Posts Tagged ‘EDAD leadership’

Strategic IT Leaders

Strategic IT Leaders Between Pandemic and Post-Pandemic

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2021/5/strategic-it-leaders-between-pandemic-and-post-pandemic

The effective IT leaders who made strong impressions on me when I was a president or provost were those who actively listened to non-IT discussions, asked clarifying questions, and—either in the moment or as a follow-up communication—

digital transformation (Dx). To help these efforts, EDUCAUSE has created a “Dx Journey Map.” It offers an elegant, visual way of telling the story of digital transformation to non-IT campus leaders.

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Writing Plainly

New study says scholarly articles that are hard to read don’t actually make the author sound smarter, and they get cited less. Authors hope their findings will encourage graduate programs to teach students how to write clearly.

The study also offers academics a tutorial and a new bot-driven Clarity Calculator to help improve one’s writing.

“I believe that in public universities, which are funded with taxpayer dollars, the public should be informed in lay language about research and results that are relevant to the public.”

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academia in the times of riots

Jeremi Suri, a professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas at Austin, outlined that argument in an article published this week in the nonpartisan publication The Constitutionalist.

Our universities just in my own lifetime, since I was an undergrad in the 1990s, have become more professionalized, more corporate and more driven by money than ever before…  what’s happened is that has crowded out the discussions about civic responsibility, about serving the public… Most people running universities today spend very little time thinking about civic responsibility. They spend much more time thinking about budgets, thinking about the politics of their university and quite frankly, thinking about athletics…. our institutions infused a certain culture and they incentivize certain kinds of behavior.

 

school board diversity

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/11/18/why-school-board-diversity-matters.html

Both superintendents and board members have a role to play in elevating different voices, say school board members. District leaders can’t pick candidates, but they can create “leadership academies” to teach interested community members about the workings of their school systems. They can also create committees and other advisory boards that allow parents an entry point into getting more involved in their school district, if they choose.

2017 study that examined middle and high schools in Florida found that districts with diverse school boards have lower rates of school suspensions for all students, and that disparities in suspension rates between minority and white students are reduced overall.

 

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Stockdale Paradox

What the Stockdale Paradox Tells Us About Crisis Leadership

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/what-the-stockdale-paradox-tells-us-about-crisis-leadership

“I lived on a day-to-day basis. … [M]ost guys thought it was really better for everybody to be an optimist. I wasn’t naturally that way; I knew too much about the politics of Asia when I got shot down. I think there was a lot of damage done by optimists; other writers from other wars share that opinion. The problem is, some people believe what professional optimists are passing out and come unglued when their predictions don’t work out.”

The Stockdale Paradox—have faith, but confront reality—can be seen in slightly different forms in many cultures.

Stockdale himself was a follower of the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers, who were noted for their concern with understanding reality correctly and shaping one’s response to it optimally. The maxim of Epictetus, “What, then, is to be done? To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens,” has similarities to both Buddhist doctrine and the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer. (“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference”). Therapy techniques such as radical acceptance similarly emphasize the point of letting go of desires and beliefs about what should be and seeing reality as it is.

In the words of Marsha Linehan, the founder of radical acceptance: “Radical acceptance doesn’t mean you don’t try to change things … You can’t change anything if you don’t accept it, because if you don’t accept it, you’ll try to change something else that you think is reality.”

Research by Leach and others indicates that people who survive disasters are able to regain cognitive function quickly after the event, assess their new environment accurately, and take goal-directed action to survive within it. This is the balance that the Stockdale Paradox facilitates: the realism to let go of intrinsic survival mechanisms and the deep-seated faith to learn the new ones.

the pattern of human response to disasters has been shown to be remarkably consistent across cultures, and for disasters of many different causes, effects, and durations, from earthquakes to shipwrecks to kidnapping.

Advice and exercises for leaders

Begin meetings by having each person introduce themselves by their name, job title, mission, and their immediate tasks

This provides practical information to rescuers, but also has the effect of bringing people back to themselves and helping them begin to focus again.

Angela Duckworth’s concept of grit may be useful here. By grit, Duckworth does not mean endurance for its own sake, but rather commitment to a high-level goal, purpose, or mission—and the ability to assess and revise lower-level goals and tactics as necessary.

One question should be regularly asked at meetings: “What is something that doesn’t fit in, that doesn’t make sense?” 

