6 skills young leaders need for the 21st century

 Source: https://www.thnk.org/blog/6-skills-young-leaders-need-for-the-21st-century

Article by: Sophie Poulsen

You just got promoted. Now you’re the boss.

There’s just one problem: You want to maintain the same relationship and dynamic with your co-workers, but you are torn between being a “member” and being a leader.

We spoke to over 50 participants in the THNK EMERGE: Lead With Courage program about the challenges they face as (new) managers. One of the most common challenges that came up was navigating the transition from membership to leadership.

In the EMERGE program, we focus on six key skills we believe will make young professionals more effective leaders, ready to drive positive change:

1. SELF-AWARENESS

It all starts with you.

In order to be an effective leader, you must first know yourself: What drives you? What are your strengths, passions, and values?

By becoming more self-aware, you will be better able to recognize your weaknesses and hidden biases, thereby gaining the trust of your team members and increasing your credibility.

Luckily, self-awareness can be taught and practiced.

In the EMERGE program, we use the Leadership Compass, a tool for participants to explore their strengths, passions, and values to paint a picture of the type of leader they want to be.

2. LEARNING MINDSET

All leaders – but especially emerging leaders – need to have a desire to learn as well as encourage their teams to learn. Fostering this kind of learning culture can only have positive effects, such as improved employee engagement, happiness, and retention.

Research from Deloitte also shows that organizations with a strong learning culture are 92% more likely to develop innovative products and processes, 52% more productive, 56% more likely to be the first to market with their products and services, and 17% more profitable than their peers. Their engagement and retention rates are also 30-50% higher. 

A key ingredient of a healthy learning culture is the ability to give (and receive) feedback effectively. By making feedback a regular part of the cadence of work, leaders can create an environment where teammates are giving and receiving feedback regularly, and therefore flexing their feedback muscles. Feedback is an important prerequisite for a culture of continuous improvement.

3. DEEP LISTENING

In the EMERGE program, we focus on topics like psychological safety, healthy conflict, and building a learning culture.

Deep listening lies at the core of all of these topics.

For new leaders, deep listening allows you to connect, empathize, and truly hear someone. When you practice deep listening, you’ll find yourself uncovering the other person’s needs and values. As a result, your people will feel heard, valued, and cared for – and when your people feel heard, they are more engaged and effective in their jobs.

A global study of over 4,000 employees found that 74% of employees are more effective at their job when they feel heard and 88% of employees whose companies financially outperform others in their industry feel heard compared to 62% of employees at financially underperforming companies.

Here are some tips to improve your listening skills:

Use mindfulness to calm your own inner chatter.

Let go of your own agenda to open your mind to new information and perspectives.

Ask “what if” questions to connect with the other person in a safe, optimistic, and productive way.

4. CONFLICT MANAGEMENT

As a new leader, avoiding conflict is not an option. It can be tempting to bottle up your feelings, but these conflict-avoiding tendencies can cause dysfunctional work environments, mediocre results, strained communication, and high turnover.

The opposite of avoiding conflict is not seeking conflict. The opposite of avoiding conflict is “effective assertion”: an honest and appropriate expression of your opinions, feelings, and needs. Being assertive can reduce conflict, build your self-confidence, and improve your personal and work relationships.

Everyone approaches conflict differently – but as a team leader, you can learn how to manage conflict in a healthy, productive way. In the EMERGE program, participants explore the idea of “healthy conflict,” a constructive approach to solving conflict that fosters respect and enables everyone involved to grow. As part of this, participants will learn non-violent communication techniques to improve their conflict management skills.

Want to get a head start? Check out these five tips to practice healthy conflict.

5. INFLUENCING WITHOUT AUTHORITY

You don’t have to be the CEO, the investor, or even the most senior person in the room to have influence.

Gaining influence in your organization can empower your – and your team’s – development. It can also make you feel respected, appreciated, and acknowledged, which will boost your performance and career growth as a result.

While a managerial title might be one of the most obvious sources of authority, it isn’t the only place influence comes from. There are many sources of authority you can leverage to inspire others to follow your lead, including:

Your expertise.

Your relationships.

Your organizational understanding.

Relational skills such as deep listening, effective assertion, and self-awareness are all tools you can use in order to influence the system around you in an authentic way. In the EMERGE program, you will explore the ways in which you can influence your organization using the skills you have developed during the six-week journey. 

6. REFRAMING

We won’t solve problems with the same kind of thinking that created them.

Innovation happens when you challenge conventional wisdom, allowing you to see things from a different perspective. Research shows that changing your mind is critical for growth. It’s called neural plasticity; each time we learn something new, the brain’s neural pathways are changed to accommodate the new information.

