Today's focus was on leadership.
We covered leadership for and of change with Nick Tate first off. This was followed by Peter Nikoletatos on the Situational Leadership framework, what being a CIO is about and how to manage challenging staff. Willie Pritchard followed lunch with Interpersonal communication, a look into preferred styles and those of your coworkers. Liz Gosling rounded out the day with a big session on Effective Teams and our own Belbin team traits. Beach cricket and a meal out in Kingscliff finished everyone off.
Due to some technical challenges I missed the beach cricket, but that did mean I had time to fill in session feedback surveys and have a brief look at our homework case study.
Nick's talk on change management I appreciated as it was done using slides like those I prefer, lots of bold images. Nick has a dry and very wry wit which he used to great effect in his talk by setting the audience up to think one thing and then surprising them (and thus getting their attention) by saying the unexpected. Historical leaders of change provided Nick with some great material for expanding on Dr Kotter's change steps , the impact of these at the personal level, and how it is a relatively well understood process.
Peter Nikoletatos reinforced that this week is to give the attendees tools that can be adapted to our own environments and styles. Peter made the point that leaders get people to do things because they want to, unlike managers who tell people to do things. We were then asked to question ourselves about
Willie Pritchard ran the next session on interpersonal communication. Willie's presenting style I like a lot he came out into the audience, asked the audience for their experiences and generally lowered the bullet point per slide average for the day very nicely. As with the other presenters today Willie incorporated a team based task, in his case based around Dr David Merrill's social style theory of different types of communicators: analytical, amiable, driver, expressive. This led on to realising you can only modify yourself and so being able to identify different styles those you interact with have, provides you with the chance to "style flex" and have more productive communications.
Our Belbin pre event work was next. Liz Gosling took us through effective teams, our own experiences of the good and the ugly. We went over our Belbin summaries and then put those together with the other folks on our tables to see what sort of team member traits our table team was missing. We then worked through a challenging, and for me at least, interesting exercise with our group. Liz then brought us back to the diagram Peter had introduced in the morning, and how it too could have the team styles and Tuckman's team development model overlaid on it.
Our short break before beach cricket turned into a technical issue for me so I didn't catch up with everyone until dinner time. Again this was interesting because the people on this week are so diverse. I learned a lot from my table mate about the Navy, and what you can achieve if you apply yourself to a different job every few years in a single institution.
I'm enjoying getting to know the very varied individuals here. What I'm having trouble with is sitting down all day (I work at a standing desk) and the fact that the sessions are 90 - 120 minutes long. For my learning style shorter sessions with more interactive group work would be better.
Two observations to finish:
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| Dinner Tuesday with the CAUDIT Leadership Institute team |
We covered leadership for and of change with Nick Tate first off. This was followed by Peter Nikoletatos on the Situational Leadership framework, what being a CIO is about and how to manage challenging staff. Willie Pritchard followed lunch with Interpersonal communication, a look into preferred styles and those of your coworkers. Liz Gosling rounded out the day with a big session on Effective Teams and our own Belbin team traits. Beach cricket and a meal out in Kingscliff finished everyone off.
Due to some technical challenges I missed the beach cricket, but that did mean I had time to fill in session feedback surveys and have a brief look at our homework case study.
Nick's talk on change management I appreciated as it was done using slides like those I prefer, lots of bold images. Nick has a dry and very wry wit which he used to great effect in his talk by setting the audience up to think one thing and then surprising them (and thus getting their attention) by saying the unexpected. Historical leaders of change provided Nick with some great material for expanding on Dr Kotter's change steps , the impact of these at the personal level, and how it is a relatively well understood process.
Peter Nikoletatos reinforced that this week is to give the attendees tools that can be adapted to our own environments and styles. Peter made the point that leaders get people to do things because they want to, unlike managers who tell people to do things. We were then asked to question ourselves about
- what sort of leaders we think we are; directors, coaches, supporters, delegators
- what of our predecessor's work we think we will build on
- what we hope to leave as a legacy of our time with our organisations
Willie Pritchard ran the next session on interpersonal communication. Willie's presenting style I like a lot he came out into the audience, asked the audience for their experiences and generally lowered the bullet point per slide average for the day very nicely. As with the other presenters today Willie incorporated a team based task, in his case based around Dr David Merrill's social style theory of different types of communicators: analytical, amiable, driver, expressive. This led on to realising you can only modify yourself and so being able to identify different styles those you interact with have, provides you with the chance to "style flex" and have more productive communications.
Our Belbin pre event work was next. Liz Gosling took us through effective teams, our own experiences of the good and the ugly. We went over our Belbin summaries and then put those together with the other folks on our tables to see what sort of team member traits our table team was missing. We then worked through a challenging, and for me at least, interesting exercise with our group. Liz then brought us back to the diagram Peter had introduced in the morning, and how it too could have the team styles and Tuckman's team development model overlaid on it.
Our short break before beach cricket turned into a technical issue for me so I didn't catch up with everyone until dinner time. Again this was interesting because the people on this week are so diverse. I learned a lot from my table mate about the Navy, and what you can achieve if you apply yourself to a different job every few years in a single institution.
I'm enjoying getting to know the very varied individuals here. What I'm having trouble with is sitting down all day (I work at a standing desk) and the fact that the sessions are 90 - 120 minutes long. For my learning style shorter sessions with more interactive group work would be better.
Two observations to finish:
- many many of the people present are diagram / picture / kin-esthetic learners.
- most people present have had other jobs/careers prior to getting into the IT or Library game.
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