Details
About the workshop
Finance leadership is crucial in the higher education sector, ensuring efficient resource allocation, strategic financial planning, and sustainable growth. Finance leaders play a pivotal role in supporting institutional resilience, enabling universities and colleges to adapt to evolving educational landscapes. But the move from specialist to strategist, from ledger to leader, is far from straight-forward. Technical expertise provides a solid career footing, but leadership demands a dynamic and finely-tuned set of skills.
This engaging course is specifically designed for the higher education community, addressing essential technical and leadership skills. It equips you to elevate your role as a fully-fledged finance business partner, and equip with the tools to lead effectively under pressure, master high-level communication skills to empower you as a change leader, and be prepared to tackle any challenge in the higher education sector.
Agenda
Foundations of finance leadership in Higher Education - From ledger to leader
- Characteristics of a valued finance business partner in higher education
- Leadership concepts and practical skills tailored to academic leadership capability
- Tactical, strategic, and practical finance leadership in the academic environment
- Transitioning from subject matter expert to a valued finance business partner
Develop a strategic perspective as a Higher Ed finance leader
- Leveraging the finance value chain as a true academic business partner
- The role of finance and accounting in understanding and supporting educational strategy
- Explore the emerging power of big data and analytics
- Strategically focused financial and business process analysis tools
Skills for adaptive finance leaders
- Different leadership models and practical approaches in a finance context
- Understand the distinction between technical and adaptive challenges
- Identify your strengths and weaknesses
- Develop emotional competence, founded on the Emotional Intelligence (EQ) model
Collaboration, influential communication and reporting
- Tailoring your communication to different audiences
- Having constructive interactions with others - when to ask vs. when to tell
- Building strong working relations with others, in both professional and academic spheres
- Identify the attributes of effective written and verbal reports
Insightful commentary through analysis and evaluation
- What does good analysis and evaluation look like?
- How can you add value through analysis and evaluation?
People management in the context of finance practice
- Managing finance teams and growing talent in the academic setting
- Building trust-based relationships with internal and external stakeholders
- Focus on individual and team performance to deliver results
- Empower finance teams to reach their highest potential
Stakeholder management and engagement
- Nurture strong internal and external relationships
- Manage competing agendas, tight timeframes, organisational changes, and confidentiality
- Technical methods to support strategic engagement, stakeholder mapping/analysis and boundary spanning
Insights into action - Next steps for academic finance leaders
- Reflecting and responding to key lessons in Higher Education finance
- Conducting force field analysis for planning next steps in academic finance
- Developing a personal roadmap to becoming a successful finance business partner
Tailor Your Training Experience
To make sure you get the learning solution that’s right for you, we offer different levels of tailoring to suit your needs. Choose from three levels of customisation:
1.Off the Shelf
Love what you see? Great! Choose this option to take one of our most popular courses and bring it in-house for your team. Includes a pre-course consult session with our facilitator to make sure we hit the mark, and deliver the right learning experience for you.
2.Customised
Make sure you get the most from the course you choose, by tailoring the content to get the right fit for you. Speak to our team, who will work with you to pick and mix from a curated bank of training modules to help customise your learning experience.
3.Premium
Not on the list? Let us know what you’re looking for and we will find the right solution. Our team of learning specialists will work with you to develop a unique training course for your business. Through an in-depth consultation process, we will work with you to profile your learning needs and build a bespoke program from the ground up.
Speak with one of our team today to find which option is right for you.