It's About Learning

What it takes to be a great leader

Dwayne Harapnuik — March 24, 2021 — Leave a comment

Rosalinde Torres shares the result of 25 years of observing truly great leaders at work that are summed up in the following three simple but crucial questions:

Where are you looking to anticipate the next change to your business model or life?
Answer – The answer to this question is in your calendar – who are spending time with, what are you doing, what are your reading/learning. Great leaders are collaborating and looking around corners.
What is the diversity measure of your network?
Answer – Consider your capacity to develop relationships with people who are different than you. Having a diverse network is a source of pattern recognition and of potential solutions.
Are you courageous enough to abandon the past?
Answer – Going along to get along leads to failure. Great leaders dare to be different and don’t just talk about risk-taking they do it. People who will join you are usually different from your traditional network.

Torres states that the great leaders of the 21st Century are:

those women & men who are NOT preparing themselves for the comfortable predictability of yesterday but are preparing for the realities of today and all the unknown possibilities of tomorrow.

In Leadership, Video - Wednesday Watchlist Change, different, great, leader, leadership, network

How Great Leaders Serve Others

Dwayne Harapnuik — May 23, 2018 — Leave a comment

In Leadership, Video - Wednesday Watchlist great, lead, leadership, servant, servant leadership, serve

Why great teachers aim for influence not control

Dwayne Harapnuik — September 2, 2016 — Leave a comment

The following is a copy and adaptation of Todd Henry’s wonderful post Why great leaders aim for influence not control in which I have replaced a few key words to change the focus from leadership and organizations to teacher(s) and classrooms or learning environments. Henry does an exceptional job of pointing out how important it is to let go control and use influence rather then reigns to get people to move in the right direction.

Why great teachers aim for influence not control

“Control is all about my needs, my ego, and my desire to feel like the center of my environment. I wish to impose my will on everyone around me, and expect them to fall in line with how I believe things should be… we should instead be striving for influence.” – Die Empty

I’ll admit that as a parent, one of my biggest challenges is letting my children make mistakes. Instead, I want to swoop in and help them do everything right the first time. Sometimes this is for my own convenience. (Honestly, I don’t want to have to wait for them to try something five times.) Of course, I know this is not good. In order to grow, children have to make a lot of mistakes, and learn their limits. They have to become comfortable with uncertainty, and understand that there is sometimes pain on the other side of effort.

In different ways, I believe that the same principle applies in classroom or learning environments. I regularly hear stories of teachers’ grasping tightly to the reins of their students, and closely controlling every aspect of their behavior. They have to approve every decision, manage every interaction, and oversee every collaboration. In the end, these control-freak teachers are actually doing much more harm to the students than good.

I believe that in any area of life in which the goal is to multiply your effort over time, you should be attempting to achieve influence, not control.

Influence is leading by vision, but control is leading by sight.

When your goal is to grow your influence over time, you are working toward a long-arc goal, and you’re willing to accept some short-term failure in order to achieve success in the end. When you lead by control, any shortcoming is intolerable, which causes students in your learning environments to adopt a “wait until you tell me what to do” mindset.
Any rules and guidelines should attempt to inform decisions, not to control and tightly restrict them. Your objective is to teach students to think for themselves.

“Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.” – Dee Hock, founder of VISA

Influence is situation agnostic, but control is situation specific.

On a related note, leading with influence means that students will learn principles that they can apply broadly to any number of similar circumstances. Control is always situation specific, because the objective is to ensure that behavior in a given circumstance is acceptable. Again, this will train students to look to you for answers rather than training them to be resourceful. Influencers teach principles; control freaks deal in absolutes.
Influence is about care, but control is about self-interest.

When you genuinely care about someone, you want to do your best to ensure their continued success even when they are no longer under your instructions. You want them to learn to take on increasing amounts of responsibility and to grow in their own influence. Control, one the other hand, is all about ensuring that they don’t embarrass you or stain your record in the here and now. You just want to ensure that they don’t mess everything up, regardless of whether they learn anything they can carry forward.

