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This week on the Faculty Factory podcast, we chat with Christina “Chris” Runge, PhD, CCC-A. Dr. Runge is the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW).
You can learn more by reading some of the episode’s highlights, or by listening to the entire episode via the embedded podcast player above.
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Leadership, Training and Networking
Dr. Runge: The leadership development and the leadership academy, and all of the things we do, it’s not about the title that you’re going to have some day. From my leadership academy days, I’m still friends with folks who went through it with me, but also, it’s about leading meetings. And there are opportunities for people to lead every single day.
Kimberly : Time and time again, at the end of all of our leadership programs, the important feedback is that participants say, “I just loved meeting people like me. I just love the opportunity to build relationships with people who are in a similar stage of life and have the same challenges and thoughts and doubts and are curious about things.”
So many things come back to that; just reaching out to each other and building relationships and community. I think that’s really unique that you have that as a guidepost and I love it.
An Environment for Faculty to Thrive
Dr. Runge: One of the things I’m very excited about in a lot of ways is the work that we’re doing for faculty well-being. We have three strategic focus areas in the Office of Faculty Affairs, and that’s faculty well-being, career advancement, and leadership development. We have a lot of our career advancement work, we’ve been doing for a long time, and we also have our leadership development. We’re always looking to be novel and do new things there. But the well-being piece is so critical and it’s a foundation for everything that we need and want to do here.
What we are doing for well-being is near and dear to my heart because I have personally been participating in a lot of the work that we’re doing to advance the well-being of our faculty. We have now instituted the well-being index as a measure of well-being for faculty and it’s helping us steer our resources and direct ourselves to the departments and divisions that maybe need it the most, have the highest distress scores, and that need institutional support.
The Faculty Factory
Kimberly: The whole purpose of this podcast is for us to get to know each other and inspire each other and just take some time out of our regular jobs and conferences to kind of glean some insight.
Dr. Runge: Thank you so much for inviting me to have this chat today. I’m really honored and I think it’s been really fun and I appreciate this. I really love this [Faculty Factory] project. I’m excited to hear from all of our colleagues and the wisdom that they have to share. I’m very excited.