LeaderMOOC Behind The Scenes: Self-Awareness Week design

A good hard look in the mirror

Another weekend, and another topic for LeaderMOOC. Week 2 on "self-awareness" just unlocked. But why is self-awareness one of the 'fundamental four' of leadership, and the first one we address in the MOOC? In the previous week on the Leader Mindset we covered how leading is about people, about getting work done through others and how it is not about you but about them. And now we start with self-awareness, isn't that misplaced? I grant it, self-awareness is a typical activity in CCL programs, and has been included in most corporate leadership programs today. In fact, typical leadership pipelines start with a 'leading self' level under the motto/dogma "you can't lead others before you can lead yourself."
Participants in our programs usually love this piece because we all like to hear about ourselves. That is, until the hard truth hits. Self-awareness is not a selfish skill nor is it easy to master. In the end, it is about others. Do you know in how much your own personality preferences, values, traits, culture, etc influence the mental models you use to look at the world and other people? I like to describe it as the 'defaults' we have. These defaults do not determine how we will behave in a given situation, but they are ... well... defaults so likely to happen, especially when we are stressed or tired.
Self-awareness is important because of the other people: what happens for good or for bad when you enter a room? What happens when you are on a project team? What happens when you work together with people who have the opposite style or preference on subject X than you do? Are you even aware or are those blind spots? And if you are aware, are you doing something about it to get to results?
And that is why leadership starts with self-awareness and it comes right after the Mindset week in LeaderMOOC.
In 'typical' leadership programs we use (expensive) psychometric assessments and 360 assessments to get data on how we intend our behavior and how others perceive it. Of course we can't do that in a free MOOC, so we are using social identity mapping, positivity (a research field within neuro-leadership). We will have our first virtual session with dr Barbara Fredrickson this week where people can ask questions.

Best video ever

I rarely get emotional, but I was really touched when I saw the video on Social Identity our team in Addis Abeba (Ethiopia) had created for our MOOC. I think it is the best video we have in LeaderMOOC. Have a look how Steadman walks and talks.


This video illustrates how LeaderMOOC is what I call a 'passion project'. We didn't ask or script for the video to be done this way. We just asked if they wanted to make one and this is the result. LeaderMOOC has unlocked many dormant talents in the CCL faculty worldwide, and people have been donating their time and energy.

Lessons learned so far

We have a couple lessons learned so far in this MOOC:

• The peer reviewed assignments (1 per week) remain the biggest obstacle and source of the most messages we get as teacher and in the technical forums. It is a new activity you won't find outside a MOOC, and also new for the MOOC team. (Eg it turns out the assignment of the reviewers only happens after due date and only if you press a certain button.) Some people get valuable feedback, other people don't (because they got assigned people who left the course for example). It is an area we need to keep looking in.
• Massive discussions. We were positively surprised by the quality of discussion we had on the leadership metaphor cards, it was a very rich discussion where people brought their own images etc. At the other had the discussions have been overwhelming in the first weeks because of the massive participation. In the MOOC literature, voices are raising the usefulness of discussions within MOOCs - eg the article the silent majority. We also learned this week that it is possible that students set up their own groups in canvas.net and that we can split up students. I can see pro and cons in both approaches.
• "Engagement service": That makes me wonder if one potential business model stream could be a form of an 'engagement service' that is paying where you get personal support to take you through the MOOC - a coach as it where that you talk with every week on the MOOC subjects. It would counter dropout behaviour I'm sure and offer a lot of value to a subset of the population (those who are not OK to autonomously steer and regulate their own learning). I think it would be a fair approach: those who have learned to cope with information overload, networking effects, etc in a MOOC can do it for free, the others may pay for the extra service. It is just a thought...
• Yes the numbers are still strong on enrollment (over 4100 now), and as typical in a MOOC we are slowly seeing the 'stable audience' which I'll have more information about next time. The roadmap was downloaded about 1400 times so that should give an indication on how many people actually actively (= not just looking at the first page) started the course. We also see that about 1/3 of progress is made over the weekend, so a lot of people take their course then. 

More next week...