Oriel Incorporated offers two project management training courses to give you the proper tools to create and deliver your organization’s products and services in the most effective manner possible.

From general definitions to the specific skills and techniques of scheduling, team management, communication, and more, our courses will teach you the latest and most effective project management techniques. Created in partnership with Boston University’s Corporate Education Center, these courses are presented by a stellar group of highly experienced professionals who have successfully employed project management across a host of industries.

Whether you are new to the field of project management or are an experienced manager who wants to keep up with the current trends, turn to Oriel. Our core material can also be customized to address the unique elements of your particular organization.

Our courses include:

• Principles and Techniques of Project Management
• Project Management Fast Track

Principles and Techniques of Project Management (3 days)
Learn how to effectively balance the weight of your managerial responsibilities with the expectations of different stakeholders.  This course provides an overview of the concepts and principles of project management, which will enable you to oversee your projects efficiently and effectively.  An integrated case study gives you a first-hand opportunity to practice the theories and concepts discussed in the course.  This class is 100% compliant with the current Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®) from the Project Management Institute (PMI®).

In this course, you will learn how to clearly differentiate among project, program, and subproject, identifying contrasting and related characteristics of each;  compare and contrast project management to strategic management, operations management, and crisis management, understanding your role in all of these relationships;  define the role of project manager while addressing the expectations of different project stakeholders;  and develop essential management deliverables such as project charters, scope statements, work breakdown structures, activity lists, duration estimates, network diagrams, and risk analysis.

Project Management Fast Track (5 days)
As a project manager, do you feel confident in your ability to effectively plan, execute, control, and close the projects that are assigned to you?  If not, or if you’d like to learn to perform your job more easily, look no further—this five-day class from Oriel, offered in partnership with Boston University’s Corporate Education Center, will give you the background and tools you need to optimize your role in the project management process.  Even better, this course will help you prepare for Project Management Professional®  (PMI) certification from the Project Management Institute® (PMI).

A case study is threaded throughout the program and includes activities that enable participants to apply the lessons that they’re learning.  The curriculum is presented in dual fashion: PMI theories are presented and then supplemented with examples from the course instructors’ project management experiences.  This combination of theoretical and practical will give you a more intensive presentation of the material, so that you can absorb—and retain—it more thoroughly.

Prerequisites for this course are a minimum of 2–4 years experience working in a project manager role and leading a team, familiarity with and understanding of PMI® and the PMBOK® Guide, and/or interest in and sufficient experience (4,500 hours over 5 years) to take the PMI certification exam.

An assessment centre is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your skills to employers through various tasks. Instead of just giving examples of your strengths in an interview, recruiters get to see how you behave in various work related situations. The activities are likely to be similar to the types of tasks that you would be doing on the job. So if you are applying for a role that involves a lot of data entry, you will probably be tested on your accuracy, speed, and attention to detail in a data task. Whereas for a job that  involves a lot of writing (e.g. marketing / journalism), you may be asked to produce  some sample text, or check existing work for errors.

Preparation is key to performing well.

Have a think about the key competencies they will be testing for on the day and what behaviours they will be looking for. If they are looking for someone who can work well in a team, make sure you actively listen to others’ ideas in the group exercise and bring in those who aren’t speaking.

Be prepared to be assessed from the moment you step through the door, so be polite and professional to everyone, starting with the receptionist. You will continue to be assessed during ‘informal’ sessions such as a drinks reception or dinner – so prepare questions to ask and don’t drink too much!

For further information check our calendar of events for our assessment centre workshops.
Helpsheets with tips and advice on Assessment Centre activities are available here.

Team behavior theory ( Tuckman) and leadership theories (Hershey and Blanchard, Adair) can be brought together to into a simple model  to show how different Leadership styles are required across the life cycle of an activity.

