MOR leadership institute, Milwaukee, WI
Jan 10th - 11th
Personal notes and reflections
Day 1
Developing practices to enable you to lead:
1.) Prioritize what's important
2.) Be intentional: presence, what, how
3.) Allocate time to what's important
4.) Manage your calendar
5.) Delegate, develop, coach
Brian McDonald, MOR Associates, Inc
Is this something we should be doing anymore?
Steps in Strategic Thinking
1. Frame the issue at the strategic level (versus tactical). For example,
how could we better serve our customers? How could we better
leverage technology?
2. Outline the options.
3. Identify important considerations (such as alignment with corporate direction, impact on customers, cost or revenue implications,
etc.).
4. Develop a couple scenarios and play out your premises.
5. Determine the right thing to do from a strategic perspective.
6. Design an action plan.
Brian McDonald, MOR Associates, Inc
Practices Designed to Develop Strategic Thinking
The following are practices MOR Associates has used with clients to
help develop strategic thinking within multiple levels of the organization.
1. Asking participants to identify external or internal forces and trends
or customer feedback or financial data and play out the implications of this analysis. This exercise, wherever it begins, invites
people to explore different scenarios.
2. Simply having people identify 3 to 5 strategic issues within their
unit will help participants focus on critical areas within their sphere
of influence. Once they start this practice, it is easy to spot other
issues that have longer-term implications they need to consider.
3. Engaging people from different levels of the organization in task
forces, focus groups, or action learning teams will give participants
a practice field for developing their strategic thinking capability.
4. Having people use a different format for taking notes can help
sharpen an individual’s strategic lens.
5. Having managers ask the right questions can also foster strategic
thinking. Examples might be: What other scenarios have you considered? What do you think the long-term implications are if we
do that? Using coaching questions such as these will, in some cases,
prompt people to raise their perspective.
Brian McDonald, MOR Associates, Inc
Reflections and goals
- Defensive calendaring
- Limit email in the morning (don't check it for 30 minutes in the AM), what are the 3-5 things you want to get done today
- Explore google tasks lists for staff and self, schedule time to review/prioritize/focus tasks
- Explore remember the milk, multiple lists, set alerts
- Continue to focus on not interrupting staff spontaneously
- Share more the variables that impact decision making (i.e., faculty/students needs, UWM goals, national trends, viability based on LTC resources ($, staff time, etc.), LTC staff interests)
- Be more explicit about expectations of the unit, individuals
- Empower staff through knowledge (budget, decision-making, etc)
- Share more philosophies, priorities, etc., to aid in decision making
- Empower staff to take the lead on projects, relinquish need to be copied on all email, figure out how to stay in the loop
- Develop groups to take on internal and external work process and communication needs (synchronous, email, calendaring, marketing, website, status reporting)
- Focus status based on project rather than the individual
- Complete laundry list of projects, prioritize, get rid of the fat
- Figure out how to focus on myself, my needs
- Review Meeting 1 coaching sheet
Never focus on the lack of resources - focus on projects which are a priority
SWOT activity
Impact of societal values and practices on university work processes, including business services, research, teaching and learning, i.e., mobile, open, free, cloud, synchronous, automation
Specifically, transformation of the expectations for student and faculty support to be 24/7, just in time, real time, user driven ; providing of services through an array of devices leading to development of applications that are device and platform agnostic; increase in use of free, web 2.0, cloud services leading to an increase university costs for human resources to support; increase in expectation for "free" services (i.e., wireless, software, learning management systems, course offerings, open source, etc.); making key decisions about what devices and software to support, to what degree, how to secure; consideration of freedom of location and need to "move time" in program offerings, services provided (tech, library);
Increase in accountability due to decrease in funding from State and due to new Federal legistation (i.e., state authorization act, credit hour for seat time).
Day 2
Reflection/Commitments --
- Implementing strategic planning framework pp. 98-99 -- very practical since question driven
- SWOT exercise (strength, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) delivered via qualtrics, then discuss f2f
- Schedule time for strategic planning
- Develop vision (what kind of organization do we want to be? what will it be like for our stakeholders when we achieve our vision? what values are most important?)
- Implement strategic planning model, could be used on a per project basis
- Implement defensive calendar, task lists, remember the milk, no email for 30 min in AM
- Empower staff w/knowledge to enhance decision making -- what knowledge or info should be shared?
- Share external scan with unit staff, economy, technology, government, demographics, stakeholder, other
Tanya's philosophies - delegation
Find your staff's strengths/interests and match them to an organizational task
I don't delegate, I give team members the lead on a project
Empower your staff with knowledge so they can lead and make decisions as you would
In order for my team members to get their job done, I ask them what they *need* from me
MOR - Learning community group - Vision
Establish a community with which to receive coaching
Establish culture of interinstitution collaboration
Be able to better accomplish UW system mission
Develop support networks and build relationship among leaders in UW System
Monitor community challenges and successes
Leverage connections to improve flow of info and expertise
Catalyst -- Leading to improve campus communities
From vision to strategy
Group A - vision statement
Group B - strategies and tactics to obtain vision (i.e., peer coaching, reflection)
Group C - what are strategies and actions for MOR Assoc coaches
Group D - What will help/hinder achieving vision
Group E - How do we stay the course -- maintain enthusiasm - what will we need to do to support this change, continuous, so it comes to fruition
Group B - strategies and actions to obtain vision
(i.e., peer coaching, reflection, commitment statements)
continued interaction
digital form of communication, synchronous meetings, wiki with push to email or rss feed to aggregate like google reader, fb, twitter, ifttt
f2f meetings, bi-annually or quarterly - at ITMC
affinity groups around projects (tech implementations, process orientated or thematic, improving skill or strategies,
moving accountability to our community
VISION -- create a collaborative community that is committed to developing our shared leadership and the success of our individual campuses and UW systems...
Ask for a rating of a 1-10 in agreement rather than yes or no
Neuroscience
70-905 reiterates patterns
10-30% mindful
Game, neuroscience
7, 14, 21, 28...
7, 17, 27...
