This blog post contains my reflections on my personal leadership. It was written for the first assignment of the LRNT525 Leading Change in Digital Environments. It addresses how I would describe my approach to leadership, how digital technologies have affected how I lead, and which theories of leadership I think work best in leading change within digital learning environments.
My Approach
The Rational inventor is “non-directive in their handling of others and will take charge of activities only when forced to by circumstance” (Keirsey, 1998).
As long as I can remember, I have been asked to lead; for as long as I can remember, I have done so with reluctance. I prefer to work alone on my own projects or as part of a team to reach a common goal. I will step up to leadership where there is a vacancy and a need; however, as soon as another competent leader shows up I am happy to step aside.
To illustrate, in 2003 I was a Communications Manager who was designated the Acting Communication Director while my boss was away on a four-week vacation. After three days of my coworkers questioning why I had been left in charge, I asked who wanted to be the director and handed the role to the most senior manager. When my boss returned he was surprised that I have given up my role and seat at the Executive table, but also impressed that my actions had calmed the senior manager, raised the morale in the office, and ensured that our department continued to serve the needs of the organization. I avoided an internal power-struggle that would have jeopardized our department’s reputation and credibility.
I doubt that Sheninger (2014) had that scenario in mind when he wrote, “leadership is about action, not position,” however, looking through the lens of values-based leadership, I view my actions as “translating the cacophony of competing interests into a simple harmonious vision of a good end” (O’Toole, 2008). My actions supported the overall goals of the Communication Department and let me focus on my immediate work which was to oversee the creation of content for the organizations’ internal and external websites, including content-management training for 34 employees across the province—training that required employees to use new digital technologies.
Digital Technologies
It is difficult for me to compare the array of digital technologies available to us in 2018 with the technologies that were available to me in 2003; nonetheless, the new content-management system (CMS) at that time changed the process of managing web content from a centralized model, which required a programmer to update the websites, to a distributed model in which any employee who learned how to use the CMS, and who had the appropriate security permissions, could update the websites.
In my role, I partnered with the web-programmer in the Information Technology (IT) department to research and choose the CMS, create the distributed content-management strategy, and lobby for at least one person from each department to become a content coordinator. We then conducted training sessions via webinars and followed-up with trainees by phone and email.
In 2003, these digital technologies and training methods were innovative; employees were accustomed to travelling to head-office for training or having someone from head-office travel to them. The novelty of learning online was both exciting and disconcerting because high-speed internet was unavailable to offices outside of major urban areas. But we overcame those obstacles to raise the technical literacy in the organization and to give everyone a stake in maintaining the websites.
One leadership obstacle for me was that I was a manager who was lobbying directors to assign one staff member from each department to work with me on the organization’s websites. In other words, while I would manage the website activities I had no actual power over the employees who would work with me and therefore could not use a transactional leadership style based on rewarding employees for their performance (Khan, 2017).
Looking back on this project, I can see that my actions aligned with some of Sheninger’s (2014) pillars of digital leadership. I became a “storyteller-in-chief” (p.3) to share the vision of how the CMS would empower others and gave them a stake in keeping the organization’s websites up-to-date. My IT partner and I focused on “enhancing essential skill sets—communication, collaboration, creativity…critical thinking, and problem-solving” (p.3); we embraced professional growth and development (p. 4) and built a strong community of practice for web-content coordinators, similar to Sheninger’s (2014) personal learning network.
I can also see that my actions aligned with Huggins (2017) distributed leadership: “a purposeful approach to increasing [organization] effectiveness through the involvement of other formal and informal [organization] leaders in leadership activities.” (p.3). The directors (formal) explained the distributed content-management strategy at their staff meetings where they asked for a volunteer to be the content-coordinator or designated someone to that role. Those content-coordinators (informal) then proceeded to lead the process of collecting, editing, publishing, and maintaining content from their departments.
The centralized control of producing web content shifted to the distributed model over eighteen months. During that time, the CMS remained stable, there were no dramatic changes to learning technologies, and mobile devices were limited to palm pilots and flip phones. The media-rich digital learning environments of 2018 were not only out of scope, they did not yet exist.
Leadership Theories for Digital Learning Environments
For now, and for the foreseeable future, building and maintaining effective digital learning environments will require teams of skilled technical experts, instructional designers, and subject matter experts. A distributed leadership model may be appropriate in larger organizations; leaders within that model and lone leaders in smaller organizations may be most effective by using an adaptive leadership approach to understand others’ values, recognizes their struggles, delegate responsibilities, and include others in the decision-making processes (Khan, 2017).
Whether leading from the top or from the middle, whether by choice or necessity, leaders will need to recognize, appreciate, and leverage the wisdom of their teams.
References
Keirsey, D. (1998). Please understand me II. Del Mar, CA: Prometheus Nemesis.
Huggins, K. (2017). Developing leadership capacity in others: An examination of high school principals’ personal capacities for fostering leadership. International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership, 12(1). Retrieved from http://journals.sfu.ca/ijepl/index.php/ijepl/article/view/670/169.
Khan, N. (2017). Adaptive or transactional leadership in current higher education: A brief comparison. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(3). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3294.
Sheninger, E. (2014). Pillars of digital leadership. International Centre for Leadership in Education. Retrieved from http://www.leadered.com/pdf/LeadingintheDigitalAge_11.14.pdf.
O’Toole, James (2008). Notes toward a definition of values-based leadership. The Journal of Values-Based Leadership, 1(1). Retrieved from https://scholar.valpo.edu/jvbl/vol1/iss1/10/.