Kevin Sanders
After two decades as a faculty member and senior leader in higher education, Kevin Sanders launched Cornerstone Leadership Group in 2023 with one mission: building the leaders who build the campus.
Kevin's career began on a stage. As a classically trained tubist, he performed with world-class orchestras across five continents before moving into academic administration. He started on the faculty at SUNY Potsdam and the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, then spent more than a decade in progressively senior roles at the University of Memphis and Baylor University, serving as associate chair, director, and dean. He currently serves on the Baylor faculty.
Kevin has worked across strategic planning, faculty development, enrollment strategy, curriculum design, capital projects, donor relations, and community partnerships. Leading teams of more than 100 faculty and staff, he has hired and fired, restructured departments, launched programs, and built international partnerships. He planned and opened a $44 million performing arts center and set enrollment records at two institutions. He knows the messy middle of academic leadership, from celebrating brilliant colleagues to making the decisions that follow you home.
He earned degrees from Indiana University, The Juilliard School, and Michigan State University, complemented by executive training at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Stanford’s d.school for design thinking, and the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership (Georgetown/ASU). Additionally, he is an ICF Associate Certified Coach, a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach, Prosci-certified in change management, and a certified facilitator through Leadership Strategies.
He writes The Academic Leader's Playbook, a weekly newsletter read by leaders at more than 580 institutions in over 50 countries, and is represented nationally by APB Speakers Bureau.
When he's not talking leadership, you'll find Kevin exploring the local arts scene with his wife Catherine (a pediatric pulmonologist who loves beekeeping and wins at word games), their two creative and energetic kids, George and Genevieve, and their golden retriever, Fitzgerald, who largely runs the show. His happy place is outside in the mountains, wrapped up in a good science fiction or historical novel.
Certifications
The story
Many years ago, I spent a month performing with a professional orchestra abroad. The first week, a guest conductor led rehearsals, clear about what he wanted, generous with productive feedback, holding a standard that brought out your best. After rehearsal, musicians lingered just to keep talking about the music.
The second week, the permanent conductor returned. He focused only on what was wrong, treated every question as a challenge to his authority, and was unpredictable. Nobody knew what would set him off. By the end of that week, something had shifted. Questions stopped. Shoulders pulled in. The sound of the entire orchestra became smaller.
Same musicians. Completely different sound.
That experience stayed with me. Great music works because the conditions for it exist. Musicians arrive at rehearsal having studied the same score and knowing how their part fits in the plan. Individual voices serve the ensemble's shared vision. Feedback is immediate, not once a year. And collaboration is a daily requirement of the work, not a stated value. These conditions don't appear by accident. Someone has to build them — and too many leaders have to figure that out alone. That's the problem Cornerstone exists to solve.
Cornerstone Leadership Group
Cornerstone Leadership Group is a higher education leadership consultancy, founded by Dr. Kevin Sanders in 2023, that helps colleges and universities address their most pressing leadership challenges: preparing new leaders for their roles, building team alignment and accountability, designing systems that scale, and translating institutional strategy into execution. Cornerstone works through a network of senior practitioners, each a specialist in academic leadership. Our work is grounded in a deep understanding of how academic institutions operate and what it takes to drive real change in complex environments.
Most academic leaders are promoted for their scholarship and then learn management on the job. Cornerstone exists so the institution stops absorbing the cost of that.
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