Rosa Say is running an interesting set of invited postings about leadership at her blog. They all are interesting, but this post by Kevin Eikenberry about learning and leadership caught my eye. Most Extension Professionals place a high emphasis on life long learning – at least for our clientele. My first reading made me think about how we as Extension Professionals need to keep on learning to add to our leaderships skills. Glen Hiemstra points out that when we find ourselves simply reacting to things we are often still looking backwards at past structures and models (see Glen’s Preferred Futuring concept in his book).
Kevin addresses this very directly: “The status quo requires no leadership. Think about it. If everything in the current situation was great – if there was no need for change – how much leadership would be needed? Leadership is required because we want to move somewhere.” Other good tidbits include brief discussions on modeling learning and how being a better leader leads to becoming a better human.
It’s also a good post for Extension Professionals working with leadership and management groups. You might want to also check out the other posts on Rosa’s blog and take a look at what Kevin is saying on his blog.
eXtension has announced 10 new Communities of Practice. Here is the link to the complete list, including the existing COP’s.
While some of you have already heard the bad news, I understand that not everyone knows that the Extension family lost a member and leader in the ComAir crash in Cincinnati on August 27. Dr. Larry Turner, Associate Dean for Extension and Director of the Cooperative Extension Service at the University of Kentucky was among the passengers that did not survive. I did not know Dr. Turner, but several of the Ag Educators in Ohio had worked with him during this summer’s National Ag Agents’ Meeting in Cincinnati. All spoke highly of him.
More information is available at this UK Extension site and also in this
posting from eXtension.
Both NACDEP (National Association of Community Development Extension Professionals) and CDS (Community Development Society) currently have calls for presentations out for their annual meetings. NACDEP meets in Philadelphia from April 16-19 and CDS meets in Appleton, Wisconsin (with the National Rural Development Partnership – NRDP) on July 17-20. Both are great opportunities for Extension Professionals looking to share programming and research. Or to just attend to network and learn. The NACDEP call is here, the CDS call
here.
I mentioned earlier that Ryan Schmiesing and I are starting to work on a youth collaborative software project. This means that I’m doing spurts of research on the subject. One area of information that I’m collecting compares current youth generations to older adult generations. So I was really interested in this Business Week article about
Millennials serving as interns (found via Tom Peters’ blog). It’s an interview of an entrepreneur that hired summer interns and takes 3-4 minutes to read. The culture clash is interesting, and I still wonder how much of it is generational differences versus typical kids working for typical baby boomer adults. Two key differences that I do think are real: A generation that knows nothing of the cold war and that take multi-tasking as a way of life.
I’m especially interested in the group of youth called the Digital Native generation. This is the generation that grew up in a complete digital lifestyle and knows nothing different (I picked the term Digital Native up from Glen Hiemstra’s new book Turning the Future into Revenue. Glen credits Marc Prensky with coining the term – see this article by Marc. See also p. 15 of the Glen’s book for more information). Another interesting term is “Mypod generation”– from Myspace and iPod - two tools that almost every teenager understands. For more on what the newer digital savvy workers expect, see this article from the September 2006 issue of Optimize. What we need to understand is this is the only life that many of our youth have experienced. Hence our efforts to look at both Extension youth and adult programming to better understand how youth use social collaboration software. Extension can play a key role in helping both the youth (via understanding the pros/cons of social software, the consequences of what they post, understanding job and other life skills) and adults (to actually better understand tools like Myspace, how club and other advisors can use the tools, and how to work with mixed generations of co-workers and citizens).
I’m a somewhat unrepentant multi-tasker. It just comes naturally to me. I have no flow issues with jumping from one item, conversation, project to another, then another, then another and then maybe jumping back. I find that this really disturbs the people around me that are really focused on single tasks. There is also some evidence that multi-tasking can diffuse effectiveness.
Drucker really pushes this in the Effective Executive. While that book was ahead of its time, it’s really tough in today’s environment for busy Extension Professionals to have the luxury of “checking out” and devoting long blocks of time to specific projects.
So what is the answer? To middle ground options that I’ve been playing around with are “chunking” and “time boxing”. I think that both can be good tools for Extension Professionals to test. Here is a quick summary of each.
Time Boxing
I found time boxing through
Dwayne Melacon’s link to this post on Dave Cheong’s blog. Time boxing refers to setting a pre-determined time frame for each project or task. Dave’s post has a good overview of the process. I like the idea because I think we in Extension tend to suffer from Parkinson’s Law , which generally states that “work expands to fit the amount of time allotted to its completion” (see interpretations applied to other uses here). I really liked Dave’s connections to doing the most important things first and his discussion of “null time”.
Chunking
Related to time boxing is chunking. I found this via
Lisa Haneberg’s blog. Lisa talks about chunking your day into blocks of time as an alternative to multi-tasking. See her post here for her idea of chunking and a tool she uses.
Both of these tools are closely related and can benefit Extension Professionals by allowing more time for them to focus. If you’re an Outlook user, you might want to look at this post for a brief description on how to create 30 minute chunks of time in Outlook.
This past week I was able to spend parts of three days attending various meetings and workshops on developing high impact teams. Ohio State University Extension hosted Arlen Leholm and Ray Vlasin, authors of the book Increasing the Odds for High-Performance Teams, from Sunday evening through Tuesday. Arlen is the current Dean and Director of Cooperative Extension for the University of Wisconsin and the former Director of Michigan State University Extension. Ray is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus for Michigan State University Extension, the former Director of the Natural Resource Economics Division of USDA’s Economic Research Service, and a Staff Economist for the House Public Works Committee.
It was time well spent. Given the fact that most Extension work is done via teams (and committees) we really need to focus on ways of improving our teams’ performances. As an institution that touts science-based research for decision making, we do a terrible job of actually looking at the literature for teams and applying it to our own work. Leholm and Vlasin do just that in Chapter 2 of their book. This chapter has a very good and very succinct overview of the literature about teams. It is so succinct that it is easy to miss the density of detail it contains. The book also has several case study chapters, including one discussing two Extension High Performance Teams (one at Michigan and the other in Ohio).
The book will be especially valuable for those interested in developing longer term, self-directed teams. Much time was spent discussing the differences between self-directed teams and single-leader teams. And the organizational architecture required to have true self-directed teams. And the time frame – maybe two or more years - to really get the team humming.
So without giving the book’s contents away, here are some key concepts. It is possible for organizations to “increase the odds” of developing high performance teams. But they need to truly empower them, build trust and commitment among team members, and help provide the context to develop clarified and realistic team expectations, rules and team purpose. To be truly self-directed, teams must have an infrastructure to keep them focused on performance. And that infrastructure is their own formalized (read written) purpose and operational statements.
To get a better understanding see this 2004 presentation by Arlen and Ray to. For twenty bucks, the book is a cheap investment for Extension professionals.