Remember to be Grateful

As a hard-working professional, I find it easy to focus on what needs to be done.  I make time to be grateful for what has been accomplished much less often.

Today we celebrated the thirty-three plus years of experience and service that Gordee Bennett has brought to our organization.  I think I have been grateful for Gordee's contributions many times through the years, and it was great to see so many people gather today to honor her.  But just think how wonderful it would be if we remembered to be grateful more often.

There are many things to be grateful for in the work world.  Here are a few of mine:

• I am grateful for students.  Because I work in higher education, students are my reason for being here.  I attended commencement last evening, and I celebrated the hundreds of students who crossed the stage to receive their degrees.  Commencement helps us to be grateful for the many accomplishments of our students and the services that we provide that help them succeed.
• I am grateful for colleagues.  My colleagues include faculty, staff, administrators, and student employees here at my campus as well as the many people I work with across the UM system.  Sometimes we disagree, but most often we are able to work through our disagreements in order to focus on our shared goals.
• I am grateful for citizens.   I believe in higher education, and I appreciate that it is much more widely available because of government funding.  I am grateful to all of those taxpayers who provide our support as well as legislators who distribute it.  Our many donors add to the support of our students and our campus, so I am grateful to them, too.
• I am grateful for interesting work.  I once had a friend tell me he worked only for the money.  How sad!  I am so lucky to have a job that I enjoy doing, with work that is constantly changing.
• I am grateful for progress.  So many things have changed and improved during my working life.  Not only am I grateful for progress, but I am grateful for the people that create progress.

If you haven't taken time to be grateful today, take some time now.

Loads of Change

This has been a huge week for IT staff at the University of Minnesota.  We reached the culmination of a three-year project to revamp the IT job classification system.  This week all IT staff received a placement in the new classification scheme.  For some this was a relatively small change, but others experienced great change.  Some experienced extra stress by having to make decisions about benefits changes.

Here is an article that might help some of those having the most stress about this change:  "5 Tips to Help You Respond Effectively to Change."  This article is published in Psychology Today.

Here are the major sections of this article, along with some of my thoughts.  But I strongly encourage you to read the article itself for a richer experience.

• Keep things in perspective.  I personally have found it easy to get stressed out when I let things grow bigger in mind than they are in reality.  My dad used to advise me to imagine writing my cares down on a piece of paper, sealing them in an envelope, and then opening it a year later.  You'll be surprised how this imagery can help you put things in perspective, even if you don't actually do this.
• Practice the 5 P's:  patience, persistent, practical, positive and purpose.  My personal downfall can be lack of patience.  Sometimes I want things fixed now.  Over the years, I have come to realize that things take time, especially if you want a good outcome.
• Stay focused on who you are and what you need.  It's easy to focus on what others want from you or think of you.  What do you think of yourself?  What can you do for yourself today?
• Question, assess, and evaluate your core beliefs about change.  If you tend to think change is bad, why is that?  Is there anything good about change?  Or about the particular change you are faced with now?
• Take as much time as you need before you respond.  This has been truly helpful to me.  I often "sleep on" an issue and mull it over for a day or longer before I respond.  It continues to amaze me how answers pop up if it give it enough time.

If you are feeling stressed by change, take a deep breath and treat yourself well.  It will all work out, one way or the other.

A Stressful Time of Year

April and May always seem particularly stressful to me.  It is the end of the academic year, so everyone pushes hard to complete all those projects that must be done before the year ends.  I do this, too, so I understand it.  The problem is that many people need my help on their projects, which makes it difficult for me to complete my own. 

This useful article, Nine Ways Successful People Defeat Stress by Heidi Grant Halvorson, was helpful to me today.  I particularly liked "5: Add where and when to your to-do list."  The idea is to plan in advance when and where to accomplish a task.  I have been doing this more and more lately using the defensive calendaring technique.  I block out times on my calendar to work on specific tasks.  This accomplishes two important things.  It forces me to actually work on that project I may have been avoiding.  And it keeps others from scheduling that time on my calendar.  I love the group scheduling function in Google calendar, but meetings other people schedule can sure fill up my time. 

Here is another of her tips "8. Think about the progress that you've already made."  I thought about this today when I attended the retirement party of Dean Kjell Knudsen.  It's amazing how many things he has accomplished in his tenure as dean.  But as he pointed out, he had the help of many people, and he didn't do it all at once.  When I listed my accomplishments for the year for my annual performance appraisal this week, I thought, "Well, now wonder I'm so tired!"  

The author has many other useful tips in this article, so if you are feeling stressed this time of year, take a few minutes and read the whole thing.

