Skip to main content

Professional Development 12/12/13: Maximizing Team Performance: How to Lead Teams

I attended this HR session, led by the always-insightful Alt Kagesa, to learn a little bit more about different leadership styles in KS as an organization. Here are some highlights:
-Leading effective teams require: a common cause, quality contributors, effective communication, and quality connections, and the difference between a group and a team is a common cause.
      I think that, if people are able to unite through the common cause, then they are able to work together effectively and build a strong team. However, I think even more core is the idea of respect for someone's work. I know that I have worked in teams where one person doesn't carry their load, coupled with how much they claimed to be doing--to me, situations like that undermine work and team work more than any personal issues, because they then make the work a personal issue.
-A good leader recognizes when elements of a team aren't working. 
     Alt recommends train, transfer, or termination, but says that "to do nothing is leadership failure." As a worker, I agree that a team is further undermined when one person's misbehavior is not noticed by leadership, because then leadership's discernment then seems questionable.
-Maximize strengths, minimize weakness.
     This phrase is one of our team norms, and I find it open to interpretation. To me, this means that we help people excel in their roles; for others in KSDL at the time, it meant that picking up the slack for others' lack of skills. I disagreed with the second interpretation because, as a high performer, it seems like that means high performers work harder and low performers face no repercussions. That kind of attitude depletes the team's resources.
-The goal of communication isn't communicating; the goal of communication is understanding.
     To me, this statement is very true, and I find it laudable that a leadership development class makes this very clear.
-10 - 4 communication plan: A change that is not shared ten times, in four different ways will be misunderstood.
    As a parent, I found this statement also to be very true. I think it is also important to add that follow up, consistency, and positive modeling and practice are equally imperative for communication success, because people also communicate with actions.
-The #1 correlation to job satisfaction is relationship with supervisor.
     Very true, which is why I am particularly grateful that I have a good working relationship with my manager. Mahalo, Clinton!




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Schools of the Future: Acquiring and Representing Knowledge

This year's Schools of the Future conference was an information-rich event. When we think of the future, more than a few of us probably also think of technology. That association certainly carries over in the interpretation of the conference title Schools of the Future . Indeed, many topics besides educational technology were covered; however, the technological advances were a strong highlight at the conference in my view. As mentioned in one of Cassie's previous posts , there are online classes everywhere. The first few links on my list reference ways to learn on your own (i.e., ways to acquire knowledge). The second set of links refer to ways of representing knowledge. **Note:  All icons link to the affiliated website.  Academic Earth has hundreds of free online lectures from prominent university professors, including Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, The University of Houston, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Michigan State, Princeton, Rice, UCLA, UCSF, and the list

Geotagging

A "wouldn't it be nice" idea that's been around a while is the ability to tag a map with images that are linked to more information about the site. Kelly C suggested it as a way for students to share knowledge about a cultural/historic site or the geographic area they live in with classmates. (right, no addresses!) There are now cameras and even storage media that embed latitude and longitude into images as they are shot. But you don't need fancy new toys to do this. I tried Flickr's geotagging map and it's fun and supereasy. Want to try it? Log in to Flickr http://www.flickr.com Sign in as " techedine " password " wist101 " yea, corny. Click the " You " tab then the " Your Photostream > Map " or Organize > Your Map links. Click the Satellite link in the upper right. Cool view! (you may need Google Satellite downloaded). Images along the bottom of the screen with colored dots have already been droppe

Zoho Creator

I thought I’d share this web application I came across in my quest to find a relatively simple app to help us manage our mentoring data in the DL Orientation. Our specific needs were that it be a free online database, password protected, had the capability of rapid form development without too much programming knowledge and was easy for the end user to use. The application that met these requirements was Zoho Creator ( http://www.zohocreator.com/ ) a part of a suite of online applications including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, wikis, organizers and more. What’s great about Zoho Creator is that they have an online repository of applications already developed that you can download to your account and use for free. Initially, I tried some of these applications, but it was overkill for our needs. Zoho Creator can do a lot if you know programming and they have a pay model where it allows you more flexibility and features. I think Zoho Creator would be a useful tool for both