Coaching for Academic Leaders
Expertise gets you the role. People are the job.
Leading people is its own discipline, and higher ed rarely teaches it. I work with a small number of campus leaders each quarter as a thinking partner and sounding board — more than 20 years in higher education, from the classroom to senior leadership.
"My to-do list is full of other people's priorities. I don't know how to change that."
"I've handed things off before. They came back to me unfinished. So I have to do it myself."
"I have a vision for where we need to go, but getting buy-in has been harder than I expected."
"There's a person on my team who is making everyone's life harder. I don't know how to handle it without making things worse."
"There's no one I can fully debrief with at the end of a hard week. I'm not sure people outside this role would understand anyway."
"I open my laptop after the kids go to bed. Every night."
"I'm good at this job. I want to be great at it. I'm not sure how to get there from here."
I hear some version of this from almost every leader I work with. Being good at your job and getting twenty other people to be good at theirs are different skills. A 2025 survey of nearly 2,000 higher education professionals found that 84.9% want more leadership training, and only 32.6% say their institution delivers it.
Who This Work Is For
Department chairs, heads, and program directors — managing fractured faculty dynamics, or chairs who inherited dysfunction they didn't create and aren't sure how to address without making it worse.
Academic deans and associate deans — leaders carrying the weight between faculty governance and senior administration. Responsible for strategy, budget, personnel, and culture simultaneously, with little structural support for any of it.
Provosts and VPAAs — working to build or rebuild leadership capacity across a complex institution, often recognizing that the dean team isn't functioning as a team.
Aspiring faculty leaders — faculty members preparing for or seriously considering a move into a chair, director, or dean-level role. Often the person the provost is quietly developing, or someone who knows a transition is coming and wants to walk into it ready rather than figure it out on the job.
Experienced leaders at any level who are good at this job and want to be better. Leadership complexity doesn't decrease with experience — it changes shape. Some of my most productive clients have been leaders with 10+ years in the role who reached a ceiling they couldn't see from inside it.
If your institution is in a period of transition — a new president, a strategic planning cycle, sustained conflict, or a culture that's drifting — this is often the right moment.
What We Work On
Most of the leaders I work with have never had a coach before. The skills this role actually runs on — reading a room, handling conflict, building a team that functions without you — are learnable, and they're rarely the ones that got you promoted.
Coaching is one way to go build them. A structured thinking partnership with someone who understands the role, asks the right questions, and helps you build the systems and decisions that move things forward. It's 1:1 work shaped around your situation rather than a fixed curriculum, and most engagements run 12 weeks with sessions every 2–3 weeks.
TIME MANAGEMENT AND WORKLOAD
Most academic leaders don't have a time problem — they have a systems problem. We look at how you're actually spending your time, where the leaks are, and what structures would help you protect the work that matters most. The aim is getting your best hours onto the work only you can do.
STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION AND BUY-IN
Being right isn't enough. Getting faculty, staff, and administrators to move with you requires a different kind of work. We focus on how you frame your vision, build the case for change, and communicate in ways that land with different audiences — so your ideas don't die in the room they were introduced in.
LEADERSHIP
IDENTITY
Authority feels different when it's yours. We work on how you show up, how you exercise it without abandoning who you are, and how you lead in a way you can sustain over years rather than semesters.
DELEGATION AND SYSTEMS
Most leaders know they should delegate more. The harder question is what to hand off, to whom, and how to make it stick. We work through that in the context of your actual team and your actual workload.
PERSONNEL AND CONFLICT MANAGEMENT
Faculty and staff situations that go unaddressed tend to compound. We work through the specific situation in front of you — what's driving it, what you've tried, and what a realistic path forward looks like. A big part of this is equipping you with frameworks and approaches for the conversations you know need to happen but haven't had yet.
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
We work together to build an intentional path forward — getting clear on what you want, what moves are worth making now, and how to execute on them, including the application and interview process for leadership positions at every level.
"Kevin is an extraordinary listener, thought partner, and coach, full of wisdom, with a ready laugh! He helped me reframe my work environment, posing questions I hadn’t thought of, sparking new ideas and perspectives, which helped me release old ways of thinking, and guided me to own my voice again. As a new leader in academia, trying to find my place, Kevin made me feel heard and his energetic coaching unlocked a new courage within me. ”
Elizabeth Bewie, Coordinator of Music Ed Florida Gulf Coast University
"As a longtime faculty member who had recently stepped into a leadership role, he helped me fill in my knowledge gaps — managing staff, effectively communicating technical needs to non-technical stakeholders, and establishing healthy work/life boundaries. He helped me bridge the gap between my existing strengths and the new skills required for my new role. The most profound impact came from his ability to guide me toward some of my blind spots."
Department Chair
Florida State University
"Dr. Sanders brings a rare combination of thoughtfulness, supportiveness, and effectiveness to his leadership coaching. Many leaders excel in one or two of these areas, but he consistently demonstrates all three—and he does so with a focus on empowering others. His coaching is a testament to his commitment to helping higher education leaders grow, succeed, and make a meaningful impact.”
Michael Grose, Associate Dean
University of Oregon
Common Questions
Group Coaching
Not everyone needs 1:1 coaching. For some leaders, the group program is the better fit. You work through core leadership challenges alongside a small cohort of 8-10 peers who understand campus leadership from the inside. The coaching is structured, but so is the community. Many participants say the cohort itself — the relationships, the shared experience, the room full of people who get what the role is like — is as valuable as the coaching. If isolation has been part of your experience in this role, the group program deserves serious consideration.