In many organizations, we are often told, “This is how we do it here.” But creative leadership is about unearthing assumptions and getting comfortable with contradiction, paradox, and ambiguity to discover new possibilities. As the great Nelson Mandela once said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

In the EMERGE program, we introduce participants to a unique reframing tool, which will help them reframe their limiting beliefs in order to generate new ideas and perspectives.

Build 21st Century Skills with Design Thinking

Source: http://creativeeducator.tech4learning.com/2012/articles/Interview-Dr_Maureen_Carroll

An interview with Dr. Maureen Carroll

Dr. Maureen Carroll is the founder of Lime Design and Director of Stanford University’s Research in Education & Design Laboratory (REDlab) and adjunct faculty in the School of Education. She has been helping educators implement design thinking into their classrooms for the past five years. She recently co-authored with Melissa Pelochino, Lois Logan, and Richard Cox, designED: Integrating Design Thinking In Your K-12 Classroom.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is both a process and a mindset. This human-centered innovation process finds solutions and solves problems in a user-centered context. Design thinking does not solve the mysteries of the universe; instead, a single problem is solved for a single user, with the hope that the resultant knowledge and empathetic understanding of that user’s needs will ultimately work for lots of other people. A familiar example is OXO kitchen tools. An engineer worked to make opening cans easier for his arthritic wife, and the resulting products work for many other people.

What does the design thinking process look like?

To begin, you Frame the problem so you can better empathize with your user. You conduct interviews and record observations. You use qualitative research techniques, working as an ethnographer to collect the story of the user to better identify exactly what they need. The mindset you attain during this part of the process is empathy.

The second part of the process is Imagine. This phase requires creative, generative brainstorms. Your goal is to develop a mindset that defers judgment, is open to different ideas, listens actively, and builds on the ideas of others. You are looking to push the boundaries and find a truly transformative innovation.

The third phase, Make, is about making the ideas tangible. This process involves iterative prototyping: developing a prototype, testing it, listening to feedback, making changes, and prototyping and testing again. Rather than creating an entirely new product, you quickly develop a “low resolution” version that you refine. The mindset is to learn from failure.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
— Samuel Beckett

Teachers are natural prototypers. A lesson that may not be as polished as they’d like during first period is finely honed by fifth period.

Why is it important to be, or become, a design thinker?

In our quest to build thinkers for the 21st century, we have focused almost solely on analytical thinking. While analytical thinking is critically important, design thinking blends in equally powerful creative thinking.

It’s not that creative thinking is more important ... a blend of both types of thinking are more productive for finding truly unique and transformative innovation.

Design thinking requires students to be strategic and metacognitive about when to apply creative thinking and when to apply analytical thinking. Students must recognize where they are in the process and apply different ways of thinking to produce the best results. For example, when you are in the creating prototypes in the Make phase, it is essential to analyze whether you correctly understand your user’s needs.

“My contribution is to teach as many people as I can to use both sides of their brain, so that for every problem, every decision in their lives, they consider creative as well as analytical solutions.”
— David Kelley, founder Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

Why is important to teach design thinking in a K12 education context?

Design thinking builds two important mindsets: risk taking and resiliency. Design thinking requires you to take risks as a learner and push yourself. It is assumed that you will not succeed with your first prototype, so it is easier to put yourself out there.

A resilient 21st century learner works to find out what works and bounces back from failure. You must have a willingness to accept that a problem has multiple solutions and develop your ability to try again.Design thinkers learn from their mistakes so they can develop a better solution next time.

This sounds a bit like project- or problem-based learning. Is it?

Design thinking is different from project-based learning because the problem is not initially identified for the students. Design thinking requires that students identify the problem for themselves. Figuring out which questions to ask and what problems are worth solving gives students a different sense of agency.

Why did you write “designED: Integrating Design Thinking In Your K-12 Classroom?”

We were inspired by all the students and teachers we worked with and wanted to create a collection of design thinking activities. Our hope is that other educators will try these easy-to-implement ideas so they and their students can quickly and easily practice the mindsets necessary for successful design thinking.

Editor’s Note: I also spoke with Michelle Flores, a teacher at Aspire Capitol Heights Academy in Sacramento, California about her recent experience using some of the projects in designED with her 3rd graders.

Many people believe design thinking belongs the secondary classroom. Why did you try it with your 3rd graders?

For the past couple of weeks, I have been using activities from designED during my morning meeting. In fact, we worked on the “My Story is Your Story” activity for an entire week. During that time, students worked in pairs to share a personal story. The person listening to the story had to retell it in the first person, trying to express how the other person felt and convey the perspective of the original storyteller.

My students loved it, but it wasn't easy. They had to struggle to listen and put themselves in each other’s shoes. While this may not be easy for younger learners, the empathy skills they learned are crucial for future success. Seeing things from their classmates’ perspectives also helped build a strong sense of community in my classroom.