At the start an activity, task or project , the individual, team or group can be confused and uncoordinated!  The leader needs to be more directive; focusing on the task at hand and promoting ownership by the individual or team member and promoting their confidence.  As they develop, the leader focuses on coaching to get them into the normative stage!  Here it is agreed how they will behave to complete the task!  There may be conflict and a leader may need a facilitative approach to lead them to resolution.  As the individual or team becomes more confident and self managed the leader concentrates on leading the team overall and develops a delegating style!

This leaves most leaders with a challenge – how do I develop the competence and confidence to use a wide range of leadership styles?  We shall explore this theme in more details over the next few posts!

Succession planning ensures we have someone ready to do a job tomorrow

In business, we use succession planning to ease short term supply problems ~ or in plain terms ~ to make sure that we have people available quickly, to do a job and to do it our way.

We have 3 basic methods of succession planning

#1  Do nothing or leave everything to chance

This is obviously the cheapest to do.   It also sets the base line.  Whatever else we do should work better than this, or we will stop doing it!

#2  Job cover for every position 5 years ahead

We make a database listing every job in the organization and every person in the organization. This massive  ’spreadsheet’ is repeated 6 times: now, next year, 2 years from now, etc.  Every year, the plan is reworked to make sure that there is someone to cover every job 5 years ahead.  That way someone’s training and work exposure is started well before they are likely to take on the whole role.  And if someone resigns, there is already somebody in-house, trained and ready to take over.

This is the most expensive system and it works best when an organization is very stable.

#3  Evaluate the depth and potential of every team

This method looks at the potential of “critical” teams.

The depth of each team is assessed by rating each member on a 3×3 grid.  On the vertical is their current performance (better than adequate, adequate, not adequate).  On the horizontal is their potential (unlikely to go higher, will go up another level, will go up 2 or more levels).

This is a relatively cheap method because most of the data is already available from performance appraisals or it can be gathered intuitively from a panel of managers.

Succession planning in the information age

The key to #3 is an assessment of how much higher a person will go in the organization.  The Economist today makes a good point.  The level that a person will reach is no longer very relevant.

What is relevant is a person’s ability to

• gather information
• analyze information
• make sense of it
• present it so other people can make sense of it and know what to do with it

I can imagine some people thinking these skills mean research skills.  That’s not quite what we mean.  We mean skills linked to the internet.

• Make a website in minutes to make data available
• Use Google Alerts, Twitter and Search to keep abreast of events and to rapidly deduce what is relevant
• Mashup data so that other people can see what is happening
• Ask questions that are relevant to people around them
• Present data so that people understand the underlying processes and quickly understand what decisions they should make
• Track the effects of action

This sounds geeky.  It is a little.  To do any of this well, though, we need to understand people and their context.

What do they need to know and what will they do once they know?

Succession planning will ask then

• Is the person aware of what is going on around them?  Do they gather and analyze the right information?  Do they ask the right questions?  Do they lay out information well?  Do people understand them and people find it easier to act quickly and effectively?
• Is the person developing his or her information talents?
• Are they able to take on larger leadership roles with more complex & dynamic information environments than they currently enjoy?

It would be good to write up the types of information contexts that people work in currently and the demands on their attention.

The fact that all nurses will now require to have degrees, indicates that the major restructuring of staff planned within the NHS for some years now, is imminent.

Almost simultaneously it has been leaked that the Department of Health have proposed to cut central funding to hospitals to cover the salaries of junior doctors. Coincidence? Not on your life! They say it is to free up funding for nurse training. These proposals would have been made in the full knowledge of the likely outcome – that Trusts will cut the number of medical training posts.

The Witch Doctor’s interpretation of what is happening just now is very simple. Nurses NEED to have degrees so that The Skills Escalator becomes what it was always intended to be – a brutal cut in the numbers of expensive professionals (e.g. fully trained doctors and nurses), perched side by side, on the narrow upper echelons of The Skills Escalator, and a broad, broad base for a large workforce each of whom has clocked up a few simple competencies.

