Leadership Challenge 3

LdC Template #3

Influential Practitioners (Leadership Challenge): Leading in a COP

Enhancing Action Research and Leadership Possibilities

through the Development of your Collaborative Skills

Module 3                                                                    Name: James D. Lett   

      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). 

      a 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.

b. Holding an on-line Conversation

Copy and paste your notes from your on-line conversation from last week and upon which you implemented your Leadership Challenge (LdC) from last week.

c. Determining your Leadership Challenge from last week

What behavior did you experiment with/try out for your leadership challenge last week?

(Write one sentence.) 

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. 

What did you end up doing for your leadership challenge last week?

We attended a conference for advising and registration. We took a great deal from the conference with respect to student, faculty, and staff engagement. We then met for lunch to discuss our plan for improving our communication and building a shared departmental voice. 

d. Assessing and Reflecting on your Leadership Challenge from last week

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

We first developed some understanding within the two support manager roles. Additionally, we each acknowledged some individual failures and oversights. Finally, we developed a plan to bridge the gap between our three student services sections (advising, enrollment services, testing) and faculty. This conversation lead to our next intervention. We plan to use our student services meeting to discuss the roles of each section and discuss how each section can support the other. We also plan to use an open forum approach to allow for the free flow of communications for those who are reluctant in the more formal settings. This seems like something that we should have been doing. However, in claiming responsibility, we admitted to becoming complacent and making some assumptions. 

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

The experience was eye opening for me. I am self-evaluative and I noticed some errors that I need to correct in my communication. First, I must learn to value the thoughts and ideas of others. I tend to dominate conversations. I think of something and I have a very rude habit of jumping in to make my point before my conversational partners finish theirs. I can feel myself doing it. Still, I have a difficult time just sitting, listening, and waiting my turn. I am a male in an office with several women who are very conscious and sensitive to gender issues. I am also a veteran and there are also some positive and negative reactions to that part of my personality as well. In a nutshell, I am a know-it-all and I need to learn when to be quiet and allow others to have a turn. That being said, it was a very good conversation about who we are as a student services group and our dean provided some much needed feedback about here vision for the future. Additionally, my colleague and I had came to an understanding about how to work through issues when the lines between enrollment services and advising services become blurred. 

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?

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

When/why do I hold back from participating? When/why do I commit to solving problems by myself?

I hold back from participating when I am not feeling accepted into the group. There are language barriers in new groups. When I joined the military, people were speaking military all around me and it did not make any sense. However, after being immersed in the environment for some time, I began to understand the language and felt more comfortable participating. The same can be said of education. When I came to work as an advisor, I had a hard time following the lingo. Education has more acronyms than the military. Additionally, there was a significant social challenge that I had to overcome. I have come a long way. Still, I have a hard time with the emotions of the environment. I often make simple statements that I do not feel are harmful. However, I will get a nonverbal response that tells me otherwise. I also hold back from participating when I am feeling incompetent. I often keep my opinions to myself until I have become more educated about the topic(s). In the meantime, I try to gain an appreciation for the context and the terms being used. I take notes for self study so that each time I am in the room, I feel a little more comfortable.

I solve problems on my own when I feel that there is an opportunity for personal growth. I love to brainstorm with others to solve problems. Nonetheless, there is a real value in figuring out a complex problem on my own. I feel like I grow each time I am able to work a problem through with available resources. However, there are times that I commit to solving problems by myself because I feel that I have to. In the army, I was expected to have answers even though a person cannot possibly have an answer to every problem. In my current setting, I often forget to utilize the team and I can feel a little bit exposed when I ask for help. 

e. Preparing for an on-line Conversation

Quote/ideas from the book; applications/instances from your workplace setting	Page number
Participants from close relationships and develop idiosyncratic was of engaging with one another, which outsiders cannot easily enter.	113
They have a detailed and complex understanding of their enterprise as they define it, which outsiders may not share.	113
They have developed a repertoire for which outsiders miss shared references.	113
For learning in practice to be possible, an experience of meaning must be in interaction with a a regime of competence. Although experience and competence are both constituents of learning - and thus of knowing - they do not determine each other. They may be out of alignment in either direction.	138
Competence may drive experience. Sometimes, our experience must align itself with a regime of competence. This is what happens to newcomers to a practice. In order to achieve the competence defined by a community, they transform their experience until it fits within the regime. But old-timers, too, need to catch up as the practice evolves.	138
Experience may drive competence. Imagine that one or more members have had some experience that currently falls outside the regime of competence of a community to which they belong - for instance, because there are no words for it or because it puts the enterprise in question. As a way of asserting their membership, they may very well attempt to change the community's regime so that it includes their experience. Toward this end, they have to negotiate its meaning with their community of practice. They invite others to participate in their experience; they attempt to reify it for them. They may need to engage with people in a new ways and transform relations among people in order to be taken seriously; they may need to redefine the enterprise in order to make the effort worthwhile; they may need to add new elements to the repertoire of their practice. If they have enough legitimacy as members to be successful, they will have changed the regime of competence - and created new knowledge in the process.	139
New staff member, once a member of the military, experiencing the initial adjustment to the environment.
Older staff members experiencing feelings of abandonment as the organization evolves.

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 lead a student services discussion this Friday at our students services meeting addressing communication breakdowns, procedural changes, and collecting feedback for further discussions and activities.