I am definitely looking forward to doing all of the activities with my students!

More resources to help you learn more about design thinking

Things We’ve Learned about Design Thinking, K-12 Education & 21st Century Learning
http://limedesignassociates.com/wordpress/archives/5

The Marshmallow Challenge TED Talk - the importance of learning from failure
http://marshmallowchallenge.com/TED_Talk.html

 

by Melinda Kolk

Melinda Kolk (@melindak) is the Editor of Creative Educator and the author of Teaching with Clay Animation. She has been helping educators implement project-based learning and creative technologies like clay animation into classroom teaching and learning for the past 15 years.

Life skills education is more than teaching skills

by Christina Kwauk and Amanda Braga

Editor's Note: 

This blog is a summary of our new report “Translating competencies to empowered action,” which can be downloaded here.

Today the buzz around life skills education for girls is at an all-time high. Policy and civil society actors—from United Nations agencies to grassroots community-based organizations—have made great strides developing life skills programming to help girls achieve a wide range of empowering cognitive, health, social, economic, and political outcomes. But in many cases, such newfound empowerment is met with violent backlash by family and community members, particularly when girls attempt to apply skills like communication, negotiation, or leadership outside of the safe spaces provided by a program. As a result, the burden of social change has been largely placed on the shoulders of the girl-child.

At Brookings, we are examining how policy and civil society actors can do a better job shifting that burden of change from girls themselves to her broader social and political context. As part of our larger work on Skills for a Changing World, we’re asking questions about how girls’ life skills programming can be better linked to transformative social change and the disruption of structural inequalities that sustain barriers for girls and women.

One answer is that life skills education should be more than just about the girl’s own skills development. Practitioners should also be focused on the girl’s agency (her capacity to see and to make choices) and whether enabling opportunity structures (like policies, social norms, and institutions) exist in her environment.

In our new framework on girls’ life skills education, we draw on the fields of gender empowerment and the psychology of learning to help practitioners better design life skills programming that connects girls’ life skills development not only to empowerment but also to wider social change. We’ve summarized this into four guiding principles:

1. Consider a broader range of competenciesFor starters, practitioners need to conceptualize life skills as a range of competencies (what one can do) that enable girls (and boys) to function, thrive, and adapt in their lived realities, rather than a narrow set of skills for life. These competencies are comprised of networks of Knowledge (what one knows), Skills (what one has), and Attitudes (what one believes and values), or KSAs. Conceptualizing life skills in this way well help encourage practitioners to be more purposeful not only around the whats of life skills, but also the hows of applying such competencies to navigate unique challenges at pivotal moments across her life and in different contexts.

2. Design for five touch points in programming
Moving the focus of life skills programming beyond the girl means designing programs that begin with 1) the dynamic process of building girls’ competencies, but continue on to focus on: 2) whether the girl can translate her skills into 3) empowered action amidst a host of mediating factors that can influence the degree to which her action is empowered. And, if actors seek to achieve wider goals for girls and women, programs must also take into account 4) the range of life outcomes impacted as well as whether 5) systemic change has been achieved. (Watch our animation below for an illustration of how these five touch points come together.)

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3. Be intentional about development and changeEvidence from the psychology of learning stresses the continuous, dialogical, and non-linear nature of skills development over the child’s life. Life skills development is no different. Practitioners must therefore be more intentional about building upon foundational KSAs throughout key moments of the girl’s life, including early childhood through adolescence and young adulthood.

But tied to development is change. This rings true not only at the individual level of the girl, but also for her wider social context. As girls build KSAs important for her empowerment, there is a consequent reaction and response by her peers, family, and community that must be accounted for by programs. This interaction can lead to the strengthening of her agency, as well as to the weakening of it.

4. Support girls to “read” context, gender, and powerFinally, if there is one “life skill” that we believe is foundational for girls, it is the ability to read her social, political, and economic contexts with an understanding of how gender and power have structured her realities and opportunities. Life skills programs must support girls to recognize, navigate, and leverage the dynamic structures in her life if she is to translate KSAs into empowered action. Without this, programs risk girls’ life skills development getting “stuck” in the safe spaces in which they are learned.

RELATED CONTENT

EDUCATION IN DEVELOPING NATIONS

Translating competencies to empowered action

Christina Kwauk and Amanda Braga

November 6, 2017

2017

NOV

8

PAST EVENT

Girls’ education research and policy symposium: Reaching the most marginalized

9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EST

Washington, DC

As the girls’ education community continues to center life skills across program, donor, and government policy priorities, we must ensure that actors take into account the urgent need to focus on more than just the girl’s skills development—lest we continue to place the burden of social change on girls themselves rather than on the gender unequal societies in which she lives. We acknowledge that this will be difficult to apply in practice, but catalyzing transformative social change has and will never be a straightforward process. Our hope is that by focusing on the above four principles, policy and civil society actors will be to push the field even further to ensure that life skills initiatives move girls and women toward both improved life outcomes and wider systemic change.

