The Office for Senior Faculty Affairs (OSFA) warmly welcomes you to 2024. OSFA programming for aspiring and established senior faculty got off to a strong start in 2023, with more good stuff on the 2024 horizon.

We held our inaugural Leadership Skills workshop this past Nov 17 in the Simches Conference Room (that’s right, live-and-in person!). Around 60 midcareer faculty (primarily at the Assistant and Associate Professor rank) participated in interactive sessions focused on key skills for rising leaders:

• Understanding and Optimizing Your Leadership Style: Mary Shapiro, fellow in the Simmons University Institute of Inclusive Leadership, prodded participants to identify their styles as Connectors, Seekers, Planners and Drivers and understand how an effective team leverages each of these styles.
• Conversations that Take Courage: Melissa Brodrick and Lisa Neale from the Harvard Ombuds Office role-played different versions of a fraught conversation between an dissatisfied fellow and their mentor.
• Skills for Successful Leaders: Sareh Parangi, Chair of Surgery at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, drew extensively from her personal experience in advocating for herself and her mentees to encourage attendees to understand the leverage points in their own work settings.

Feedback on the session was extremely positive, a testament both to the excellent sessions themselves and to the thirst of mid-career faculty for this kind of skill building. We are therefore delighted to offer a second Leadership Skills workshop on March 6, 2024. The topics will be entirely new, addressing key mid-career skills including “Shift from Mentorship to Sponsorship,” “How to Give a Talk,” and “Building Diversity and Avoiding Unconscious Bias.”

We look forward to seeing you in March!—and to hearing what else you’d like to see featured.

With best wishes,

Steve