Now that I am back from the AUTM annual meeting, I have some time to reflect on the last couple weeks. The first event I attended was the EDUCAUSE Institute Management Program which was a week long management and leadership seminar for IT professionals working in higher education. The program is taught by IT managers and leaders from all over the country including CIOs, IT directors, and librarians. The individual sessions covered a lot of management and leadership issues from the state of IT in higher education to developing an organizational culture to effective teams. The following are a few of the highlights for me and what I was able to take away from the week.
Personality types play a big role in interpersonal dynamics, and there are lots of approaches to personality assessment. Last year, my department had a DISC assessment where people were categorized into dominance, influencing, steadiness, and compliance. We did a very basic self-assessment at the EDUCAUSE seminar that classified us into amiable, analytical, driving, and expressive. These categories paralleled the DISC categories very well and can serve as a quick and dirty personality assessment tool. After doing a bit of Google searching, it looks like this system comes from Peter Urs Bender, and his site has some more information. These personality types can be very useful in knowing how best to work with those around you. For example, if you know you are a driver and a coworker is an expressive, you have to convince them to accept your ideas in a slightly different way than your natural personality might lead you. The key is not to change yourself but to take the personality types involved and adjust accordingly.
Leadership was another big topic at the seminar, and it was of particular interest to me as an IT leader with some large career goals. Higher education is facing a major shortage of leaders in information technology as the current generation of CIOs, Directors, and Managers retire, and EDUCAUSE is hoping to encourage would-be and capable leaders through their educational efforts. While there is such a thing as a natural born leader, all people can learn some leadership skills that are very useful in any team situation. In a team of IT people, leadership often shifts among different people as the needs of the team shift through different phases of a project or task. In one particular exercise, we had to solve a logic puzzle that involved a set of clues for each person and prohibitions against passing notes or using other media to share information with the group. As we went through the task, leadership shifted depending on who had an idea on how to solve the puzzle or resolve a particular issue. When the groups reconvened, pretty much every other group went through the same thing with leadership shifting from member to member. Leadership in this form requires emotional intelligence to know how to talk to and listen to other people. Everyone can work on improving their leadership skills without ever having a leader's title, but it was also apparent that some people really have no desire to lead.
Official leaders are people with titles like CIO, Director, Vice President, or Manager. Good leaders are usually seen as transformers or change agents. Official leadership requires both leadership skills and a desire to lead. Usually a person knows whether they want to be a leader, but assessing one's own leadership skills can be a challenge especially if a person really aspires to be a leader. One of the first steps, assuming you are already in some type of leadership position, is to take an assessment that uses the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire model. In this model, you answer questions that help you understand your transformational and transactional leadership qualities. Transactional leadership qualities are those that will do whatever it takes to get more people to follow them, usually through authoritarian means. A transformational leader is one that gathers people to their cause by a shared vision to improve the organization as a whole. Someone who is a transactional leader is unlikely to be suited for most leadership positions in modern society. The days of people being a wage slave are long gone, and most people want to be excited about their work and feel fully engaged. A transformational leader will excel at getting the most out of people for the betterment of the organization they lead. These skills are ones that can be developed, so no one should be completely discouraged by their initial results. However, they can definitely trigger some serious self-assessment if leadership is the goal but the current leadership skills are severely lacking.
The other area that I found particularly interesting was professional development. While I have always regarded professional development as important, I had not really taken as broad a view as I now see. Professional development is more than just attending a class or two during the year or doing an annual review with goals. Professional development is assessing your skills, thinking of your goals, and figuring out what you need to develop to get there. So for someone wanting to be an Oracle guru, attending Oracle training and getting certification is a probability. For someone wanting to lead an IT organization, attending leadership conferences or finding leadership opportunities in the organization are more important than technical training. While this isn't exactly an "a-ha" moment, it does require a bit more planning than one would normally do during annual reviews. This site has really been a good tool for my professional development, and I intend to start using it more as a way to both plan and build on my skills. With my new column to start in Systems Management News, I intend to add professional development of yourself and your team to my usual set of topics of business-IT alignment and IT strategy.