[Mid-Career Series] What Academic Leadership Really Means (Re-Release EP 94)

In this episode, I’m breaking down one of academia’s biggest myths: that leadership and administration are the same thing. They’re not, and understanding the difference can transform how you approach your academic career.

As part of our Mid-Career Series, this episode explores what real leadership looks like beyond the tenure track. I share what I’ve learned about leading without losing yourself to bureaucracy and why leadership is less about hierarchy and more about vision, collaboration, and identity. 

You’ll also hear what I learned firsthand from stepping briefly into administration and how it reshaped my understanding of what academic leadership really is.

Tune in now to learn how to leverage your leadership to build influence, impact, and a meaningful legacy without getting lost in admin work.

Redefining Leadership in Academia

Leadership isn’t about managing forms or sitting in endless meetings. It’s about advancing ideas that shape your field and inspire others. Too often, academics conflate leadership with titles, but real influence comes from creativity and conviction. I share how stepping into an interim administrative role showed me that leadership doesn’t require a corner office; it requires clarity of purpose. You can lead from wherever you are, through mentoring, publishing, organizing, or innovating in your discipline. I challenge you to reframe your leadership mindset from “I’m not in charge” to “I’m leading change.” 

Building Teams That Amplify Your Impact

You can’t do meaningful work in isolation. Mid-career is the perfect time to rethink how you use your time and talent by building a supportive team around you. I discuss how to identify your “zone of genius” and delegate or collaborate on the rest. Whether that’s hiring a research assistant, creating a peer writing group, or partnering on grants, building a team lets you focus on high-value contributions. Leadership becomes less about doing more and more about amplifying the right things, like your ideas, your academic mission, and your impact.

Leading with Vision, Not Titles

The most powerful leadership doesn’t always come from formal positions. It starts with a vision for what could be different and having the courage to pursue it. I talk about how mid-career scholars can lead cultural and intellectual change by modeling the kind of academic life they want to see: sustainable, equitable, and innovative. Leadership is not about gatekeeping. It’s about opening doors for others. When you redefine leadership this way, you reclaim your agency, your creativity, and your ability to make lasting change from wherever you are.

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“The skill set for leadership and for university administration is an overlapping venn diagram rather than one set of skills. When academics think about: What do I want to do with my career? I want to have an impactful presence in the world. I want to take my research up to the places that I can see making a big difference in the field. Those are questions that leaders ask themselves. So, if those sound familiar to you, if that sounds like your hopes and dreams, then you are already thinking about leadership.”

“Leadership is understanding that you need a team of people around you and leadership is also understanding that impact and legacy is building that team. It’s building people around you that are supporting you and in the process of supporting you, they are helping to create that impact and create that legacy.”

We’re receiving applications for our next cohort of Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap®. Check out the program details and start your application process here.

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Apply here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing,and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. If you would like to hear more from Cathy for free, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter, In the Pipeline, at scholarsvoice.org. It’s a newsletter that she personally writes that goes out once a week with writing and publication tips, strategies, inspiration, book reviews and more.

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