Those who have grabbed a fistful of “skills” will earn a place on the first few rungs of The Skills Escalator and most will go no further. This means, though, that the workforce will be “skilled.” It stands to reason. Hopefully patients will not know the difference between a professional worker and a skilled one. They certainly won’t know who is standing on each rung of The Skills Escalator. Eventually the skilled workers will regard themselves as “professionals” and The Skills Escalator will have done its job as one of societies‘ Great Levelers. Dumbing down will then be complete.

The Witch Doctor was made aware a couple of years back of a course being planned where a dietitian was to train staff in certain aspects of patient nutrition. Fair enough. Rightly, there was concern that patients were not eating their meals. The course was not really about nutrition at all. It was absurd. In one of the “modules” a banana featured. The skill required was to consider whether a patient was, or was not, able to peel a banana for herself. If the conclusion was that the patient was confused, had arthritis or couldn’t see etc, then that banana had to be peeled by the skilled worker and placed in an appropriate place that the patient could reach.

Who knows, maybe there was a “banana box” to be ticked on a clipboard. However, it was The Witch Doctor’s view that if members of staff did not have the powers of observation or wit to work this out, then they were a liability and should not be allowed near patients at all.

Not everyone will agree with The Witch Doctor, but she is of the view that “dumbing down” does not save money. Indeed, from what she has seen it can be a pretty expensive exercise. For example, a trained nurse while peeling a patient’s banana will ask, “why am I having to peel this banana today for this patient when I didn’t need to yesterday?” Nurses will want to know why there has been a deterioration. They will ask about pain and discomfort. They will look for vital signs. They will check the drug cardex. In fact, they are multitasking while they peel the banana. A professional, multi-tasking while doing mundane jobs, saves money, time and lives. Similarly, as a junior, The Witch Doctor used to pick up many important problems about patients and dealt with them, while she multi-tasked during her “blood round” early every morning. Incidentally, this also taught her how to get blood out of a stone and put up difficult drips at amazing speed! It also primed her for the following year when she had to tackle tiny scalp veins on dehydrated babies as a matter of urgency. Nowadays, she would not acquire these “skills” so easily. Phlebotomists were a great blessing in many ways, but they were also one of the earliest symptoms of “dumbing down.”

The Witch Doctor could go on, and on, about her views on The Skills Escalator and how “dumbing down” is the expensive alternative. But won’t. Instead, the question she is asking herself is this:

How can dumbing down save money? Lots and lots of money…….

She thinks she knows the answer to this.

She might be wrong, of course.

But the signs are all there that she is correct.

a red apple ……………………

The Witch Doctor – Link to a random page

_________________________________________________

LINK TO UK MISSING KIDS WEBSITE

LINK TO MISSING PERSONS WEBSITE

_________________________________________________

© Dlundin | Dreamstime.com

I’ve struggled to communicate exactly what a User Experience Designer does.  User Experience is a relatively new field.  It borrows a lot of techniques from various long-established disciplines, but I don’t think there is any strong consensus on what a User Experience professional does, how they interact with other established parts of an organization and how to know if you’re a good one.  In this post, I synthesize some of the current thinking on what UX Designers are supposed to do (UXMatters.com), how they go about doing it (userfocus.co.uk), how they might be evaluated (Jared Spool, uie.com) , and present a framework for thinking about your User Experience practice.

The Bottom Line:  UX Designers/Developers need skills in 3 areas: Core UX Skills (User Research, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Implementation, Evaluation), Enterprise/Business Skills, and Foundational Skills.

UX Designer/Developer Core Competencies

User Experience Definition

Search for ‘user experience definition’ and you’ll get a lot of different answers.  You could do worse than the ISO 9241-11 definition:

‘…we define [user experience] as all aspects of the user’s experience when interacting with the product, service, environment or facility’ and we point out that ‘it is a consequence of the presentation, functionality, system performance, interactive behaviour, and assistive capabilities of the interactive system.

It includes all aspects of usability and desirability of a product, system or service from the user’s perspective’.

