Skip to main content

Penultimate – reflection and influence


Hot damn I finally got a swim.

By the end of the day to day my team, team sky, was pretty burnt out so Andrew, Abbey, Yasna and I plus a couple of others did the pools. There are three. We should all probably have been working but we probably aren't ever going to get the chance to talk and swim at the same time again.

Three very interesting (for me) and different sessions today
  • Carrie Regenstein of Carnegie Mellon - took us through successful influencing.
  • Marnie Hughes-Warrington of ANU - gave us a tour de-force of what a great presentation can be. Passionate, direct and inspiring. It covered a Deuputy Vice-Chancellor's view of senior managers issues and design principles for a modern university. She also answered some curly questions from the attendees.
  • Judy Stokker provided a building block for all attendees - how to actively manage your career.

The Caudit cocktail - thanks to
Nimrod / Karina and team green
Active and Reflect have been two common themes that have run through this week for me. I've been going to the Yoga sessions every morning at 6:25. I've never been before and this morning I found it particularly challenging. In many respects it has reflected the day I end up having. Today Yoga was attended by a modest number (lots of folks were at the pub the night before). We did a large number of downward facing dog, don't worry if you don't know what that is, suffice to say it is as hard as some of the self reflective work we did today with Carrie and Judy.

Intentional could substitute for active. In our Yoga we're expected to be graceful and intentional. In the material Carrie and Judy provided they outlined how being intentional in our careers, and in how we manage those above and below us is made easier by us making what we do look effortless.

I've been a tour guide, and it strikes me that the same intentional approach applies there. Your clients/staff/boss expects you to provide consistency and support no matter what the request. Being intentional about what you say, do, and how you react to these requests makes you more trusted. The virtuous spiral then begins to grow, the more you're trusted the more you're intentional actions, use of emotional intelligence, personal self knowledge become part of the work landscape, the more your clients/staff/boss relies on you.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington is the pinnacle of this virtuous spiral, leader in her academic field and leader of her aspect of her institution. For me her presentation showed me that she had also mastered that art, to the point where like your voice or the words you write you're able to influence others with it at will.

The great thing about today was that, I think, we (the attendees) have all begun to see that while some have innate skills in certain areas no-one is rounded and that most skills can be improved. The key to realising my (your) potential is to
  • make time to reflect, on experiences feelings and your future.
  • actively make choices about what to do with your reflective discoveries.

More on this after I've had a sleep.

Dorje

PS Thanks to Karina for the photos in this post one from a morning walk and one from last night :-)

CAUDIT Leadership Institute - the morning after
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To setup rails on IIS and enable it for multiple Applications. START Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1 IIS 6 RUBY Install ruby 185_22_rc2.exe You don't have to put it in c:\ruby I created the following folder c:\webdata\ruby, then ran the install. Run install into c:\webdata and say "YES" to deleting the existing ruby directory. During the install I ticked SciTE and Enable RubyGems Took 10mins 1000s of files Ruby GEMS Install Ruby Gems 0.9.1 (don't change it from the defaults) Extract zip file to temp directory, then double click setup.rb, does the default install (about 5mins) Then run at the command line gem pristine --all c:\> gem pristine --all I tried to install Ruby Gems in a particular directory, but couldn't get it working because if you use the command line SET command to put a value into GEM_HOME when the ruby gems installer setup.rb reads the registry it doesn't account for the fact that values in the registry contain double b...
4 comments
Read more

Yammer and puddles

Recently I was asked " What are the top 10 points you think are important to get across to staff at all levels in an organisation about Yammer? " My initial reaction was "Tough ask", mainly because I've seen great write ups on what organisations get out of Yammer but very few that talk directly to the user benefits. Many articles give the usual cop out "users can't see the point, until they get it" I admit I was in that boat when I started using Twitter, a public micro blogging platform. But just like they said "once I used it I got it". What they didn't say was that it took a while and it suits certain people better than others. So as with all things in the social media space, be aware that culture change not the technology may be your biggest challenge. So what does Yammer, a microblogging platform for organisational use , do for real employees that is compelling enough for them to spend the time to "Get it" ? First off Y...
6 comments
Read more

Make it useful and they'll love it

AwayToday - useful and well loved The AwayToday feature created for the intranet I work on has garnered some interest via email and the Kiwi Intranets online group because it won a Gold Award in the Intranet innovation awards 2007 . To answer these questions and help the intranet community in general this post will out line some of the processes and features that have made this a well used and now essential tool. The problem : Staff absence from the workplace due to sickness, off site business commitments or travel for work caused a communications breakdown. This had a negative impact on our business. The solution : "Share the love" - but seriously, sharing the information that was already available to some staff with everyone was our solution. Let everyone know where everyone else was, or at the very lease let them know if they were in the office or not. To this we added when they could be expected back in the office. Background : Now used by staff globally the de...
1 comment
Read more