Leadership and Team Development

Leading a team means growing it, helping advisors build new skills, coaching them through real challenges, and creating a culture where good ideas and hard work get noticed. This page brings together tools for supporting your team's professional development, project management basics, ways to recognize good work, and habits that keep your office improving over time.

Employee Development Opportunities

The resources below give you a few starting points: a tool for setting concrete, individual goals, guided ways for advisors to explore their own interests within the field, and formal training and mentoring options available to academic advisors.

Project Management Resources

Supervisors often lead projects, such as a new onboarding process, a caseload restructuring, or a technology rollout, without any formal project management training. You don't need to become a certified project manager, but a few basics go a long way.

Start by mapping your project with the Project Scope Worksheet, which includes instructions and examples. It walks you through the project's purpose, constraints and assumptions, key stakeholders, deliverables, timeline, and budget tracking. 

Interested in learning more? Check out a list of free project management resources below. 

Additional Resources

• Project Management Institute: Free articles, templates, and an open community section. PMI is the source of the PMBOK standards, so it's useful if you want terminology that lines up with PMP certification.
• PM Resources on Coursera (audit mode): Preview modules from courses like the Google Project Management Certificate and the Agile Project Management specialization for free by auditing instead of paying for the certificate. The Agile course covers Scrum roles, events, and backlog management.
• Scrum.org: The official home of Scrum, with free guides, glossaries, and open assessments — a good fit if agile/Scrum specifically is your focus.
• Atlassian's Agile Coach: A free, well-organized set of guides covering Scrum, Kanban, and agile team practices, written in plain language with visuals. No signup required.
• HP LIFE: A free, self-paced Agile Project Management course covering Scrum and Kanban, aimed at practical business skills, with a certificate of completion.

Employee Recognition

Recognition doesn't always mean formal awards, and waiting for the "right" moment, such as an annual awards ceremony or a big win, means most good work goes unacknowledged. The most meaningful recognition is often specific, timely, and small enough to give often. 

It can take many forms, including:

• A specific, genuine verbal or written thank-you
• Highlighting someone's work to your own supervisor or across departments
• Nominating advisors for recognition — submit a nomination for the annual Academic Advisor Awards, or nominate a team member for a NACADA award
• Giving credit by name when sharing a success with leadership
• Offering a valued opportunity (a stretch project, a conference, representing the team on a committee) as a form of recognition
• Simply asking "how did that go?" and genuinely listening — attention itself is a form of recognition

Thank An Advisor

The UAARE team's Thank an Advisor initiative lets anyone submit a short gratitude message for a colleague. The recipient gets it by email, and you can choose to have it shared publicly.

Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement works best as an ongoing habit, not a periodic special project. It's tempting to treat "improving how we work" as something that happens during a big initiative or an annual review, but the offices that actually get better are the ones where questioning current practice is just part of how the team operates day to day. As a supervisor, you help to set that tone.

A few ways to build that habit into your team:

• Normalize regularly asking "is there a better way to do this?" rather than treating current practice as fixed.
• Make it safe for advisors to point out problems or suggest changes without it being seen as complaining.
• Recognize and credit team members whose suggestions lead to real improvements.
• Balance stability with improvement: not every process needs to change constantly, but nothing should be permanently off-limits for review either.

Grounding Changes in Data

Pulling caseload numbers, appointment trends, or survey feedback before making a change helps you tell the difference between a real pattern and a one-off frustration, and gives you something concrete to point to when you explain the change to your team. 

Resources for Accessing Data

• Obtaining Appointment System Data (job aid)
• Data Through Institutional Research Workbooks
• Student Data Through the Student Information Generator (Office of the Registrar) — video tutorial
• Creating Surveys Using Qualtrics — YouTube video
  • Access the MSU Qualtrics Site

Developing Yourself as a Supervisor

Building this culture also depends on your own skills as a supervisor: facilitating change, coaching a team through it, and modeling the habit of reflection you're asking of others. Explore a range of resources for supervisor development below:

• elevateU — MSU's free online learning platform (via the EBS portal), with a dedicated supervisor track covering leadership, change management, and coaching, alongside a general employee track.
• MSU Performance Excellence: Supervisor Tips & Tools — MSU HR's collection of short guides for supervisors, including goal-setting tips, sample goals by role, conversation starters, and coaching-conversation frameworks.
• Faculty and Academic Staff Affairs Training Opportunities — A hub of MSU-specific development resources for those supervising academic staff, including SpartansLearn and links to instructor-led courses.
• Academic Impressions: Coaching in Supervision — Free modules built specifically for supervisors in higher ed, with a self-assessment worksheet you can bring into your own practice.