That’s a tall order for one person to fill.  In a company of any size, it is unlikely that one UX Designer will have complete influence over all aspects of the user experience.

UX Honeycomb. Peter Morville

So while I hold this definition as an ideal, and try to communicate it to others in my organization, I tend to focus my view and efforts to the electronic, web systems that I design and have direct influence over.

There are a couple pictures that I think sum up this view rather well.  The UX Honeycomb describes 7 facets of a good web user experience.

Dan’s visualization of UX at KickerStudio encapsulates the notion that UX is the space/cytoplasm that connects the various disciplines into a single organism.

User Experience Artifacts/Deliverables

What are user experience designers supposed to do?  I like the idea that UX designers bring compassion and empathy into product design.  They use structured methods to turn empathy into a design process that result in improved user experience.  David Travis breaks UX work into four categories: Analyze the Opportunity, Build the Context for Use, Create the User Experience, and Track Real-World Usage and Continuously Improve the Product (graphic).

A Model for User Experience. David Travis

What deliverables they bring to the table?  We use tools like stories, wireframes, tasks analysis, and prototypes Peter Morville gives a nice overivew of the UX Deliverables (along with an excellent graphical UX Deliverables Treasure Map).

With Agile development methods leading to shorter and shorter developmet cycles, some have suggested that UX Designers also need some development skills.  Being able to express designs with the same language and tools as used by the ‘backend’ development team certainly makes easier for the UX designer to integrate their work with the development team.  I agree with this view, to a certain extent.  I started my career as a developer, and I still do some coding.  I think this helps me communicate with my full-time developer colleagues.  But I also think that focusing on development can taint your design thinking.  When you’re in the weeds of writing code, and under a delivery deadline, it’s easy to cut corners on the design and say “this works…this is good enough.”

User Experience Core Competencies

In his Agile2009 Keynote, Jared Spool had a nice graphic of all the different disciplines the UX Designer/Developer dabbles in (I’m surprised the slides from this aren’t available anywhere).  I combined some of these ideas, some from Steve Psomas in UX Matters (linked above), and my own thoughts/experiences.

I would tend to group UX Competencies into three categories.  Let’s look at the picture again:

UX Designer/Developer Core Competencies

CORE UX SKILLS

This is your ability to turn your compassion and empathy into design artifacts and deliverables.  This is what people hire you to do.  I think this breaks down into 5 areas:

• User Research
• Visual Design
• Interaction Design
• Implementation
• Evaluation and Testing

The graphic gives some examples of the types of artifacts deliver and skills required in each of these areas.  These are obviously not complete lists.  In particular, take a look at the Implementation box.  To be a UX developer these days, you need to know something about the front end presentation (HTML, CSS), the ability to make the screens sing and dance (javascript, AJAX, or maybe Flash, Flex, or Silverlight).  You need to be able to persist the data, whether in a local database, key-value store or remote system.  You need to be able to glue those two together, either through some lower level server side programming with straight PHP, or some framework like Ruby on Rails, Django, or CodeIgniter.

ENTERPRISE/BUSINESS SKILLS

Enterprise and Business skills enable you to map your Core UX Skills onto the needs of your organization in order to deliver business value.  As Jared Spool explains:

User experience extends beyond the on-screen interactions to all touch points with the user. Special skills are needed to ensure the team interacts with the rest of the organization in a productive manner. While the teams don’t need to know how to do the jobs of others in the organizations, they need to know how those other roles will influence the design.

I organized some of these Enterprise/Business skills differently than Jared…more in a way that fits my experience I guess.  Where the Core UX Skills live almost exclusively in the UX World, the Enterprise/Business skills are about the connections, interfaces, and links between the UX practitioner and the organization.