Introverts and Extoverts

Yesterday the ITSS Management Team shared our individual results on version of the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, provided free online by HumanMetrics.  One very interesting outcome is that all but one of us showed up as extroverts.  Does this mean that extroversion is important for success in leadership?  I don't think so.  Introverts have many advantages in life.  An interesting book on this topic is The Introvert Advantage:  How to Thrive in an Extrovert World by Marti Olsen Laney.  Perhaps you can tell by the title of the book that this author believes extroversion is more widely valued in our work world.  Assuming that is true, introverts may need to work a bit harder to capitalize on the strengths that come with introversion.

On the personality inventory, I came up as an extrovert, but only barely.  I find that I need alone time to relax and recharge.  The introvert in our group has some extrovert tendencies, too.  Like many human characteristics, there is likely to be a bell curve lurking, with most of us in the middle, having some blend of extrovert and introvert.  Relatively few are off the scale on either end. 

I happened to meet a man this week who is a high extrovert.  He was on campus interviewing for a job, and he talked about how the interview experience charged him up.  I know if I had been on a rigorous interview schedule all day, I'd want to go home at the end of the day and collapse.  But not this man.  He predicted he would not even be able to sleep that night, since he was so excited by the whole experience.

I believe that both introverts and extroverts bring valuable qualities to leadership.  Moreover, we may need to temper our qualities in order to be good leaders for all sorts of people.  At the very least, leaders should be aware of the spectrum of characteristics along the introvert-extrovert scale.  We may have to try a little harder to engage high introverts, and we may have to protect ourselves from being overwhelmed by high extroverts.  Overall, we need to value all of the skills that people bring to the table.

Lessons from a Mentor

In last week's post, I mentioned watching others as a strategy for developing your own leadership skills.  This week I'll talk about some lessons I learned from an important mentor of mine, Sandra Featherman.  Sandra was my first boss when I became an administrator.  At that time, she was the Vice Chancellor for Academic Administrator at UMD.  After that she went on to become President of New England University in Maine.  She continues to view mentoring others as a very important aspect of her leadership role.

Sandra was very good at avoiding micro-management.  If I had a concern or problem I was trying to solve, she would listen, and if asked, she would give advice.  But she rarely tried to solve the problem for me.  She provided a safe space for me to explore ideas without taking over or shutting down my creative spirit.  She encouraged me to be a problem solver.  She also encouraged me to look at a problem from multiple aspects before making a decision.

Perhaps Sandra's best advice to me was to use principle-based decision making.  That is, before making a decision, ask yourself if there is a principle you can apply.  If not, is this situation likely enough to recur that you should take the time to develop a principle before making the decision?  By developing a set of principles and using them in making decisions, you will make more consistent decisions over time.  This helps those who are working with you to anticipate what you would do and, best of all, to begin to develop their own principle-based decision making.  In my experience, people appreciate consistency, and lack of consistency tends to make them crazy.  Moreover, using principles makes it easier for me to make decisions over time, cutting down on having to reinvent the wheel at every new decision point.

Sandra Featherman is retired now, but she remains very busy with many activities that continue to take advantage of her great leadership skills.  I am lucky to have had her as one of my important mentors.

Building Your Leadership Skills

Last week I talked about preparing to speak to a class of undergraduates about leadership.  I did that yesterday, and the experience was very enjoyable.  They asked great questions, and I had a good time formulating answers.  As is often the case, both in IT and in leadership, the questions can be quite complex, and consequently the answers are often difficult to frame correctly.

I offered them these ways to develop leadership skills:

• Watch others
• Read books and articles about leadership
• Read my blog (ldeneen@blogspot.com)
• Take a class or a workshop
• Think about how you want to impact the world

Yes, I realize that third one is a bit self serving.  Forgive me!

I also enjoyed writing a letter of recommendation for a younger colleague who is applying to graduate school.  When I asked her what her goals are for working on a graduate degree, she pointed to these skills that learners are expected to develop in the program:

• critical reflection
• investigation and application of educational theory to practice
• evaluation, execution and effective communication of educational research
• intercultural competence
• the creation and participation in communities of learners as professionals
• leadership for educational reform

Just reading this list makes me enthusiastic about her future and the value that education brings to us all.  And here is a program that does emphasize leadership.  So here's to learning!

Talking with Students about Leadership

I am looking forward to giving a guest lecture in a colleague's computer science class next week.  Even though the topic is ethics, I think I'll find a way to slip in a few things about leadership while I am at it.  After all, if the leader doesn't set the right goals and personal example for ethical behavior, how likely is is that the department or company will act ethically?

I am pretty sure that when I was an undergraduate, I didn't think much about leadership.  And thinking back over my educational career, I don't remember much instruction about leadership.  It's likely that is a part of a good education in business schools, but I wonder why it isn't taught more widely across disciplines.  Certainly in higher education, we talk frequently about critical thinking skills.  But we are also educating the leaders of tomorrow, so why not teach leadership across the disciplines?

If you are a faculty member or a supervisor of a student employee, and if you are reading this blog, I hope you will give some thought to building in some time with your students to talk about leadership.  You will be doing our entire society a favor.