Week 5: Leadership Context and You
“A simple framework to help you make your career choices … Defining your search strategy … Organising support … Wrap-up”
Summaries
- Week 5 - Leadership context and you > Welcome video > Introduction to week 5
- Week 5 - Leadership context and you > A simple framework to help you make your career choices > A simple framework to help you make your career choices
- Week 5 - Leadership context and you > Defining your search strategy > Defining your search strategy
- Week 5 - Leadership context and you > Organising support > Organising support
- Week 5 - Leadership context and you > Wrap-up > Wrap up
Week 5 – Leadership context and you > Welcome video > Introduction to week 5
- Welcome everybody to the next week of our MOOC on leadership.
- I just want to thank you for your very active participation in our course.
- We have a very lively Facebook group and we all, the staff, we all appreciate your participation very very much.
- We are working on a profEd on engineering and leadership.
Week 5 – Leadership context and you > A simple framework to help you make your career choices > A simple framework to help you make your career choices
- Making career choices is a continuous process during our whole career, rather than just a one-time event.
- As we are learning and developing ourselves, we will want to move on to new challenges.
- Our work-context is continuously changing around us and we may decide at some stage that our current work environment is not right for us anymore.
- Career changes therefore can be gradual moves to a next step or a complete departure from what we were doing before.
- As our life expectancies go up and the work context is more dynamic than ever, we can all expect to make more career choices during our lives than our parents have ever done.
- You may actually be positively surprised! We have developed a simple framework that will help you think about your next career steps.
- You may want to have a look at your workbook again, as your passions may guide you to your moments of flow, they may even coincide.
- The key question here is: what’s the context you need around you in order to be successful? The assumption here is that a context that supports our development will ultimately make us more successful.
- Edgar Schein – former professor from MIT- argues that all learning is based on coercion and even pain “Because you either have no choice, as is the case for children, or it is painful to replace something that is already there with new learning.” I still believe that the optimum is a pleasant work environment with significant, but healthy challenges.
- Examples of specific questions to consider in the Context box are: In what type of organizational culture do I want to work? What are my colleagues like? How much money do I want to make? How important is career growth to me? What are the opportunities for advancement? What does the work environment look like? What’s the ideal location of my work? Where do I want to live? How international should the environment be? Are there opportunities to travel? What’s the work-life balance like? How important is autonomy to me? With which types of stakeholders do I want to work? And last but not least: What do my loved ones need from me in order to be happy? The fourth and final box of the framework is Legacy.
Week 5 – Leadership context and you > Defining your search strategy > Defining your search strategy
- What the framework really does is provide you with a picture of all the relevant criteria for your next job.
- Think about it: What is your Edge: the things you are really good at.
- The next step is to start brainstorming about your options.
- The question is: which jobs meet at least some, or most, or even all of these criteria? This is what we call a search strategy.
Week 5 – Leadership context and you > Organising support > Organising support
- CEOs of large corporations have Boards and external advisors who provide them with advice.
- Our advice to you is to appoint your own Board of Directors.
- In a Board of Directors, all members have a fixed term.
- That’s the period of time during which they serve on the board.
- Members roll off and join the board depending on these terms.
- The good news about your own Boards that you can define the terms of each of the members.
Week 5 – Leadership context and you > Wrap-up > Wrap up
- We would like to congratulate you with almost reaching the end of the course! But before it’s time for the Final exam, we want to give you a brief wrap up of the last weeks.
- In week one, Hans en Gerdien explained that leadership is highly context-related.
- In this week, we also asked you to post cartoons of leadership on the discussion forum.
- In week 2, two mindsets of a leader were discussed: a project-based mindset and a process-based mindset.
- On the discussion forum most of you told us which style fits you best.
- The average answer consisted of a mix of styles, due to the fact that leadership is very much context related as you learnt in week 1.
- In week 2 and 3 some personal characteristics of leaders from were covered by Stefaan and Surya.
- We further explained the leadership styles that were briefly introduced to you in week 2 of the MOOC, with the clips on Jack, John, Jeff and Jay.
- In light of the triple bottom line we introduced another leadership style that is hopefully able to capture the current level of complexity in this world in a better way: sustainable leadership.
- The assignment of this last chapter was to come up with your own leadership style, that you observed in your region, culture or work environment.
- We have seen very promising submissions! We like to highlight the leadership style provided by Kevin from Peru.
- He shared the transactional leadership style with us.
- In addition to the leadership styles, TU Delft alumnus Pieter Ligthart and Dana Kruegerr finally infused you with some essential advises to enhance your career opportunities and improve the quality of your working live.
