Tag: Digital Leadership

Reflections on leadership

This course has been unexpectedly timely. Our cohort has looked at our own experiences with leadership, learned about leadership styles and theories while watching local and world leaders navigate health care and associated crises brought on by the COVID-19 virus.

I’m looking through new lenses, thinking about leadership from new angles with a better understanding of the attributes of effective leaders. While I still have deep appreciation for Reflective leadership (Castelli, 2016) with its grounding in values and flexibility in looking to the future, I’m gaining a better working understanding of distributed leadership (Julien, Wright, and Zinni 2010) as the institution where I work (like many) is thrust into an online-only course delivery model.

Within the distributed model, leadership is thought to lie within every member of the community, and that when it is their time and space to emerge as leader, they do. When their time is over, someone else emerges as leader. This most closely resembles the relay-like passing of the baton that is happening within my work spaces currently. Instructors are consulting with instructors from different schools in silo-breaking collaboration. Groups of faculty are working with traditional, hierarchical leadership to brainstorm and build new initiatives that will enable our students to complete the programs they are currently in. Everyone is bringing their own strengths to bear in problem-solving, and willingly sharing their resources. The multiplicity of change that we’re navigating together is benefiting greatly from a better understanding of the complexity of our organizational systems (Weiner 2009), and how one change within the system has cascade effects to other parts of the system.

Within my work spaces the traditional leadership has been clear and communicative of the day-to-day things we have needed to know to navigate the rapid changes over the past few weeks. It is interesting to note that Sheninger’s (2019) first pillar, Communication, is central to effective leadership at this time. Communication is being done through a variety of digital media simultaneously in an effort to reach as many people as possible with good, reliable information. We’re watching digital communication methods for work proliferate daily as all people, not just leaders, explore the flexibility and efficacy of digital communication.

While the timing couldn’t be better for our cohort to participate in and observe leadership through these new lenses, it’s been a difficult time to implement planning and project management as many changes are being rolled out without planning, but out of necessity. There simply hasn’t been time to create the scale of change that we’ve undertaken with any forethought. It’s times like these where the strength of our leadership is what makes and breaks the changes. We have to have trust in our leaders as they ask us to implement change. We have to trust in our own ability to be leaders when it is our turn.

References:

Castelli, P. A. (2016). Reflective Leadership Review: A Framework for Improving Organisational Performance. The Journal of Management Development; Bradford 35(2):217–36. doi:10.1108/JMD-08-2015-0112
Julien, M., Wright, B., & Zinni, D. (2010). Stories from the Circle: Leadership Lessons Learned from Aboriginal Leaders. The Leadership Quarterly 21(1):114–26. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.10.0009
Sheninger, E. (2019). Pillars of Digital Leadership. International Center for Leadership in Education. Retrieved February 1, 2020 (https://leadered.com/pillars-of-digital-leadership/).
Weiner, B. J. (2009). A Theory of Organizational Readiness for Change. Implementation Science 4(1):67. doi:10.1186/1748-5908-4-67

Some of Sheninger’s Pillars in Action

In my experience, the most important attributes of a leader working in digital learning environments reflect the Seven Pillars listed in  Sheninger’s Pillars of Digital Leadership (2019) primarily because of the emphasis put on communication. My workspaces have spanned private for-profit, public non-profit, and education spaces from kindergarten to post-secondary, each space having a different set of attitudes, expectations, and willingness to adopt and use technology for learning. In many cases those attitudes, etc., are based on personal biases and experiences or popular culture, not on factual study or evidence. Sheninger’s Pillars, with the inclusion of communication, public relations, branding and student engagement and learning, most comprehensively address the varying attitudes of potential users with strategies to assist stakeholders in understanding why implementation is necessary, what it can look like, and how it can positively affect users. When communication is done capably through implementation of these pillars, users are better able to connect the institutional adoption and development of digital learning spaces with their own growth and greater competency in their work or learning.

While there are two spaces in which leadership in digital learning environments is relevant for me personally, I’ve chosen to concentrate on one for the purposes of this blog post. I work for a large music festival in the summer, and last year implemented an online digital learning platform (Moodle).

The music festival was looking for a way to pre-train their 2000+ employees and volunteers before they arrive on site for the show. Everyone must undergo a mandatory safety orientation, done in previous years as workers arrive. Historically, this meant delivering the information to large groups in batches (the bulk of those 2000 people arrive over two days) and having the workers sign off on their participation. Workers participating in the safety orientation is non-negotiable as it part of the festival’s WorkSafe BC compliance. Human Resources (HR) staff was extremely stretched during the days that workers arrived, wanting to orient all employees quickly, and with less strain on HR.

As senior management, our solution was to create a Moodle shell and short Moodle course (the safety orientation) and short quiz. The link to the course was sent out with the employee or volunteer acceptance letter, with an explanation that their work at the festival was conditional on their completing and passing the online safety orientation quiz. Workers went to a link that showed a short (five minute) video, with a randomly generated five question quiz. Competency was set at mastery (all five questions answered correctly), and once completed, HR was notified that the person had completed their orientation and could be accepted to work on site.

Our initial expectation for uptake in the first year was that 30 – 40% of workers would complete the orientation ahead of time, with many returning workers expecting to do the orientation on site as they had in previous years (we had the old version of the orientation available as a back up). We were delighted to find that 89% of workers did their orientation online ahead of time through the Moodle (numbers generated by HR as part of report-out after the festival).

The festival has a very active social media presence. While the bulk of people were accessing the Moodle course, social media threads included explanations and screenshots of how to create an account and log in for the course. Dialogue was lively and engaged between potential workers and the moderators of the social media platforms, and soon we saw that potential workers were troubleshooting for each other and offering help to get each other get into Moodle.

Sheninger’s (2019) pillar of communication explains some of why our initial roll-out was a success. The HR team was actively engaged in two-way communication through a variety of different digital channels, (email, online conferencing and social media) to help workers understand the benefits (shorter processing at arrival on site) completing the orientation online had, and working with them to ensure that the experience was as barrier-free as it could be. The pillars of public relations and branding help to explain success through our ability to control the narrative somewhat (through our social media presence), avoiding negative rhetoric through good customer service, in line with our overarching customer service philosophy and inclusive community philosophical underpinnings.

The initial roll-out of the safety orientation was successful enough that other departments of our festival (Harm Reduction, Medical, and Equipment Usage) have been developing their own courses to deliver to their workers before coming to site. I’ve been working with them to ensure that the pillar of student engagement and learning is explored and implemented effectively throughout the development phase with different methods of delivering information and assessing learning.

As an organization, we will take what we learned about effective communication and build on it for this year to push the reach of this program further in hopes that our workers come to experience a more streamlined arrival to site, and better prepared to do their work.

References:

Sheninger, E. (2019, December 19). Pillars of Digital Leadership. International Center for Leadership in Education. https://leadered.com/pillars-of-digital-leadership/