I recently took part in a leadership development programme, Leadership in Higher Education and Artificial Intelligence: A New Paradigm. The programme was designed with an international cohort in mind, and it was great fun to work with leaders from across different countries and from a whole range of Higher Education institutions.
My session was inspired by Global Trends Towards Flexible, Hybrid Working and its Impact for Digital Leadership in Higher Education, a report commissioned by the N-TUTORR National Digital Leadership Network, and which was just publisher earlier this year. It was a great opportunity to share some of the key recommendations that came out of this work and to begin to unpack how these may be implemented.
This is a complex topic, and there was a lot packed into the talk, so I broke it down into three sections:
- developing leadership capabilities in critical digital and date literacies, with a focus on frameworks that reflect changing practices in the AI-enabled workplace (or classroom);
- enhancing leadership skills for hybrid working (and learning) in Higher Education, emphasising the central importance of building trust and balancing the overlap between professional and personal;
- finding inspiration at a time when everyone is already overworked and under-resourced, opening up a perspective beyond the current hype cycle.
Given that we ourselves were experiencing Oxford’s city centre in heatwave conditions, I can only applaud the delegation’s energy and interest in engaging with these topics on the final day of their busy programme’s week and before lunch, as well. We had lively discussions which only served to highlight to me how widely our experiences, practices and policies around hybrid working futures vary. And it gave me much food for thought about what else I would like to include in the research for the book I’m writing on.
A big thank you also to the organisers for making me feel so welcome, and for bringing together a really interesting group of people! If you’d like to learn more, explore my session slides.