So what is leadership to you?
In this next article in the 'behind the scenes' series I wanted to share the design of Week 1 - Leader Mindset that has just gone live on www.leadermooc.net. It is our first 'real' week after the soft start with Orientation Week (numbered as week 0). Looking at the first data and activity in our MOOC I think the Orientation Week has been crucial as for the majority of people this is their first course on canvas.net and for roughly one third of participants even their first online course. That didn't stop interesting and spontaneous discussions to start such as 'are leaders truly not born?' or sub-communities to form such as K12, government, etc. The most tricky part of the platform for people is how the peer reviewed assignments work. But now 'the real work' has started and this week we ask people to think hard about what leadership means for them and ask themselves if they have a leader mindset - if they value leading as opposed to doing the work yourself for example. To that end we cover definitions of leadership over the years of research, cultural aspects through the Global 6 research findings and we have a topic on women leadership.
A million models
The starting point of our design has really been: there are a million models of leadership. Just google the word and you'll see the multitude of models, good advice, 10 point checklists what (not) to do, etc. Every month sees the publication of yet another set of books on leadership and we already have a full library at our headquarters devoted solely to leadership. For beginning leaders who find themselves 'suddenly leading' this can be quite overwhelming. Before I joined the Center for Creative Leadership I created a slide deck overly simplistic overview of 10 schools of thought on leadership. For many decades leadership was associated with 'the leader' (always a male by the way) who just 'had it'. But now our thoughts have evolved to see leadership as a collective process. Just like any function (accounting, marketing, sales,...) in a company, leadership has a purpose too. We suggest to look at leadership as a COLLECTIVE PROCESS to create DIRECTION, ALIGNMENT and COMMITMENT. Go into the MOOC if you want to learn more, but with this definition you already see that leadership is not attached to a formal position or role per sé. It also makes clear what the 'leadership' versus 'managment' side of the coins are.
Getting the work done through others
A popular book in our field is the leadership pipeline. It details specific levels of leaders in a corporate context such as 'leader of others', 'leader of leaders' (aka middle managers), leading the function etc. The pipeline is the stream where people get promoted to the next level. One particular aspect the book focuses on is how different these levels are and that what it takes to succeed at different levels. There are certain values we expect from people at each level, a certain mindset. For the first 'passage', this mindset shift is mostly to move from identifying yourself as the star performer (which was probably a reason you were promoted in the first place) to defining your success as the success of your people, and to get the work done through others instead of doing it yourself. It is a mindset shift you need to be OK with before you accept the position and one the goes right to your core values and identity.
I'd also like to point to a series of articles on our corporate blog with the tag #itsnotmeitsyou, about this shift in mindset when you start leading people.
Various lenses
In the week's subtopics we also take people through the lenses of culture and gender to look at leadership. We point to Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook who wrote the book Lean In on that subject but also discuss some of our research on 'the glass ceiling'. For the cultural lens we tap into the Globe study. Actually, in the intake survey of LeaderMOOC we asked people to select an image that represents leadership for them and those images were taken from that global research project. The majority vote for the LeaderMOOC audience was the 'flock of birds' flying in the same direction.
It is our ambition / design goal that by going over these various aspects of leadership and by discussion it in the forums, people will be able to see that there is no one 'truth' about leadership, and that they are able to make up their own mind about what leadership means for them, how they see themselves as leaders and if they are willing to accept that (and do the hard work it requires to develop into that leader...)
Some observations after the first '0' week of LeaderMOOC:
- Enrollments are up to 3900 now. Around 450 people submitted the first peer reviewed assignment.
- We hope the technological barrier to the platform and a MOOC course will not become a big hurdle for people to take part. For a lot of people (36%) this is their first online course.
- Some good spontaneous discussions started, and a few people made nice blog articles so we decided to curate a weekly 'Journal' with the highlights of activities that week.
- Our board of governors asked us to present the LeaderMOOC topic on their recent meeting.
- We compiled the data on the intake and demographics survey: we have a good gender balance (about 50/50), people coming from all over the world but the majority from the USA, mostly people in their early or mid careers, and willing to spend 2-4 hours a week on the course.
- And the topic for 'Mystery Week' (a topic people could vote on) is known. We'll announce it soon on the platform.
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