Leading for Results: a Capacity Building Seminar

ESM-296-4W

Leading for Results: A Capacity Building Seminar

Course Syllabus - Winter Quarter 2016

Tuesdays & Thursdays 8:30 – 9:45 AM

Visiting Lecturer John Jostes, AICP, MPA

Office: TBA, Office Hours: 10:30 – 12 Noon and by Arrangement

(805) 452-9807 (cell)

or

Why Take This Course?

Individuals play an important role in leading organizations toward environmental sustainability and implementing cross-sector initiatives. Getting results in today's complex world requires collectively influencing and motivating peers, managers and executives at a variety of organizational levels to take action in a world full of risk and complexity. Substantive expertise in conservation and ecological issues is simply not enough to effect long lasting change in policy and practice.

Leadership entails not only the capacity to have and maintain influence beyond your authority, but the ability to get people to face and ultimately bridge the gap between the values they stand for and the conditions they live in.

Leadership skills are increasingly important in the full range of corporate, NGO and public agency settings. There are varying perspectives on leadership, but in this class, we will focus on leading as it relates to challenges and change we face in personal, business and social situations in the Twenty-first century. Leadership is what individuals do in mobilizing other people, notably in teams, groups and networks to do “adaptive” work – improvisational problem solving in the context of environmental social and economic change rather than the maintenance of a given “status quo”.

Interested?

Course Objectives

There are only two ways to influence behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it. This course focuses on the latter, while not ignoring the trade-offs of the former. Leading demands both inspiration and perspiration. It will focus class participants on their own behaviors and build skills to more effectively influence and lead environmental decision-making within groups, organizations, networks and society.

Leadership skills and the act of leading are critical to the survival of our planet, civil society and the need to anticipate and respond to events, trends and decisions that affect our quality of life. Environmental sustainability, resource management, urban design, public policy and many other professional fields all require individuals to face and facilitate change, build collaborative networks, and generate results. In the words of Peter Drucker, managers are tasked with “doing things right” whereas leaders “do the right thing”.

All environmental problems have a human dimension. This course focuses on leading with and without authority in a variety of public and private settings. You will learn about group dynamics in order to become a more effective team member.You will gain agreater understanding of your own personality preferences, and your strengths and weaknesses as a leader/ manager through your interaction with a team during group work and in the classroom. You will learn to become a better social diagnostician and through that process improve your framing, communication and negotiation skills. This course will also provide an opportunity for you to become reflective about your own ability to lead environmental change in the organizations you build relationships with.

Learning Method

Our work together will utilize a combination of class discussion, case studies, team presentations and situation assessment. A variety of teaching materials have been selected to help you learn about leadership, communication and risk-taking. Case studies, short written assignments, film viewings, negotiation exercises and practitioner articles will form the basis for capacity building. These will be based upon real world situations that are chosel to offer personal insights. The casework requires not only disciplined assessment, but prescriptive responses to emerging leadership challenges. You will engage in self-motivated actions to learn about your own leadership abilities thus developing new diagnosticand motivationalskills. Risk-taking is an essential element of class preparation and participation.

Content and Organization[1]

Addressing environmental and public policy challenges with a long term view requires engaging cross-sector individuals and organizations in collective action and risk taking. Even the most experienced people are always trying to learn how to be better leaders and managers.

ESM 296-4W will not focus solely on environmental issues. Rather, it will focus on learning how organizations and institutions think and work, what motivates individuals and teams to perform work – and generate outcomes that not only last, but also set a positive precedent. We will look at two levels of organizational theory analysis in the course. The first level is about making sense of the individual’s role in organizations. This is the micro level of analysis with which we start the course. Individuals are the basic unit of organizations. Most work in organizations is done in groups with individuals playing instrumental roles in creating the solutions to organizational problems (workgroups, departments, research teams, divisions, business units, etc.). We will look at what motivates individual behaviors and analyze group dynamics to gain an understanding of the micro-level. In certain settings, groups are assembled without a common purpose. In other situations teams are designated to create specific outcomes. Individual values will form the building blocks of class engagement and team building. The understanding you gain about how to motivate other individuals and groups to change will be highly important to your success as an environmental leader.