Link: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2017/11/21/life-skills-education-is-more-than-teaching-skills/

How to Change The World in 3 Not-So-Easy Steps

"We’re now helping freaky people change the world by teaching connection, personal growth, communication, and empowerment."
From Pace and Kyeli - Freak Revolution

Normal people aren’t going to change the world. They’re too content with the status quo, too interested in not rocking the boat. So who does that leave?

Freaks.

That’s us. Anyone who doesn’t fit into society’s mold. Anyone who doesn’t want to be a cog in the wheel. Misfits, outcasts… world changers.

No guns.

No violent uprisings.

No protest rallies.

No bullshit.

This is a revolution of ideas.

This is a revolution of paradigm shifting - from one of control to one of connection.

We are living in a mass hallucination. Everyone around us thinks it’s normal to hate their lives. It’s normal to fight with their spouses and their children. It’s normal to eat and drink and drug ourselves to escape, to veg out and stare at a screen for hours a day just to dull the pain.

This is not normal at all! It doesn’t have to be this way. We have the power to change the world.

All we need are some trailblazing freaks to lead the way.

Are you one of us?

Help us; we can’t do it alone. Join the revolution.

“If the success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?” — Buckminster Fuller

Our answer to this very big question, in just one sentence? Shift the paradigm through connection, personal growth, communication, and empowerment.

Our slightly longer answer requires three not-so-easy steps.

Step 1: Become awesomer.

A world full of awesome individuals makes for an awesome world, don’t you think? The best place to start making change is yourself. This will also give you the tools you need to be happy and avoid burnout. Happy world-changers are effective world-changers!

Some ways to become awesomer:

- Get in touch with your spiritual self in whatever way works best for you.
- Learn to be happier.
- Learn to accomplish the things you want to do - and then work on accomplishing them.
- Learn how to better understand others and communicate with them (we wrote a book about that).

Step 2: Build community.

We can’t do it alone; we need each other. We need each other’s ideas and we need each other’s support. We live in a culture of isolation and most of us are lonely - so community is a very good way to change that.

Some ways to build community:

- Connect with like-minded, positive, and supportive people in your area or online (for instance, you can join the Freak Revolution if you feel like we’re your right kind of people).
- Disconnect from incompatible, negative, and unsupportive people in your area and online.

Step 3: Shift the paradigm.

People are miserable because we’re living in a miserable-people-creating factory. To change the world, we need to replace that factory with an awesome-people-creating factory - by shifting the dominant paradigm from a control paradigm to a connection paradigm.

Some ways to shift the paradigm:

- Opt-out of a control paradigm system, like TV, politics, fearmongering mass media, or public school.
- Get in lots of people’s monkeyspheres.
- Be fearlessly yourself.

Yes, it’s a big plan - when aiming to change the world, little plans don’t cut it.

Don’t worry; you’re not alone! We’re all in this together.

The Usual Error Project

• http://usualerror.com/e-book/
  

Why We Don't Understand Each Other and 34 Ways to Make It Better

We’re giving this e-book away for free, one chapter per week. Since there are 34 chapters, the entire e-book won’t be available for free until September 2009. If you don’t want to wait that long, you can buy it right now in PDF format. Click here for details.

Dedication

for Dru

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Welcome!
• Part I: Communication Dynamics
• 1: The usual error
• 2: Different communication styles
• 3: Different personality types
• 4: The other half of communication
• 5: Checking in
• 6: I already know this, but I need to hear you say it again
• 7: What problem are you trying to solve?
• 8: Feeling considered
• Part II: Boundaries
• 9: Holding healthy boundaries
• 10: Fierceness
• 11: Ask for what you need
• 12: I am not green
• 13: “I” statements
• 14: It’s not all about me
• Part III: Turning Conflict into Communication
• 15: What did you intend?
• 16: The next time I ask for $1000, just give me a veggie burger instead!
• 17: We’re on the same team
• 18: Coming to terms
• 19: Meta-communication
• 20: Memory
• 21: Trust your future self
• 22: Giving permission to disappoint
• Part IV: Conflict Resolution
• 23: The only way out is through
• 24: The William James zone
• 25: The lollipop
• 26: What do I get out of being right?
• 27: Reflection
• 28: Verbal aikido
• Part V: Positivity!
• 29: “That makes me really happy!”
• 30: It’s okay to have problems
• 31: Knowing is half the battle
• 32: Rephrasing things positively
• 33: Teasing
• 34: Endings

From Pace and Kyeli - FreakRevolution