“I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” – Ralph Nader

Influence is about spreading praise, but control is about claiming credit.

When you lead by influence, you will dilute credit for any given initiative. The student gets acclaim for any successes. Control is ultimately about putting yourself at the center of everything, which means that you believe that you are the only person capable of making the project successful.

“It’s amazing how much you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
– Harry S. Truman

Controlling behavior never leads to results beyond your own grasp.However, when you are able to achieve influence, you multiply your efforts and reproduce your values and principles in the lives of others.

Aim for influence, not control.

References:

Henry, T. (2016, August 26). Why Great Leaders Aim For Influence, Not Control. Retrieved September 2, 2016, from http://www.toddhenry.com/leading/great-leaders-aim-influence-not-control/

In Learning, Motivation control, influence, leadership, motivation, teachers

First Fifteen Minutes or More

Dwayne Harapnuik — May 9, 2016 — Leave a comment

Learning something new is frustrating. It involves being dumb on the way to being smart. Once we get good enough (at our tools, at our work) it’s easier and easier to skip learning how to do the next thing, because, hey, those fifteen minutes are a hassle. (Godin, 2016)

I have been thinking about this Seth Godin quote ever since he posted The first fifteen minutes to his blog in January. For the most part I think he is accurate. All too often we are not willing to deal with the fifteen minutes of hassle to learn something new that can save us hundreds or even thousands of minutes down the road. I said for the most part because Godin’s fifteen minute rule can only be applied to the simplest of tasks, tools or processes. It also only applies if the task, tool, or process impacts you as an individual. Once the you bring in other people into the picture the time factor can increase significantly. Regardless of the complexity of the task or the added complexity of a collaborative effort the short time pain for long term gain are still worth the effort. Let me explain.

Students in the Lamar University Master of Digital Learning and Leading (DLL) study online and use digital books and resources. When they transition from one course to the next it has become common practice to share the reading list for the next course to give them the opportunity to stay up with the high volume of reading. We only use digital resources in the program and due to the nature of Digital Learning these resources are constantly being updated. Keeping and sharing static lists of these resources for each of the courses in the Master program has become a challenge. Updating a shared Google document doesn’t offer enough power and flexibility.

This is why we planning a move to Zotero reference management software. I have been using reference management software of one kind or another since the mid 1990’s and have been using the open source, cloud based Zotero since it was first developed in 2007. Therefore, I didn’t have to spend fifteen minutes to learn the software. However, I did have to spend much more then fifteen minutes because I had to explore and test:

The best way to set up Zotero Groups which included determining the correct group and user permissions and access model,
How to add new users and how to invite and share access to the system;
How to instruct the group administrators and new users how access and use the online system.

Each of these steps took approximately fifteen minutes so Godin’s model does work if you multiply it by numbers of significant steps in the process. If you factor in the initial learning process I would have spent sixty minutes to get to the point where I could demonstrate to my colleagues that using Zotero would be the best way for us to share DLL resources.

But are the sixty minutes worth the effort. Godin argues:

The problem with evaluating the first fifteen minutes of frustration is that we easily forget about the 5,000 minutes of leverage that frustration earns us if we stick it out.

Once again Godin’s model is based on individual effort. When you factor in the six or seven full time faculty and dozen or so adjunct faculty who will use the Zotero system and the hundreds of students who will not only use Zotero to access the course reading lists, but will also share it with their students the impact can be much more significant then the 5,000 minutes of leverage that Godin points to.

Perhaps even more important than the time savings and leverage is the impact this can have on our future leaders. Our program is call Digital Learning and Leading so it is appropriate that faculty in the program model the digital leadership required to take the fifteen or sixty or more minutes of frustration in order to leverage the power of digital learning which will have an exponential effect. This is what leaders do and what leaders must model.

References

Godin. (2016, January 16). Seth’s Blog: The first fifteen minutes [Blog]. Retrieved from http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/01/the-first-fifteen-minutes.html

In Learning, Productivity digital learning, Innovation, leadership, new