Delegating

Mike Dewey is Director of Campus Services in the Office of Information Technology at Rice University.  He leads groups that provide desktop computing support and help desk services.  He is also interim director of the Teaching, Learning, and Scholarly Technologies group. To be honest, I did not know what to expect when my CIO asked […]

Stop Getting in Your Own Way My big takeaway from our first set of meetings has to be to “get on the balcony.”  Related to getting on the balcony, I recognized through our reading and activities that I need to delegate more, give work back, and say no more.  Once I condition myself to make […]

A reflection shared by MOR Leaders alum, Jim Hall from UMN. Jim writes, “We only have so much time in a given week. How you divide your time is up to you. But where should you provide focus? Lead, manage, or do? The “lead-manage-do” concept helps us to understand the focus we need to put […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, “The Case for and Against Stressful Deadlines” comes to us from the pen of Laura Vanderkem and recently appeared at FastCompany.com.  Vanderkem is a well-known writer who questions the status quo and helps readers rediscover their true passions and beliefs in pursuit of more meaningful lives. Some of us abhor deadlines, some of […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading “If You’re Not Helping People Develop, You’re Not Management Material” <http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/01/if-youre-not-helping-people-develop-youre-not-management-material/>, first appeared in the HBR Blog Network.  The author is Monique Valcour, Professor of Management at EDHEC business school in France.  She focuses on helping companies and individuals craft high performance, meaningful jobs, careers, workplaces, and lives. Professor Valcour argues that […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is How to Ask Better Questions.  The essay’s author is Judity Ross, a contributing writer and columnist for Talking Writing, an online literary magazine.  She has written numerous articles and reports for academy, corporate, and nonprofit organizations, including the Harvard Business School.

Several weeks ago, the Tuesday Reading was “Increase Your Team’s Curiosity” […]

This week’s Tuesday Reading, “Where’s Your Focus?”  is a post on Jim Hall’s COACHING BUTTONS Blog.  Jim is an 2007 ITLP alum from the University of Minnesota where he is now Director of Information Services at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Jim’s essay focuses on Leading – Managing – Doing (LMD) and, in particular, on […]

In “Forget The Mission Statement:  What’s Your Mission Question?”,  Warren Berger challenges us to consider responding to a set of mission questions instead of writing a mission statement that is so general it can apply to almost anything.  He argues that mission questions provide a reality check on whether you are staying true to what […]

This “reading” is a short video presenting the idea that having courage enables you to say NO to something so that you can say YES to something that really matters.  Its author is Michael Bungay Stanier, a senior partner at Box of Crayons, a Toronto-based organization with the slogan “do less Good Work in order […]

Grant Halvorson, associate director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School, notes that everyone who is a professional in today’s workplace experiences bouts of extreme stress.  So, it’s not whether you are going to experience stress but what you are going to do about it.  His Harvard Business Review blog essay offers nine […]