It’s hard to believe, but after 18 years of formal study, from first grade in a small East Texas school through doctoral study at MIT, I cannot remember ever having a class or having a teacher talk about learning how to learn. Perhaps that’s why Coursera’s MOOC “Learning How to Learn” has been taken by more than 1.8 million students from some 200 countries.1, 2 It’s appears clear that my experience is not unique.
Some 150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”
What Emerson was saying is that the way you show up, your presence, can so over power what you say that your words have little or no impact or perhaps even a negative impact. That’s not a very pretty picture.
Today, most organizations, including a university’s IT organization, structure their work through a set of teams. Other examples include professional sports teams with their structure, their practice day-after-day of plays they may execute in the game, and a surgical team that performs the same procedure, for example, hip replacement, under tightly controlled conditions, perhaps multiple times, day after day.
Compliments are a good thing, right? Everyone likes to be recognized for a job well done. Especially from someone whose work you admire. They are a special form of positive feedback. However, many of us find accepting a compliment with grace to be a major challenge. Too often, our first instinct is to dismiss the compliment. For example, the recipient:
Yesterday was Memorial Day, our holiday for remembering all those – some 1.4 million from the American Revolution until now – who gave their lives in conflicts while serving in our nation’s armed forces.
The MOR Leaders Program, as the name implies, is about leadership. Just what is it that leaders do and how do they go about doing it? Two weeks ago, we focused on the humble leader. There we wrote about what makes a leader humble1 and how a leader can cultivate those characteristics in his or her leadership style.
Leadership style has to do with the way a leader provides direction, implements plans, and motivates people. The literature on leadership discusses many different styles.
Daniela Aivazian is the author of today’s Tuesday Reading. She is an Organizational Effectiveness Specialist in Stanford University’s University IT organization. Her essay first appeared as a leadership program reflection earlier this year. [Dani may be reached at daivaz@stanford.edu.]
The MOR Leaders Program employs a leadership model which calls for leaders to focus on
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617.924.4501
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