Leadership Challenge #2

LdC  #2

Influential Practitioners (Leadership Challenge): Leading in a COP

Enhancing Action Research and Leadership Possibilities 

through the Development of your Collaborative Skills

Module 2                                                                    Name: James D. Lett

The process below relates to the following Leadership Provocative Question(s):  

How are groups and communities of practice (CoPs) different?  How are they alike?  So what?  What now? 

Groups and CoPs are comprised of people who have frequent contact, consistent interaction, collective influence, a shared feeling of friendship and support, and a commitment to work together to achieve common goals.

Communities of Practice are not simply a collection of individuals discussing various topics or participating in a myriad of activities. PoPs are built upon competent membership. There are three components of competent membership:

1. Mutuality of Engagement - the ability to build relationships based upon engagement with members and reciprocating actions. Membership is based upon social status, organizational membership, or personal relationships with people. Identity is established through participation.
2. Joint Enterprise - the ability to adequately grasp the enterprise, take responsibility for it, and participate in the negotiation of the community's continued pursuit. 
3. Shared Repertoire - refers to routines, words, tools, words, experiences, tips, stories, and ideas that have been adopted during the communities existence. 

a. Preparing for an on-line Conversation 

Consider the provocative question(s) above; please record quotes/ideas from the Wenger text that are appropriate in responding to the provocative question(s) posed in this module. These quotes/ideas will help you participate in a scholarly and collegial on-line conversation during the module. Also record illustrative stories or instances from your professional practice appropriate for responding to the provocative question(s). Typically, you should provide six (6) quotes/ideas from Wenger and two (2) applications/instances from your workplace setting. Write them here.  

Quote/ideas from the book; applications/instances from your workplace setting	Page number
Membership is not just a matter of social category, declaring allegiance, belonging to an organization, having a title, or having personal relations with some people.	74
Their practice supports a communal memory that allows individuals to do their work without needing to know everything.	46
Makes the job habitable by creating an atmosphere in which the monotonous and meaningless aspects of the job are woven into the rituals, customer, stories, events, dramas, and rhythms of community life.	46
Knowledge is a matter of competence with respect to valued facts, fixing machines, writing poetry, being convivial, growing up as a boy or a girl, and so forth.	4
Communities of practice are an integral part of our daily lives. They are so informal and so pervasive that they rarely come into explicit focus, but for the same reasons they are also quit familiar.	7
(Implications for what it takes to understand and support learning) For organizations, it means that learning is an issue of sustaining the interconnected communities of practice through which an organization knows what it knows and thus becomes effective and valuable as an organization	8
Frequently, our student services are often unsure of their responses to students when being asked general advising related questions.
Many procedures are communicated through word of mouth, which places a great deal of pressure on staff members to know everything.

b. Holding an on-line Conversation 

After participating/viewing the “fishbowl” conversation record notes here (below) about your responses to your peers or new thoughts based on their postings.  Be certain your notes here are comprehensive, as were your responses to peers. (If you participate as a “fish,” in the fishbowl your notes, which should be entered below, can be much more succinct.) 

(This space expands to accommodate your writing.)

c. Determining your Leadership Challenge

Pt. 1: Based on your own quotes/ideas from Wenger, your workplace experiences, and new insights you developed as you reflected on your peers’ work, what behavior do you want to experiment with/try out for your leadership challenge in the next few days? 

I want attempt to improve our organizational knowledge by offering student services information sessions during our Friday meetings.

Implement your leadership challenge over the next week. 

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(Complete in Module 2)

Pt. 2: What did you end up doing for your leadership challenge? 

I provided answers to frequently asked questions to our enrollment staff to help them better support students. 

d. Assessing and Reflecting on your Leadership Challenge 

How did your change in behavior affect others in your Community of Practice? Tell the story of what happened. 

In the past, we have had advisors available to answer questions ranging from initial getting started steps to transcript evaluation. However, we have recently seen a strong shift in enrollments. This a good thing. Unfortunately, we have experienced some turnover in the advising section, making routine calls difficult to answer. I contacted our web updates team and updated our website to better support our students and to provide easier access to information for our student support staff. I also spoke with our enrollment staff about the changes that I made. Additionally, I provided them with a copy of our getting started steps and answers to some frequently asked questions. I know that it sounds very minimal. However, the ease of access and the sharing of information really put them at ease.  

