Well, today I starting into the Supervisory Leadership program that the University is offering for those who want to take it. There is a class of about 40 and the course runs three times a year, so it is a very much needed program. But coming to it, other than thinking that it would certainly help me get my head around some of those tricky questions that come up when you “sit in the big chair”, I was hoping that it was going to some insight as to what sort of thing was expected of leaders and supervisors on campus. Being a teacher, I was thinking that much of what it takes to be a good leader is what it takes to be a good teacher… and so far, I might be right.
One of the empowering realizations during PD comes when you receive some manner of validation of what you are doing already, being “allowed” to drop those items that are not fitting and realizing that you are not the only one in the boat. This last point is often something that is lost in the one on one PD sessions that I really quite enjoy, but the difference there is that those sessions, would they have been in a large session, it would have been a large group of people working toward a technical goal, so the various ideas about what is happening would be stamped right or wrong. In the PD where it’s a “knowledge” or attitude target that is the goal, the various ideas are all valid and it’s the giving and taking of understandings, rather than misunderstandings that moves the course forward. So far, ideas of mine that have been validated is to let team meetings be about the team and not about the work all the time and to let people grow into where you want them to be at the end – thinking about evaluations – setting the bar a little higher and helping them blow away that expectation at the end of the term is certainly something that I agree with.
This course is also the first since my Ed courses, that has really thought of constructivist thinking – I guess that is largely because the leader is a teacher as well. I had some really deep thoughts about the use of constructivist theories, but they are lost to the ether right now, but what I do remember of them is in line with the orginal comment about teachers… teachers build pupils to be greater when they leave at the end of the day than they were at the start. It seems that leaders are the same thing. A leader cannot do everything that the individuals of the team can do, but they can work to enable and “construct” those they lead to be greater. They help build the positive feelings of enablement that comes from success, but they can only do this if they understand what makes the members of their team tick.
I think this is going to be a good experience and much of what will be done is very applicable to the situation that other technology leaders might find themselves in. So for that reason, I’m going to blog it and hopefully others can take from my thoughts something to help their own.
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