A Chemist's Path to Leadership Education with Dr. Todd Deal

In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by Dr. Todd Deal, Senior Faculty and Director of the Higher Education Practice at the Center for Creative Leadership and a longtime facilitator with the ILA Leadership Education Academy, where he and Dan first met. Todd traces a career he calls serendipitous: 28 years as a tenured chemistry professor, a five-year stint as associate dean, and then a vice president's request that he build a leadership program for high-ability students despite having, by his own account, no obvious qualification for the job — a program that grew to fold in service learning and community engagement, occupied him for a decade, and won five national awards. Most of the conversation sits with the pivot from teaching to facilitating, including the early CCL colleague who told Todd his challenge wasn't passion for the material but his expert mindset. He describes how discovery learning and guided inquiry moved intact from chemistry into leadership theory, how deliberately forming teams across the four CliftonStrengths leadership domains cut his conflict mediation to two cases in the remaining years of a service-learning course, and why senior higher-ed leaders often handle ambiguity worse than undergraduates do — inventing rules and rubrics nobody ever stated, a pattern the 30 circles exercise exposes in about three minutes. He closes on framing academic and student affairs as a polarity to manage rather than a problem to solve, on CCL colleagues using AI to build experiential activities where none existed, and on 15 years as the public address voice of Georgia Southern football.

Resources and works mentioned in this episode:

• Todd Deal — CCL faculty bio — background on his higher education practice and the chemistry-to-leadership transition
• Frost, L. D., & Deal, S. T. General, Organic, and Biological Chemistry (4th ed.). Pearson. — the allied-health textbook Todd co-authored
• CliftonStrengths (Gallup) — the assessment Todd used to build student teams across the four leadership-strengths domains
• Bonwell, C. C., & Eison, J. A. (1991). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1. — referenced by Dan on the origins of active learning pedagogy
• Are You Facing a Problem or a Polarity? (CCL) — CCL's treatment of polarity thinking, the frame Todd applies to academic affairs and student affairs, originally developed by Barry Johnson
• Build Your Creative Confidence: 30 Circles Exercise (IDEO) — the creativity activity Todd uses with students and executive audiences, originally from Stanford's Bob McKim
• Leadership Educators Institute (LEI), Dec. 14–16, 2026, University of Louisville — the biennial conference Dan recommends
• Journal of Leadership Education — a source Todd credits for classroom activities he adapted for university and CCL audiences
• ILA Leadership Education Academy — where Todd and Dan met and began collaborating