Normalize admitting these mistakes and analyzing them. Discuss weak spots, harm reduction, and damage control—people will sometimes fall when traveling uncertain terrain, so how can they fall without injuring themselves?

Create ways for your team to surface both their deep faith and their real fears. 

In mental contrasting, a person:

  • Visualizes a goal and its rewards, and then
  • Visualizes what obstacles—including their own behavior—stand between them and their goal. (It is important to do it in this order.)

In their paper on the Stockdale Paradox, authors C. W. Von Bergen and Martin S. Bressler point to previous studies that show when people focus on only positive thoughts about the future, “they literally trick their minds into thinking they have already succeeded and, so, do not need actual efforts to attain something perceived as already acquired.

Six leadership qualities

6 Things That Will Hold You Back From Becoming a Good Leader

Want to keep growing? Make sure not to be this person.

https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/6-things-that-will-hold-you-back-from-becoming-a-good-leader.html

1. Managers who take all the credit.

2. Managers who are MIA.

3. Managers who treat people as objects.

4. Managers who act on impulse.

5. Managers who don’t share information.

6. Managers who micromanage.

leadership is about making everyone better

Leadership is not about being the best. Leadership is about making everyone else better.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leadership-being-best-making-everyone-else-better-brigette-hyacinth/

According to Gallup’s most recent global research only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. One reason for this is, many employees feel like their boss does not respect or appreciate them. The truth is great leaders don’t talk down to their employees or make them feel inferior. They make everyone that they come in contact with, feel like they are the most important person in the room. Great leaders are in the construction not the demolition business.

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college leaders and return to campus

College Leaders Must Explain Why—Not Just How—to Return to Campus

By Kevin R. McClure     Jun 25, 2020

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-06-25-college-leaders-must-explain-why-not-just-how-to-return-to-campus

So far, the why question seems harder for many institutions and their leaders to forthrightly answer, yet it is vitally important.

Presidents have also shared their views through anonymous surveys, highlighting worries about hitting enrollment targets or managing revenue losses. There is an unmistakable sense that they see their responsibility mainly in institutional terms: We must resume in-person instruction to ensure the financial viability of the college or university. Protecting institutions’ budgets is apparently also worth the risk.

Rationales like these have gaping holes. Some problems are obvious, like being silent on the health and safety of faculty, staff, students and community members who aren’t aged 18 to 25. The disregard for people working on and near campuses recalls practices at an Amazon warehouse or meat-packing plant, where the expectation is that workers must show up in the interests of the organization and consumer.

The rationales I’ve seen are problematic for other reasons, too. First, they show little concern for slowing or stopping the spread of COVID-19.

Second, they demonstrate a disregard for serving the public good. I haven’t read a single announcement or plan that anchors an institution’s decisionmaking in shared community interests. Few presidents are willing to say that what the public needs right now is to live in a society free of a deadly virus, and that it is the responsibility of higher education to contribute to that effort by keeping people off campuses that were often

Third, the rationales I’ve seen don’t seriously contend with the differential effects of the pandemic by race and income. Racism means that people of color are more exposed and less protected when it comes to the virus. When a president says returning to campus is worth the risk, who is bearing the burden of that risk-taking?

Finally, the plans I’ve seen have a strained relationship with truth and science. In many states, new virus cases and hospitalizations are rising, with clusters in nursing homes and daycare centers. Yet presidents continue to announce that it is safe for students to return to residence halls.

Katherine Newman, president of the University of Massachusetts Boston, provided an example that other presidents could follow by announcing that the institution would continue to be primarily online in the fall. Explaining this decision, she noted that that Black and Latinx “populations have borne a disproportionate burden of morbidity and mortality in the pandemic, and many students live in multi-generational minority households where exposure to the virus would be particularly problematic.”

leadership weekly duties

What should people in leadership roles actually be doing all week?

Sep 8, 2019 Ted Bauer

https://medium.com/swlh/what-should-people-in-leadership-roles-actually-be-doing-all-week-67de8c24fd2

People spend most of their week sitting in meetings or on calls — or checking email. Since nary a soul has prepared for any call/meeting, and since e-mail is the biggest joke society has wrought on us all, these are not necessarily “productive” uses of time. That doesn’t matter, of course — the goal isn’t productivity, it’s to be seen as useful or essential. In no place is that truer than the front-line managerial ranks, who often create fires on their own team just to swoop in and “save the day” in order to get lauded by a boss.

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