FOUNDATIONAL SKILLS

The Foundational Skills are the theory, tools, and practices that help you critically evaluate new technologies, tools, or methodologies.  Design and Development practices seem to come and go almost daily.  Today we’re all talking about guerilla usability testing, paper prototyping, user stories.  A few years ago talking about Usability Engineering, Outside In Design and looking at UI UML modeling.  Before that, we were talking about User Centered Design and the need for full blown usability labs.  Tomorrow, we’ll be talking about something else.  It’s your Foundational Skills that help you step back and see the relationships between all these things.  Foundational Skills enhance your ability to ‘pick up’ the latest thing because you can relate it to something you already know.

Foundational Skills would grow both through formal academic training in fields like Ethnography, Psychology, Human Factors, Computer Science, Engineering.  Foundational Skills would also grow through real-world experience with people, organizations, technology, and systems.

User Experience Core Competencies Use Cases

Assessing Your Own Strengths/Weaknesses

A designer/developer might rate themselves on some scale, say 1-5, in each of the 7 areas, to clearly communicate the skills they bring to the team.  I could imagine some color coded version of this graphic, or even a treemap that emphasizes where one’s skillset lies.

Assessing Your Teams Strengths/Weaknesses

A UX team manager might assess their teams strengths along these dimensions, in order to identify team strengths, weaknesses, opportunities to pair people and do cross-traning, and guide hiring decisions.  This leads to…

Evaluating Job Candidates

Given that you’ve identified areas where you need additional skills, you can rate prospective hires in the 7 areas (or ask them to rate themselves).  You can give each area a weight in order to emphasize the balance of skills you’re looking for, and build a table that calculates a weighted score for each of the candidates.

Conclusion

There are many misconceptions about UX.  In many organizations I’ve worked or consulted for, UX design is treated like some magical black box — sprinkle some pixie dust on our servers and *poof* out comes a great UX.  Maybe this type of framework can help remove some of the mystery, and help us communicate generally what we do and how we do it.  It may also help you communicate your own strengths, skills, and contributions to the product team.

I showed this visualization to my boss at my performance evaluation this year, and said, “this is how I think about UX and the types of things I should be doing…here are the areas where I’m strong, and here are the areas where I’m looking to grow.”  I noticed he only marked up the areas where I’m weak.  =)  That’s ok, because 1) we have others on our team that are really good in areas that I’m weak, 2) we agreed on where I need to get more practice, and 3) it lets me be proactive in defining the UX world, and the value a UX Designer/Developer in general (and me specifically) brings to the team, and what things I should be doing.

I certainly welcome thoughts from the community.  Is this helpful?

BLANCO, ASCENSIÓN (Coord.). Desarrollo y evaluación de competencias en Educación Superior. Madrid: Narcea, 2009.ISBN:978-84-277-1600-1.

Aquest llibre ens aporta una definició, desenvolupament i avaluació de les competències genèriques que es pretenen desenvolupar en els estudiants universitaris.

Disponible a la Biblioteca 

This is a bit of an unusual activity as it is essentially background reading for what is coming later in Unit 6.

First we are asked to look at: Hillier, Y. (2002) ‘The quest for competence, good practice and excellence’ (online), The Higher Education Academy. Available from: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/id494_quest_for_competence.

This paper focuses on attempts to define excellence in teaching, pointing out that this is hard to do, since it is a value judgement. Also what a teacher might rate as teaching excellence does not necessarily match what students view as excellence.

We are then asked to look at a paper by Goodyear et al. In this paper lists of competencies are given for specific toles in online teaching, e.g. manager, designer, technology, researcher, adviser, assessor, content facilitator, process facilitator.

Finally we are asked to ‘browse through some of the sites in the supplementary resources section below, looking for examples of elearning practice that could be used to illustrate the roles and competencies that Goodyear et al. refer to.’ That sounds to me like it is going to require a comparison table. I will return to this at a later date.

