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4.4 | Spend time reading about the Google Oxygen Leadership Model. Identify an area of your leadership that needs more attention. Explore steps, conversations, and actions to cultivate growth in this area. Post insights.
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I struggle with articulating a common vision and strategy beyond our core mission, teaching and supporting students. Strategies are often set at the institutional level by senior leadership or legislation. We are a public college which impacts many aspects of our work. For example, my college is not allowed to have mask or vaccine mandates.Degree requirements are also set by state legislation which affects the courses that my department offers, enrollment and what receives investment. Within these constraints, I’m exploring how to identify smaller-scale strategies for my department.
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Being more productive and results-oriented – I have trouble focusing on any one single project and take a lot of time to flush out strategies to implement my ideas/projects and don’t communicate the process. I often feel I need to take the burden of planning everything out very clearly before I can present a project to the team. This can feel overwhelming, and I never feel prepared to “pull the trigger” on a project. It also doesn’t solicit investment from team members. Ways to improve would be to start by establishing goals and vision, engage team members in the planning process and solicit ideas and feedback, hold vision/brainstorming meetings.
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I need a different approach to “supports career development and discusses performance needs.” I give ongoing realtime feedback but fall short on the yearly written reviews. It’s not that I don’t value them or find them important, rather that I’ve turned them into an epic endeavor writing 12 to 15 page reviews with strengths, opportunities, quotes, tools and a plan forward.
In 2022 I’m committed to finding a abridged version of this kind of feedback so they don’t take as long to complete and I don’t wind up in a situation where I’m late sharing them.
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The productive-results oriented is an area I would like to focus in 2022. Creating goals that are time sensitive and connected to my overall values at work will help make me a better leader.
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I see growth areas for me as discussing performance and coaching- I tend to be too hands off when i could pro-actively bring up opportunities and stay with my team through change until they complete the task/change at-hand.
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“Is a strong decision maker” is an area of growth for me. I tend to defer to others to make decision and like having the structure of being told what to do. I also tend to have a lot of anxiety around decision making and get paralyzed about all the various outcomes of a given decision and not knowing what choice to make. I find this especially with hiring- it makes such an impact who you hire for a position and I feel so much stress and pressure about making the wrong choice.
The wisdom circles have helped with my decision making process. Detachment from the outcome also helps- just figuring out how to let go.
Most of my life I’ve doubted my intuition but I’m now learning to hear it and listen to it and not let it be clouded by anxiety. -
Psychological safety, was a favorite term for me. The last two years I have established a new interdisciplinary team and I did not have this term. I just described focusing on building a harmonious, respectful team and atmosphere, and when it worked I said it is difficult to create and easy to break. And too strong opinions and running over people with “power over” dynamics, seemed to ruin some of this this fall. The term psychological safety captured this perfectly for me, as we could collaborate, but people became quiet when they did not feel psychologically safe in the team. This model made me realize that this was not a “soft” term or idea, but the core for the entire project to reestablish and protect the psychological safety for everyone.
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Under the Oxygen model, the area of leadership that I believe needs more attention is listed as number four, “is productive and results-oriented.” This is in many ways the story of my professional life. To illustrate, I reference a famous quote from the author Walker Percy: “Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.” In less than two dozen words that quote accurately summarizes the manner in which I tend to filter the professional world. I see any door as one that I/we can walk through. I see any opportunity as one that I/we can attack. On some level, this is a positive attribute. Where many see a challenge, I see an opportunity. It does, however, have a shadow side, which includes becoming unfocused, which can diminish productivity and muddy the definition of results. Some of the steps and actions I’ve considered in discussions with my partners is to document and identify ideas as they come in. To consciously convert these ideas to an action list. And to be very deliberate in making sure that while some ideas are pursued, some are explicitly eliminated from the action list and discarded.
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The area I’d like to focus on is “has a clear vision/strategy for the team.” I’m definitely someone who always has a clear vision of the overall goals and strategy for my team, and my team knows this and lives by it. But I’ve also noticed that where I’m falling short on this is outwardly communicating this more broadly to my CEO. This probably has something to do with my perfectionist tendencies, which this course has helped tremendously with in terms of letting go of where it’s no longer serving me and moving forward with more confidence in my skills. The Oxygen leadership model has given me a number of great ideas on how to start to better communicate this with Gusto and I’m excited to put them into action.
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I am torn between two – “is a good coach”, and “creates an inclusive team environment, showing concern for success and well being”. For the purpose of this exercise I will go with the latter. I think that I often default to a perspective along the lines of – if someone has something to say on this issue they will speak their mind. And I know that is not the case, and I can see the interpersonal dynamics that lead to silence or not contributing to a discussion or decision. So learning more about behaviours that will make me a more inclusive leader would be a first step. Engaging in one-on-one on one discussions with my senior team – or perhaps using the google manager feedback survey as a precursor – would open up dialogue in this area – an indicate my interest in making positive change. Primarily I think I have learning to do – both from the people I work with and experts in inclusive leadership styles. AND of course, making inquiries into how people are doing routine, and not a special occasion question.
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