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In response to both the lack of formal leadership training and the challenges facing leaders across higher education, a number of programs are being planned and initiated at colleges and universities. This application brief highlights the conceptual foundations, structural components, and operational considerations of one such program, the Rutgers Leadership Academy (RLA). RLA was created to provide an integrated leadership development program for individuals in academic, administrative, and professional programs who aspire to assume or advance in leadership positions. The program is theory-based, and emphasizes leadership, communication, and organizational concepts and competencies. Somewhat uniquely, it is designed for both academic and administrative leadership positions, and it highlights the importance of informal as well as formal leadership roles, among other core topics. We have found the proposed model to be useful in developing high-quality leadership initiatives for our institution, and the core components of the model and initial outcomes may be of use to others in their leadership development efforts.

Leadership scholars, practitioners and educators find themselves at a very opportune time, when their subject matter-expertise is of increasing interest across sectors, settings and levels of analysis, as leadership is hailed as both a pressing problem and a promising solution. It is also a challenging time for leadership study—a point in time when incongruities between leadership theories and the observed dynamics and outcomes of leadership in practice have been difficult to ignore. In this article we identify and discuss several problematic incongruities, explore possible reasons for these gaps and outline an integrated view of theories of resonance, communication and systems to address these discontinuities and advance our understanding of leadership theory and practice.

Building upon the intersection of theories of resonance, communication and systems in this conceptual article, we advance a line of renewed macro-level thinking on the topic of leadership as social influence, resulting in what we describe as leadership resonance theory.

This article advances an explanation of leadership as a phenomenon that is co-constructed through the communicative connections established between leaders and followers. These connections are mutually-defining, mutually-reinforcing and mutually-causal. Resonance, activation and cultivation are central concepts in the proposed framework, introduced to help explain dynamics and outcomes that seem unpredictable or unexplainable when focusing attention solely on a leader or followers in isolation of one another at a single moment in time.

This framework offers an original, nuanced and integrated way of thinking about leadership in terms of communication, social influence and systems theory, and it helps to explain gaps between the guidance provided by leadership theory and observed leadership outcomes in practice. The proposed framework can help to explain observed leader–follower behaviors, dynamics and outcomes, irrespective of whether they are seen as desirable or comfortable, whether they are necessarily aligned with extant theories or guidance on preferred practices and whether or not they align with traditional values in a personal, organizational or societal context.

Standard doctoral preparation includes formal training in a specific academic discipline. In some instances, this training includes experience serving on departmental and university-wide committees. Structured leadership education, however, is most often a peripheral concern of the graduate school experience. For a significant number of doctoral students, formal leadership education is simply not considered to be of primary importance to the careers to which they aspire within higher education. Recognizing a need for increased leadership preparation in higher education, this chapter aims to highlight one systematic model for leadership education at the doctoral student level, the Rutgers University PreDoctoral Leadership Development Institute (PLDI).