Day 1: Mastering Challenges for the Self: Self-Management and Self-Motivation

The first day of this two-day workshop turns the spotlight on the participants themselves: you’ll learn how to sustain and strengthen your performance, motivation, and job-related well-being over the long term. Following the principles of positive psychology, the focus is on recognizing, cultivating, and purposefully deploying your own strengths and resources. You’ll also explore methods for managing your workload sensibly, setting priorities, and drawing clear boundaries.

Day 2: Mastering New Leadership Challenges: Motivating and Empowering Staff in Difficult Conditions

The second day centers on leading and motivating your team. You’ll learn—and critically reflect on—strategies for encouraging employees to act autonomously and proactively even under tough circumstances (e.g., talent shortages, heavy workloads, shifting expectations). The session also equips you to handle dissatisfaction and problems within the team with calm and constructive approaches.

Problematic Structures and Power Dynamics in Academic Organizations: How They Emerge, How to Recognize Them, and How to Influence Them

This workshop gives you a chance to use focused thematic inputs and intensive peer exchange to analyze your past leadership experience, your current roles, and the power resources that come with them within the organization as a whole. Building on that analysis, we will examine the structural framework and your individual situation to assess both the scope you already have and the latitude you can still expand.

The workshop also creates space for a solution-oriented discussion of experiences of powerlessness in the university setting. By day’s end, you will have broadened your existing repertoire of strategies.

Managing Conflicts Constructively and with a Focus on Solutions

In this workshop, participants analyze common sources of conflict in their work environment, reflect on their own approach to conflict, and learn a range of methods and techniques for constructive conflict resolution. These skills are practiced using real-world workplace scenarios. A special emphasis is placed on recognizing and overcoming traditional gender stereotypes in conflict management.

Projecting Confidence as a Leader

In this workshop, participants analyze and reflect on how gender-based role expectations and stereotypes shape their day-to-day leadership practice, with the goal of developing a confident way to handle potential workplace disadvantages. They learn techniques for shaping their verbal and nonverbal leadership presence, persuasively conveying their viewpoints, and responding calmly and quick-wittedly to resistance and disruptions.

Introduction to Peer Consultation

The final component of the program is the launch of an ongoing peer-consultation group at the close of the workshop curriculum. Participants receive a brief introductory workshop on the peer-consultation method, followed by two professionally moderated consultation sessions (2 hours each) in the subsequent months.