Month: March 2025

My initial blog post has a focus on balanced decision-making and integrity. In another class that I am taking, we have just finished a group project on Inclusive leadership, which I also resonated very strongly with. Our group not only completed research on it, we modeled the attributes to it which worked out wonderfully for our project. I continue to feel very strongly about both balanced decision-making and integrity in leadership and both can be found in inclusive leadership. After that project was complete, I did add another goal, which was to be curious, to ensure that I am leaning into the what my teams needs me to hear, creating meaningful connections (Anderson, 2024). They weave together with many other traits from other leadership models to create a style that is unique, and often found in indigenous leadership styles.

Indigenous leadership has been evolving throughout my adulthood. As a young adult, it was not nearly as prevalent as it is now, 20 year later. Indigenous leaders are modeling ‘new’ ways of successful leadership in a colonialistic world, changing the view from hierarchical to a more collective view (Benmira & Agboola, 2021). New in colonial leadership, not so new in indigenous communities or cultures. Indigenous leadership is very similar to inclusive leadership in many ways. A leader that I’ve followed for many years is my Haida dancing and singing leader. He often tells us that his goal is to teach us to become leaders of our own group, empowering us to become the leader (Benmira & Agboola, 2021)

I come from a matrilineal culture. As significant as the Maori women are in Fitzgerald’s article (p. 16), so too are women in my culture. The matriarch’s in my lineage are the policy holders, they are the ones who we go to for counsel, or knowledge. These women are the original inclusive leaders in my culture.

As you seen in our group project, our focus was on a feedback loop, Anderson also discusses the importance of regular, consistent feedback in order to grow. In my current role, I am helping our team to lead change through collective leadership. It helps the team to attain our goal. My role is to do whatever I can to effectively help, whether that is reaching out to my contacts or writing a supporting brief. The feedback loop comes in as we are checking in with one another, and seeing how the progress is going bi-weekly. In doing this, I am practicing my vision of balanced decision making, having integrity in my communication, and being curious to the other in my team to be inclusive and ensure that we are all recognizing one another’s strengths and running with it when we can!

References

Anderson, C. (2024, December 11). Principles of Indigenous leadership and self-care in the academy. Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/principles-indigenous-leadership-and-selfcare-academy

Benmira, S., & Agboola, M. (2021). Evolution of leadership theory. The Learning Zone, 5, 3–5.

Fitzgerald, T. (2003). Changing the deafening silence of indigenous women’s voices in educational leadership. Journal of Educational Administration, 41(1), 9–23.

I once worked for a small law firm. We filed all electronic documents using folders and file naming protocols. Our issue was: they were only saved and accessed through Windows Explorer. Searching was difficult, and if a file was misnamed, misfiled, it was lost for good. Our goal was to find a proper litigation file management product that included a financial management aspect to the program that would output customized reports for our main stakeholders: our clients. Within the firm, our main stakeholders were all staff.

Was our mismanaged adventure successful? Yes, and no. We were capable and successful in migrating our files. The program advertised the ability to recognize duplication, but we found there was a caveat, in that it had to be an exact duplicate, with the same metadata. We were looking for how to find duplication within file contents. As well, the financial customization that was promised was not delivered.

Our instructions were to research the top 3 software options that were selected by our principal lawyer and meet with the distributor and select one based on the principal lawyers demands.

We were a small firm with less than a handful of staff to complete this. We chose a program that was not used often in Canada because of the promises of the finance forms customization. This ended up requiring a lot more extra work on the part of our finance staff, and I, a semi-savvy sql nerd. It did not produce the form customization that we had believed that we would get in the end.

What we should have done: We required much more expertise in determining our actual needs. We should have hired a Project Manager and a knowledgeable consultant to do the research, based on an environment and digital scan (Watt, 2014; University of Calgary, Learning Technologies Task Force, 2014) of our data along with our contracted IT professionals. A Project Manager would have been able to determine the terms of this project and the management of it. A consultant with the required expertise to find the software that would do exactly what we needed. A Project Manager could have determined the difference between needs and wants, the need of the software, and the need as a law firm.

Down the rabbit hole we go! Once we selected a software program, the distributor/sales person set us up with installation plans and basic training. That was our only training plan. It was decided that I would be the Administrator. I took all of the training offered. The front-end of the program was managed through security levels. Certain employees would get certain training based on the security level that they were assigned. This created issues when staff began working within the program as they were asked to access files that their security level did not allow, creating issues for me, as the Administrator, as I would either have to change their access, or access the files for them.

What we should have done: Have the Project Manager create a more succinct, permanent plan to follow-up training to support staff (University of Calgary, Learning Technologies Task Force, 2014, p. 3). Clearly determine security levels for staff based on more than their prescribed job descriptions, security levels should have been based in reality, rather than assumed roles (an aside, so should have job descriptions).

In short, there were many things that we could, and should, have done differently. The software program remained in place and band-aid solutions were put in place for the areas that did not work to our expectations. Having a Project Manager and consultant whose only jobs were to focus on the implementation of this software program would have given us ample time to do our prescribed jobs to our expected standards.

University of Calgary, Learning Technologies Task Force. (2014). Strategic framework for Learning Technologies.

Watt, A. (2014). Project Management (2nd ed.). BCCAMPUS.