Leadership Development
During the 2004-05 academic year, the LCT unit directors and senior staff embarked on a multi-faceted leadership development effort. One of the things on which we focused the greatest attention was development of a set of leadership characteristics. We see this as the basis for everything else that we do. The process of discussing and debating the characteristics was useful for developing a set of shared values, and also enabled us to discover and understand key cultural characteristics we share as a group, and thus to better understand how we relate to the rest of the University community.
Our goals for developing these leadership characteristics were to develop:
- A shared sense of values;
- A common lexicon for focusing continuing attention on individual professional development;
- A conceptual framework that would work well at all levels of our organization (“leading at all levels”);
- A common lexicon through which we can talk with each other about professional performance and working relationships
We are putting these characteristics on our LCT website so that they may be publicly known, and so that our colleagues at Michigan State University can know what to expect of us.
Developing a good set of leadership characteristics is not an easy thing. We examined several existing sets to use as “starters”, and settled on a set actively used and repeatedly refined and improved over several years at a major US corporation. We liked the architecture of these characteristics, which seemed to provide understandable descriptions of each characteristic along dimensions that were useful for continuing professional development, improvement and assessment. We spent the academic year using large portions of our weekly senior staff meetings to understand, debate, refine and “MSU-ize” these characteristics. Along the way, several LCT units began to have similar discussions among their senior managers and supervisors.
We are very pleased with the way that this has worked for us. If you have questions or a further interest in this, please do not hesitate to contact any of the LCT unit managers.
Leadership Characteristics
- Demonstrates and demands the truth
- Holds self and others to the highest standards of truth, objectivity and ethics
- Does the right thing
- Maintains a University-wide viewpoint
- Embraces and champions diversity
- Truly believes that a great university will only be achieved by valuing and espousing the diversity of thought, culture, ethnicity, and socio-economic background that comprises the MSU community, and the communities we serve through outreach activities.
- Business acumen
- Demonstrates know-how that moves the University forward
- Innovation and technical excellence
- Open to trying new approaches; willing to challenge norms; learns new technologies and effective methods from a variety of sources and applies them in the MSU context
- Systemic thinking
- Sees consequences and potential in the development of policies and the delivery of services.
- Courage
- Willingness to act
- Drive for results
- Gets things done with high-quality outcomes and in a timely fashion; solves problems; works hard; expects the same of others
- Stakeholder satisfaction
- Makes a difference for the stakeholder
- Develops employees and teams
- Fosters teamwork. Areas of discussion: respect, professional development, working relationship patterns, goal development, accountability, cooperation, work and life balance
- Connects with stakeholders
- A stakeholder is anyone with a connection to the greater MSU community: students, faculty, staff, general public.
- Communication
- Creates awareness and shared understanding. Respectful, expands understanding, timely and effective, handles difficult issues