How Duke Alumni Engagement and Development Is Growing Duke's Next Leaders From Within

Duke’s Learning & Organization Development creates a custom program for 21 department managers

A paper is taped to the wall of a conference room.
AED Leadership Academy teams were asked to reflect on the concept of growth during a recent session. Photo by Stephen Schramm.

On a recent Monday morning, a group of managers from different corners of Duke’s Office of Alumni Engagement & Development (AED) paused their work to reflect on how they manage their teams.

As participants in a custom-built leadership academy designed by AED and Duke’s Learning and Organization Development (L&OD), 21 AED team members reflected on how their teams have evolved under their leadership and why. They explored where to focus their energy and examined what growth means in the context of their work.

“When you’re working day-to-day, you don’t usually have an opportunity to come together with your peers like this,” said Tom Dominick, Executive Director, Marketing & Communications at AED who has been at Duke since 2000. “This gives you an opportunity to think differently and really probe issues in a way that might solve something.”

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The academy is modeled after L&OD’s Duke Leadership Academy and Duke Management Academy, which are yearlong cohort-based programs that give Duke’s emerging leaders a chance to grow their skills and work together on projects exploring concerns at Duke.

Through its consulting service, L&OD helps departments and administrative units from across Duke University and Duke University Health System create customized professional development experiences for their members. They can be as simple as  bringing in an L&OD instructor to teach a specific course or designing cohort-based leadership development programs that can be customized to meet a team’s needs.

AED Leadership Academy participants take part in a group discussion at a recent session. Photo by Stephen Schramm.

“When people come to us, we work with them to develop a tailored, targeted experience that builds the skills and competencies they feel their team can benefit from,” said L&OD Associate Director for Organization and Workforce Development Shannon Ashford.

The roots of the AED Leadership Academy go back to fall 2024, when Dave Conner, AED’s Senior Director for Talent Management, and AED leaders began exploring the idea of partnering with L&OD for a tailor-made leadership development program.

After consulting Ashford about the design of the program, the “AED Leadership Academy” officially kicked off in August 2025.

“We like what those programs do and we’ve benefitted from them,” said Conner. “We just needed to accelerate leadership development within our own unit. Instead of waiting years to get several people through L&OD’s flagship programs, we wanted to get 21 people through one this year. And we also wanted to focus on real problems in our unit, the challenges we wanted to solve.”

AED Senior Director for Talent Management Dave Conner kicks off a recent meeting of the AED Leadership Academy. Photo by Stephen Schramm.

The AED Leadership Academy, which wraps up in May, consists of four, two-day in-person retreats featuring coaching, individual strengths assessments, guest speakers and classroom learning as well as team projects designed to address needs that are unique to AED.

The four project teams are exploring ways to create a standardized protocol and list of best practices for events and programming, how to better manage relationships across Duke, enhancing internal communication and finding new approaches for budget planning and oversight. 

They will present their findings and make recommendations for implementation to AED’s Senior Leadership Team in mid-May.

 “It really felt like the right moment to accelerate our leadership development,” said AED Associate Vice President for Organizational Performance and Business Operations Kate McDaniel. “These are our future leaders, so we want to make sure that they have developed the right muscles.”

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