drbrendanmoloney - Tips and Strategies for Professional Growth

Knowing that professional growth in higher education governance requires structural literacy, exposure, and a track record is one thing; knowing how to actually pursue those things week to week, inside a busy institution, is another. Where broad career steps describe the destination, practical tips and strategies describe the route — the specific habits, requests, and choices that turn ambition into capability. This piece focuses on the tactical layer: the concrete moves governance professionals and aspiring academic leaders can make to accelerate their development without waiting for a formal program to hand it to them.

Want expert help putting this into practice? Dr Brendan Moloney can guide you through it.

Treat Committee Papers as a Training Ground

Every committee paper that crosses a governance professional's desk is a small case study in institutional decision-making. A useful strategy is to read papers not just for their content but for their construction: how is the recommendation framed, what evidence is presented, what risks are acknowledged or left unstated, and how does the paper anticipate objections from the room. Over time, this habit sharpens both analytical skill and an instinct for what makes governance advice persuasive rather than merely accurate.

A related tip is to volunteer, wherever possible, to draft or co-draft papers rather than only reviewing them. Drafting forces a much deeper engagement with a governance issue than passive reading ever will, and it produces a visible body of work that decision-makers come to recognise and trust.

Ask for Debrief Time After Significant Meetings

Related: drbrendanmoloney - Best Practices for Professional Excellence.

One of the most underused strategies in governance development is the simple act of asking a chair, secretary, or senior colleague for ten minutes after a significant board or committee meeting to talk through what happened. What seemed to work in how an issue was presented? Where did the discussion go off track, and why? These debriefs compress years of accumulated pattern recognition into a much shorter learning curve, but they rarely happen automatically — they have to be actively requested.

• Request a short debrief after any meeting involving a contested or sensitive item
• Ask specifically what could have been framed differently, not just what happened
• Keep a private log of recurring themes across multiple debriefs

Rotate Through Different Governance Functions Deliberately

Governance work spans several distinct functions — policy development, risk and compliance, academic quality assurance, secretariat and meeting management, and stakeholder engagement. A common mistake is to specialise too early in one of these areas and never build competence in the others. A more effective strategy is to deliberately seek rotation, even informally, across at least two or three of these functions early in a career. Someone who has drafted policy, managed a compliance response, and run a board secretariat function brings a far more rounded perspective to senior governance roles than someone who has only ever done one of the three.

This rotation does not need to happen through formal job changes. Many institutions allow staff to join working groups, second onto a project, or support a colleague in a different function for a defined period. These smaller-scale rotations often deliver most of the developmental benefit without the disruption of a full role change.

Build a Personal Reading and Reference System

See also: drbrendanmoloney - Essential Steps for Effective Leadership.

Governance professionals who grow quickly tend to maintain some form of personal system for tracking sector developments — regulatory updates, sector reviews, changes to standards frameworks, and notable governance failures or successes reported elsewhere in the sector. This need not be elaborate; a simple running document noting what changed, why it matters, and how the professional's own institution would respond is often enough to build meaningful expertise over a year or two.

• Track regulatory and standards updates relevant to the institution's jurisdiction
• Note governance case studies from other institutions, including failures
• Periodically test personal assumptions against what a review or audit actually found

This habit compounds. A professional who has been doing this quietly for several years walks into governance discussions with a depth of contextual knowledge that is difficult for others to match quickly.

Seek Feedback That Is Specific, Not Just Encouraging

Encouraging feedback feels good but rarely accelerates growth. A more useful strategy is to explicitly ask senior colleagues for specific, even uncomfortable, feedback: what would make a paper more persuasive, what body language or framing undermined credibility in a meeting, where judgement was sound but communication was not. This requires some vulnerability, but professionals who normalise asking for this kind of feedback develop faster and, over time, become more trusted precisely because they are visibly responsive to it.

Framing the request narrowly helps. Asking "what's one thing I could have done better in that meeting" tends to produce a more useful answer than a general "how did I do," which often invites only reassurance. Over time, collecting this narrow, specific feedback from several different senior colleagues builds a far more accurate picture of genuine strengths and blind spots than any single annual performance conversation ever could.

Protect Time for Reflection, Not Just Activity

The final strategy is perhaps the least intuitive in a busy governance calendar: protecting deliberate time for reflection rather than filling every gap with more meetings or more papers. Writing on institutional leadership, Dr Brendan Moloney has noted that governance judgement is built as much through reflection on past decisions as through exposure to new ones, and that professionals who never pause to review what worked and what did not tend to repeat avoidable mistakes.

Setting aside even thirty minutes at the end of each month to review recent governance decisions — what was handled well, what would be done differently, what new pattern emerged — turns ordinary experience into compounding expertise. Professionals who build this habit early often find that, within a year or two, they can recall precedent and reasoning for past decisions far more reliably than colleagues who covered the same meetings but never paused to reflect on them afterward. None of the tactics above require institutional permission or a formal development budget; they are, deliberately, things any motivated professional can start doing this month, which is precisely what makes them a useful complement to the longer, more structural steps that a governance career eventually also requires.