The CMALT core areas reflect my job as a media developer better than the core competencies of the LNS certification scheme. All four core areas are things that I would feel reasonably confident in providing evidence of compliance. For example item2: Teaching, learning and/or assessment processes includes ‘understanding your target learners’. This is a key part of the editorial side of my role – I need to know whether I’m editing material aimed at first level students or post-graduates. I need to know also what kind of previous knowledge or experience students are bringing on to a course. A big part of working at the OU is our commitment to providing accessible online learning materials, and so there is a lot of knowledge required for that in terms of understanding specialist needs.

For me, the LSN competences seemed to be painted with too broad a brush. I could certainly provide evidence that I know how to develop elearning materials and content, but the other competencies dont really reflect the skills and knowledge that surround that task.

The first part of this activity asks us to explore implicit and explicit definitions of elearning professionals, and specifications for education and training aimed at elearning professionals.

I like this definition, which is quoted by Warrior (2002): Sockett proposes that:
“A profession is said to be an occupation with a crucial social function, requiring a high degree of skill and drawing on a systematic body of knowledge.” (1985:27).

Although quite general, I think it applies well to the role of the elearning professional: the social function is that of elearning, an area that is becoming increasingly important in both education and business. That elearning professional draw on a body of knowledge is certainly true, although I am unsure how systematic that body of knowledge is. A high degree of skill is also a prerequisite – elearning is both quite technically challenging (wikis, blogs, VLEs, podcasts, etc.) and intellectually challenging (learning outcomes, pedagogy, etc.).

The European Institute for elearning has an interesting piece on the Certified e-Learning Professional (CeLP®) programme.
CeLP comprises some 300 learner hours of tutor-supported e-Learning and leads to five certified tracks; tutor, trainer, developer, manager and consultant. The press release is here: http://www.eife-l.org/news_events/releases/2005/en

This led me to a competency framework: http://e-learningzone.co.uk/resources/celp.pdf. This outlines competencise for managers, consultants, developers and tutors. I was interested to see that I indentified strongly with the developer competencies – being a media developer this is good!

The Elpco website (http://elpco.a2en.aoyama.ac.jp/EN/H01E-01.html) also lists five kinds of elearning professional: the instructional designer, the content specialist, instructor, mentor and learning system producer. I don’t identify so easily with these roles. Mentor = tutor, and at the OU the content specialist would be the authors, however, that role also overlaps with instructor. As a media developer I am partly an instructional designer, but again there is such collaboartion with the authors (course team) that I would be reluctant to label it so distinctly. I get the impression that instructional designers are seen very much as project leaders, whereas I tend to see the role as being much more team-orientated with a project manager leading the way.

Warrior, B. (2002) ‘Reflections of an educational professional’ (online), Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education, vol. 1, no. 2. Available from: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/hlst/documents/johlste/0030_warrior_vol1no2.pdf

We can only change successfully when we belong

As a young work psychologist, I was lucky. I graduated just as Zimbabwe achieved Independence and I joined the work force investment was high and change was rapid, far-reaching and positive.  Everything was being turned inside-out and upside-down, but in an climate of hope & expectation.

The business conditions of today are not that different – except that there is little hope & expectation. Other than Barack Obama, we don’t have leaders who are able to point us in a general direction and say “that way guys”.   And we don’t have investment flooding in. Times are tough. Failure and blame are in the air.

This bring us to a little-talked-about issue in change management. We can only change successfully when we belong.

Rethinking the work of managers

This week, McKinsey published a report on re-energizing senior managers. I almost didn’t read it. Why do I care about senior managers who created this mess, I thought?

That is precisely the point. They can’t think straight when no-one cares about them.

• Yes, it is clear they made the mess. They know that.
• Yes, it is clear that whatever business models they used in the past must be wrong. They know that.

But, they can only “step-up-to-the-plate” and help us work out the new rules when they know that we will accept them as they are – not all-knowing.

Remember for a long time we’ve treated managers as if they are all-knowing. We’ve given them conspicuous lifestyles because we wanted to reward this all-knowing.   And now they are not all-knowing, who are they?  What do they contribute? How are they supposed to function?