The second focus of organizational theory is what we call the macro level. Issues of organizational formation (design), culture, change, learning, and ethics are all part of the organization-as-a-whole analysis that we study during the course. This holds particularly true in the context of cross-sector networks for implementing change. Part of the macro-level analysis includes understanding inter-organizational dynamics (interactions between organizations). A catch phrase for these dynamics is “stakeholder relations”. You will learn to map the set of internal and external stakeholders that bring pressure to bear on different types of organizations.

Course Prerequisite:

The only prerequisite for taking this course is the completion of an on-line survey of your Myers-Briggs personality type at the Counseling and Career Services office before the start of the first class (see Casey Hankey for details). A work session on the results and implications of this survey will be held on the first day of class. Each class session will make use of short lectures, interactive discussion of assigned reading[2] and GauchoSpace teaching tools, in-class exercises, team discussion. Grading will be based upon class participation and several short assigned papers and/or work assignments.

WEEK ONE: Values and Team-Building – Motivating Good Work

The first two class sessions will orient students to a variety of perspectives on leadership, needs and opportunities for exercising leadership in the foreseeable future, both as students, group project members, and managers within outside organizations and agencies. We will spend a portion of class focusing on the personal values that class participants bring to the MESM program, and explore how those values shape leadership development and team formation.Working teams will be set up during this class and participate in an exercise designed to simulate competitive and cooperative behaviors.

WEEK TWO: Negotiating for Results – inside and outside of the Organization

The second two class sessions will continue the course focus on skill building and explore the nuances of internal and external negotiations - a necessary skill for environmental leaders. We will briefly identify the types of negotiations that confront change masters in environmental policy and practice. The discussion will focus on structure, strategy, process and outcomes, diagnostics and adaptation. We will briefly discuss the manager’s dilemma of ‘creating versus claiming value’.

The Thursday class will discuss the leadership tools and skills utilized by EdouardSakiz, Chairman of Roussel-Uclaf, the French pharmaceutical company responsible for developing and gaining approval of RU-486. Breaking into teams, class participants will engage in stakeholder mapping to improve their diagnostic skills associated with situation assessment and strategic planning.

WEEK THREE: Decision Making: Framing, Intuition, and Getting People’s Attention

These two session will focus upon tools for improved decision making, the role of counter-intuitive thinking and the different challenges of working with teams versus groups. We will explore the basic elements of neuroscience as it pertains to the choices people make. We will apply the ‘golden ratio’ - a simple mathematical relationship that has fascinated mathematicians, biologists, architects, artists and naturalists since the beginning of history – to leadership. For the Thursday class, participant teams will be asked to develop and present a motivational reframing of the mission statement for anotable environmental think tank.

WEEK FOUR: Communicating for Results: How do good leaders motivate people?

Week fourclasses will shift to skill building as it pertains to getting your point across to others, and inspiring action and commitment. The class will explore why some ideas thrive, while others die and review the SUCCESs model developed by Chip and Dan Heath. Finally, class participants will turn their attention to a discussion of the movie “Twelve Angry Men”, the challenges posed by consensus, and the management or mismanagement of agreement.

WEEK FIVE: Network Governance, Collective Impact and Cross-Sector Leadership

Week five will focus on leading without authority and cross-sector leadership – leading change among entities that do not traditionally associate with one another, but are forced to do so in order to efficiently solve shared problems. The class will also focus on recent work chronicled in the Stanford Social Innovation Review regarding the emergence of a body of work referred to as “Collective Impact”. This approach is being used to foster collaborative problem solving among foundations, funders and NGO’s. The session will conclude with a short presentation on legacy building.

For additional information and Reading Materials, see GauchoSpace

1

[1]Further class details, reading assignments are covered in the ESM 296-4W Teaching Note and Guidance Document.

[2]The required textbook for the course is: Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose between Right and Right (Cambridge MA; Harvard Business Press) by Joseph Badaracco, Jr