclusive leadership practices that demonstrate their voices are heard and valued in institutional direction-setting.
The suite of services at JSM are about higher education, reimagined.
Our signature programs help you make a deeper impact in higher education–whether you are an individual leader navigating the challenges of a current or new role, a team looking to improve their communication, or an institution who wants to be future-ready.
Leadership Intensives
Through our Leadership Reset Intensives or Leadership Transition Intensives, you will have the opportunity to map out your individual journey of impact so you can move from feeling overwhelmed and reactive to empowered and strategic. Whether you are transitioning to a new leadership role or looking to make a greater impact in your current one, JSM can help you identify and develop the behaviors you need to have to be an effective and healthy leader.
First Choice University Blueprint
The First Choice University Blueprint™ is a comprehensive one, two, or three-year engagement that transforms your leadership ecosystem through integrated executive and team coaching, leadership development, and succession planning. We help higher ed leaders and their teams build sustainable roles, systems, and cultures that deliver meaningful, student-centered change without burning out. Breaking free from the “This is the way we’ve always done it” mentality, we create a First Choice University for students and employees.
Learn More
Department Chair Academy
Transform your role as department chair through our exclusive 9-month leadership community. Each cohort explores a critical leadership challenge monthly—from managing faculty burnout to driving institutional change—while building lasting connections with peers across institutions. Drawing on my experience as a former department chair and organizational communication scholar, I facilitate discussions that blend strategic frameworks with practical application, guiding the community through targeted exercises in role design, culture building, and systems thinking, while creating space for organic peer learning and problem-solving. Unlike traditional workshops, the Academy combines structured leadership development with a trusted space where department chairs can openly share challenges, workshop solutions, and develop their capabilities. Through this collaborative approach, you'll gain both practical strategies for immediate implementation and a sustainable network of fellow academic leaders who understand your unique challenges.
Hi, I’m Jennifer.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve been seated on all sides of the table—the staff member, the faculty member, the administrator, the only woman on multiple leadership teams.
I have held numerous leadership roles that span institutional categories, ranging from academic and student affairs to alumni relations. But whether it was an inaugural or a long-established role, my onboarding experience was the same. After attending a one-day training or conference, there was the implicit expectation that I was now “ready” to hit the ground running. In truth, I always felt that I was being thrown into the deep end without much in the way of a lifeline. What’s worse is that I thought I was the only one.
But after working with hundreds of higher ed leaders, I have come to realize that my experience wasn’t unique. Most everyone I’ve talked to described a similar story: minimal preparation, overwhelming responsibilities, and the expectation to excel immediately in their new role.
How could institutions that take pride in preparing students for future success do such a poor job of developing and supporting academic leaders? The journey to a permanent position in academia is among the lengthiest of all career paths. Shouldn’t academics be more prepared than most other people starting their first leadership position?
Informed by my own journey as a department chair, assistant dean, and director of strategic initiatives—combined with my research as an organizational communication scholar and work with countless department chairs across leading institutions—I've made it my mission to answer this question.
What I have discovered is that higher ed leaders are being asked to navigate an increasingly complex and interconnected landscape where one-off training sessions or individual leadership coaching is no longer enough. Institutions need to create a leadership ecosystem that offers a holistic and sustainable approach to leadership development.
Effective leadership is not just about individual effectiveness, but about how leaders interact within a dynamic network of relationships, processes, and structures across an entire institution. As both a practitioner and scholar, I have been drawn to roles that have allowed me to break down silos and make those connections across the institution. Drawing on experiences as varied as my training as a Gallup-certified strengths coach and my executive coaching certification from the Center for Executive Coaching, I have developed a leadership team design approach that brings this ecosystem to life.
Clients & Partners
Want to learn more about how I can support you, your team, and/or your institution?
Let’s get on an introductory chat to discuss coaching and training options.
4 Essential Leadership Competencies Chairs Need to Lead in the New Normal
What makes an effective department leader today, and how can we support their development? Through my research on higher education leadership, as well as coaching and training hundreds of department leaders, I have identified four key competencies that, when mastered and used in concert, enable department leaders to lead change during this momentous time in higher education: the abilities to anticipate (strategic mindset), interpret (manage complexity), appreciate (values difference), and decide (decision quality).