Reflect on your experience with the Leadership Challenge for this module.  

Communication is very important to our team. When we do not communicate consistently, it can lead to some anxiety filled moments. For a long time we performed our daily operations in a certain way and everyone was comfortable and the day made sense. Then there was budget crisis within the DoD and federal workers were furloughed and military students' tuition assistance accounts were placed on hold. Our extension site survives on these tuition assistance payments. Once tuition assistance was reinstated, it was reduced. Therefore, students needed more financial aid to support TA. Then, the calendar at our extension site was deemed no longer in compliance with financial aid payout requirements for the college district. This lead us to change our calendar, which affected enrollments for a time. Then there were changes in organizational structure and within the advising team.

Our staff absorbed all of these changes. However, their normal workday and the office tempo changed. What I leaned during this exercised is just how much these changes have affected our team. Before we could make assumptions because we had been performing the same way for so long. We got lazy with our communication. I learned that we now have to rebuild our community of practice and begin sharing more knowledge. We need to rebuild that shared understanding. However, we need to be sure to keep our practice fertile and active rather than allowing it to drift into complacency. 

(Be verbose.  Write 2-3 paragraphs.)

Some prompts to help the juices flow, but it is not mandatory that you use any/all of these: 

·            Was your behavioral change supported by CoP theory? Explain.

·            Was this change really a challenge for you? Why?  (cont. next page)

·            Did you “Lean In” for this challenge? How far? Could you have leaned further? If so, why did you hold back?

·            Did your behavioral change trigger changes in response from others? Was it a positive or a negative response? Why do you think this is so?

·            What do you think would happen if you sustained this behavioral change over time? Why do you think this is so? 

·            What would Wenger say? 

The process below relates to the following new Leadership Provocative Question(s): 

How does “participation” relate to identifying problems/challenges and solving problems?

      Participation will often lead to collaboration among peers. The collaboration can lead to problem sharing and group thinking leading to problem solving. From the Wenger text, the claims processors were often in situations where the organizational policies conflicted with the realities of their work situations. Though they completed their work individually, they were able to collectively work with their group to find solutions to these conflicts (Wenger, 2008, p. 46). These resolutions cannot come about without deliberate and active participation. Wenger defines participation as the social experience of living in the world as members of social communities and being actively engaged in their endeavors (Wenger, 2008, p. 55). The author goes on to describe participation as an intricate method in which participants combine activity, feeling, thinking, talking, and belonging (Wenger, 2008, p. 56). 

e. Preparing for an on-line Conversation

Quote/ideas from the book; applications/instances from your workplace setting	Page number
Participation refers to a process of taking part and also to the relations with others that reflect this process.	55
Provides resolutions to institutionally generated conflicts such as contradictions between measures and work	46
Supports a communal memory that allows individuals to do their work without needing to know everything.	46
Helps newcomers join the community by participating in its practice	46
Generates specific perspectives and terms to enable accomplishing what needs to be done.	46
Makes the job habitable by creating an atmosphere in which the monotonous and meaningless aspects of the job are woven into the rituals, customs, stories, events, dramas, and rhythms of community life.	46
We need to improve communications between our administrative team.
We need more knowledge management to improve consistency of message to our students and external partners.

f. Holding an on-line Conversation

After participating/viewing the “fishbowl” conversation record notes here (below) about your responses to your peers or new thoughts based on their postings.  Be certain your notes here are comprehensive, as were your responses to peers. (If you participate as a “fish,” in the fishbowl your notes, which should be entered below, can be much more succinct.)

(This space expands to accommodate your writing.)

   

g. Determining your Leadership Challenge

Based on your own quotes/ideas from Wenger, your workplace experiences, and new insights you developed as you reflected on your peers’ work, what behavior do you want to experiment with/try out for your leadership challenge in the next few days?

 I plan to spend some time with my supervisor and peer this week so that we can begin providing a more consistent message from a managerial standpoint. Additionally, we want to help our staff communicate in one voice to students and the general public.