They are paralyzed.  The only way to unlock the paralysis, the only way to gain access to the skills and know-how that they do have, is to give them permission to be sort-of-knowing.  They cannot function unless we show them as they belong – as they are.

Where does belonging begin?

McKinsey write their report for CEO’s which leaves a second point unspoken. These are hierarchical organizations. The junior people do not decide who belongs and who does not. We don’t give permission to anyone to be anything.

In hierarchical organizations, the process of signalling belonging begins with the Board, goes through the CEO, through the senior managers to the managers and, only then, to the front-line.  Of course, this begs the question of who soothes the Board.  Well, we’ve hit on the fundamental weakness of hierarchical organizations.

Until we have sorted that out, the lesson for senior managers and change management scholars is that change will never happen unless everyone feels they belong. The first competency required of managers in a hierarchical organization is signalling that belonging. I have never seen that competency in an assessment centre. It should be there.

How do we communicate belonging?

The American psychologist, Baumeister, can demonstrate in a lab that we are all up-ended rather easily.  He asks people to play a computer game.  Half are treated nicely by the computer.  Half get snubbed.  Those who are snubbed don’t look in a mirror as they leave.  We are that sensitive!

Should we develop thick skins?  I haven’t seen any experimental work but I’d be willing to bet that ‘thick-skinned’ people feel snubs more deeply.  They just pretend to themselves that they don’t and become even more boorish.  We’ll let the lab rats test that for us.

The point is that in give-and-take of life, we do get ‘up-ended’; we do get snubbed.  Our internal equilibrium is upset.  At that moment, reassurances that we belong are invaluable.  Leaders who can accept our misery for what it is, without making it worse by threatening us with expulsion, are invaluable.  From that starting point, we can figure out what to do next, and spread the sense of belonging along to the next person.

How can develop resilience?

Not by being thick-skinned, that’s for certain!

Probably in three ways:

1.  Understand our deep fear of being ‘cast-out’.

People who need to cast-out others are deeply worried about their own status.  We need to reassure them of their worth before they will be more compassionate towards others.

In plain language:  Ask, why is this person being such an [insert your favourite word here]?  What is s/he worried about?

2.  Work with others

We are human!  When we have had enough of someone’s carping & complaining, get people who believe in the person to work closely with them.  Build the teams that form naturally and step-back to make the links between the groups.

“To be clear”, as politicians seem to have become fond of saying, I am not advocating you put up with bad behaviour or subject yourself to hours with someone who depresses you.  I am suggesting proactively putting together those people who reassure each. Then when the group is positive, link it to another positive group.  In that way, you remove yourself from provocation and provide positive alternatives.

In plain language:  When you cannot deal with someone, find someone who can.  What counts is getting along, not demonstrating our right to a temper tantrum.  Indeed, when you throw a temper tantrum, we have to ask the question under #1 – what are you afraid of?

3.  Take casting-out very seriously

We aren’t running a TV reality show.  We should only cast someone out when it is very clear that we will really be able to achieve a positive state and knowing that once the positive state is achieved, that we can invite them back in.  Tough criteria but the only criteria that tests whether or not we just throwing a self-indulgent wobbly.

We should make casting-out such a serious event.  We should document it and hold people accountable for getting it right.  I once taught with a Professor from West Point. He told me that if a student there fails, there is a full scale inquiry. The students are bright.  The Professors are good. They have the resources they need.   System fail – what went wrong?  The ethos, I was told, is that you don’t choose who you go to war with.

When we make casting-out difficult, then we are motivated to find other solutions and we may be well pleased with what we find.

In plain language:  Make casting-out rare and hard, so you can’t treat it as a cop-out.

4.  Look after your ‘interiority’

We have to keep ourselves emotionally fit.  Just as we eat, sleep, wash and exercise [do you?], we need to keep ourselves in emotional balance.  It sounds silly to say that our first job is to be happy.  The truth is that emotion is contagious.  When we are miserable, we make everyone around us miserable.  When we are in a good mood, we much more able to make space for others and much more likely to find unusual ways to get along – even if we don’t like each other very much.

