The Kardia Group

The Kardia Group specializes in consulting, coaching, training, meeting facilitation, and organizational development in academia.

Kardia Group provides a comprehensive suite of services for the academic environment. These services have been developed through close association with academic institutions to achieve the development needs of faculty, staff, administrators, and institutions. Kardia Group provides services that are not readily available within a typical academic environment and are best delivered by experts who are located outside the academic infrastructure of a particular institution. These services include:

Coaching
Coaching supports and facilitates the growth of the individual’s leadership skills and abilities through providing timely and pertinent resources for the challenges, projects, tasks, and situations that faculty, staff, and academic administrators face on a daily basis.

Consulting and facilitation
Consulting services provide resources for assessing and developing departments, projects, policies, and institutions, and include the development and facilitation of strategic retreats and other organizational intervention strategies.

Seminars and presentations
Standard and customized seminars and presentations aid in the development of skills and strategies necessary for success in the academic environment.

Kardia Group has in its repertoire a wide variety of tools and skills that can be brought to bear in coaching and consultations, to create the best-fit solution for the needs and goals in the specific situation. These include:

In-Depth coaching – ability to coach key players in a consulting situation
Brief coaching – one or two sessions with individuals or small groups
Team coaching – working with a team (whether a small group working on a specific project, or a full department faculty), both as individuals and as a whole, to improve working relationships and effective achievement of team goals
Group coaching – for one or more individuals
Interviews – to gather information and perspective from individuals
Retreats – half-day to multi-day retreats to accomplish specific goals
Facilitation – working with groups to guide a process out of the tracks where it has gotten or might get stuck, into productive progress
Seminars and Training – creation and presentation of training seminars on topics as needed, including materials
Mediation – working with individuals or small groups to resolve a specific conflict
Survey creation and analysis –gathering perspective from constituent groups
Organizational analysis – to understand the structural dynamics, effectiveness of existing infrastructure, and capacity for change
Research, analysis and writing – to produce reports to inform situations

For academic departments

Disciplinary tensions, peer evaluation, and other factors unique to academia foster complex conflicts and tensions - overlaid on the usual communication issues, identity conflicts, power imbalances, discrimination, competing priorities...

For chairs and deans

The role of department chair or dean requires the knowledge, awareness, and experience of being a member of the faculty - an experience that provides little preparation for the realities of budgets, personnel issues, faculty/staff relations, student complaints, tenure denials... 

Diversity consultations and Climate assessments

Difference is the source of a richness of ideas, new directions, and continual expansion - much that underlies the academic endeavor. However, distrust, misperceptions, and conflicts related to difference too often impair productivity, decrease satisfaction, and undermine cohesiveness...

Web-based resources

The Kardia Group website is designed to be a repository of resources for participants in the academic endeavor. Case studies, descriptions of academic culture, planning documents, and other resources serve to foster a more strategic, aware, and prepared level of participation in the day-to-day life of colleges and universities.