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Tuesday, 8 July 2008: 1:55 PM
Learning Objective 1: 1. Describe the difficulties institutions face in preparing new leadership, and the cost of failing to widely prepare a cadre of potential leaders.
Learning Objective 2: 2. Explain how the challenges faced by faculty when a leadership training program is used under cross cultural conditions can be successfully addressed.
University administration often takes place under conditions made difficult for leaders; including narrow availability of leadership training for persons climbing the career ladder to leadership roles; and little support, sometimes even outright hostility, from public or political entities and other stakeholders. Since leadership performance is not incidental to institutional success and since institutional competition may be intense, the stakes are high. In a nation with a new national agenda to increase the utilization of technology and reduce historic racial discrimination in all milieus, the need for a successful, routine process of leadership development becomes acute. When the incoming national leadership of South Africa appointed a historically Black institution to serve as the only school of nursing in the region, it was clear to administration that a mechanism to address nursing leadership and technology utilization was acute. This presentation describes a cross-cultural inter-institutional train-the-trainer approach to pilot, evaluate and revise a technologically advanced model of academic leadership training that had proven successful in the University of Missouri -Kansas City, School of Nursing in the United States so that it might be useful to emerging leaders at The University of The Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, and their institution. Outcomes of the program (funded through the US AID Higher Education Project) included the development of a culturally modified leadership program that became self-sustaining as an African regional center for “train-the-trainer” leadership development modalities; a women's writing group to promote professional publication among faculty; and extension of the leadership training module in a campus-wide Academic Leaders Program developed to impact UWC on a system-wide basis.