But happiness takes hard work, and ironically, discipline.  We are happier when we take time to reflect on the day and get to the point that we are summing up and thinking about what went well and what we should do more of. We are happier when we spend some time in the morning thinking about what is important in life and allowing the pressures of the day find their smaller place under the greater umbrella.

In plain language: We are much more likely to be knocked off-balance when we are too busy to find the time to be happy.

5.  Build a strong positive network

And we do need to remember that we are all sensitive to rejection.  We need to cherish the social support that we get.

A neat trick that most people don’t know is that giving support is almost as good as getting support.   So when your support networks are thin, help others.

Help the person who is obviously stressed-out-of-their-heads at the airport or railway station.  Smile at the rude guy in a paroxysm of road rage (while you are wondering why his wife stays married to him).  Fake like they are human, as the saying goes.  You feel better.  And they calm down.

In plain language:  Don’t network for gain.  Network because it is fun.

Belonging in plain words

We can only function when we belong.  We can only lead positive change in awkward times when we like the people we lead. Sometimes they can be hard to like.  So our friends help us out and work more closely with the people they can bond with and we can’t.   Then we can link positive groups to each other.

We have always known this, but it takes the ‘crisis of capitalism’ and a ‘McKinsey report’ to bring it all home.  Remember that senior manager may still have a big car, but he (or she) no longer knows whether s/he are coming or going.  Someone has to settle them down.

In the meantime, connect with people who are positive.  Connect people to each other.

We will succeed in direct proportion to the amount that we trust each other.

]]> http://ffbsccn.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/vote-for-androgynous-leadership-2/ Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:11:20 +0000 csknowledge http://ffbsccn.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/vote-for-androgynous-leadership-2/

Cheryl offers: There’s a lot of debate in the media right now over whether or not more women in the upper ranks of the financial leadership ranks would have prevented the current economic situation.  In most of them, women and men seem to get “labeled” with all kinds of characteristics, usually stated as if they were fact based on profound research; usually they are not.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said. “The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous” and I tend to agree with him. This infers a great mind would have both female and male characteristics (the best of both worlds so to speak).  In Daniel H. Pink’s book, “A Whole New Mind – Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future” he proposes the idea we are moving from the Information Age, dominated by an economy and society built on logical, linear, and computer-like capabilities (think left brain hemisphere and robotic traders on Wall Street) to one called the Conceptual Age characterized by inventive, empathetic, big picture thinking found primarily in the right hemisphere of the brain.  Hmmm…makes me wonder if he’s not right! How different would our world be if the financial world had not been driven so much by numbers and had instead considered the long-term big picture with an empathetic view on the potential impact on those being affected. This is neither a male nor female view of the world. It’s androgynous and requires the whole brain to be engaged. Research has repeatedly proven more women in upper ranks of leadership will produce better financial and qualitative results. I vote for androgynous leadership rather than new financial laws!

Sara adds:   I hadn’t thought about leadership that way, but I like it.  Imagine a world where leaders are assessed by the competencies rather than gender or ethnicity!  It echoes Jim Collins’ idea of leadership in Good to Great.   “Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company.  It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest.  Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious – but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves. “  It is the best of both genders – just think consider the possibilites!

Earlier this summer, the MCH Leadership Competencies Workgroup announced the release of Maternal and Child Health Leadership Competencies, version 3.0. As you explore the materials available in this document you will find useful tools, resources and frameworks–including a definition of MCH Leadership, a conceptual framework for how MCH Leaders develop, and a list of the core MCH Leadership Competencies. Suggested education experiences for each competency, readings, websites, and additional assessment tools are also available, along with discussion forums and descriptions of how others are using the competencies.

Additional resources are available at http://leadership.mchtraining.net, a collaborative website of the MCH Training grantee network. Check it out!