Leadership Talk: Positive Academic Leadership – How to Stop Putting Out Fires and Start Making a Difference
January 23, 2025
06:00 PM – 07:30 PM CET
ONLINE
Dr. Jeffrey Buller
English
*NEW DATE* January 23, 2025!
When many people hear the expression “positive leadership,” they think, “Oh, that’s easy. Just keep a positive attitude and hope for the best.”
But that approach doesn’t work particularly well in the setting of higher education, nor do many the so-called “traditional” leadership approaches that were developed for more hierarchical organizational cultures. In this expert talk, the speaker will discuss what genuine positive leadership looks like in an academic setting, why it is effective in that environment, and which specific strategies (what the psychologist Martin Seligman calls “positive interventions”) can enable us to lead more effective in higher education today.
The Expert
Jeffrey L. Buller is the president and CEO of ALPHA Leadership Programs. He has served in administrative positions ranging from department chair to vice president for academic affairs at four very different institutions: Loras College, Georgia Southern University, Mary Baldwin College, and Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of twenty-six books on academic leadership, a textbook for first-year college students, two books of essays on the music dramas of Richard Wagner, a book of research on the Greek tragedian Sophocles, and more than a dozen novels. Dr. Buller has also published over two hundred articles, essays, and reviews, including works on Greek and Latin literature, nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera, and college administration. From 2003 to 2005, he served as the principal English-language lecturer at the International Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany. More recently, Dr. Buller worked as a consultant to the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia, where he conducted workshops to improve academic leadership across the Kingdom.
