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Exploring
Leadership: An Innovative Program for High Potential Staff
Robert Cyr - (People's Energy Corporation - Chicago, IL)
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"Exploring Leadership" combined readings from Harvard Business Review articles
and interviews of local and nationally known leaders to broaden the leadership
perspectives of high potential staff at Peoples Energy. The program was
comprised of 12 sessions, each beginning with group discussions of key concepts
from the HBR articles, followed by one-hour interviews of leaders of corporations
and organizations in the Chicago area. Featured speakers included the Rev.
Jessie Jackson, Congressman Luis Gutierrez, John Rowe (Chairman, Exelon),
Arne Duncan (CEO, Chicago Public Schools), and Christie Hefner (Chairman,
Playboy Enterprises). Rob Cyr, Senior Employee Development Specialist, will
review the experience, its highlights and lessons learned through the program.
"Exploring Leadership"
combined readings from Harvard Business Review articles and interviews of
local and nationally known leaders to broaden the leadership perspectives
of high potential staff at Peoples Energy. This session will review the
experience, its highlights and lessons learned through the program.
Rob Cyr is
Senior Leadership Development specialist for Peoples Energy, Chicago, Illinois.
His career in the Employee Development field encompasses positions in which
he was responsible for organizing and managing corporate and technical training
functions, academic instruction at Northwestern and Loyola University, and
project work as an independent consultant. He is adept at working collaboratively
with internal and external clients to design training and organizational
development solutions that have a measurable impact on group productivity,
efficiency and morale. His passions include leadership development, performance
management, coaching, and quality improvement. He encourages his clients
to tie training design and delivery to the goals outlined in their strategic
plans. He specializes in developing pragmatic solutions that require accountability
for all stakeholders for all coaching and training outcomes. He has helped
implement quality improvement systems and instructed quality management
techniques to maximize team effectiveness. Among the international programs
he has created are Doing Business with the Japanese, Client Relations -
Korea, Chinese Business and Communications Style, and Client Relations -
East Asia for working with businesses in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.
He has spoken on leadership, intercultural and client relations issues at
national conferences of the American Society for Training and Development,
the National Society for Performance and Instruction, the Society of Consumer
Affairs Professionals, and the Society of Intercultural Education, Training
and Research. His experience includes employee development, public relations
and community organization work at Underwriters Laboratories, the Easter
Seal Society and the Urban League. He has been published extensively in
business and professional journals.
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The
Effectiveness of Narrative in Facilitating Online Relationship Development
Stephen Thorpe - (Aukland (NZ) University of Technology - Aukland,
NZ)
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to agenda)
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Aim
The research project aims
to investigate how story and narrative can be used to facilitate relationship
development between participants in an online group.
Focus
The focus is the use of narrative (also referred to as story) because it
potentially offers a useful catalyst in developing online relationships.
It provides an accessible form for developing inclusiveness, deepening rapport
and for people to present aspects of themselves in an environment lacking
in human presence. The overall goal of the project is to develop some practical
processes and techniques that are useful in building and maintaining relationships
between members in online groups. The study group will also explore other
areas of online facilitation throughout the research process including areas
of trust, power, conflict, inclusion, community, motivation, best practice,
metaphor, learning, process and system design, conferencing, tools and culture.
Method
The method of co-operative inquiry will be used within a participative approach.
Co-operative inquiry produces data that has a strong grounding in participant
experience and multiple perspectives of phenomena. Co-operative inquiry
also aligns strongly with facilitator values of equality, shared decision-making,
equal opportunity, power sharing and personal responsibility.
Plan
The research will happen in two stages. An initial 6-week pilot will begin
with investigating agreed themes of interest within the area of the research
question. This pilot stage will have a particular focus on how we might
research cooperatively together and we will try a few things out to see
if they are useful ways to research. At the end of this pilot stage, we
will likely have a major evaluation to see what has worked well for us and
where our energy is for investigating further in more depth. The second
stage of the research will see us follow through several cycles of planning,
action and reflection. The planning will involve discussion about our choice
of focus or topic and what type of inquiry we wish to apply. In the action
phase we will explore, in experience and action, aspects of the inquiry.
The reflection phase reviews what has been experienced and we may decide
to modify our topic in light of making new sense of the data we have collected.
At the end of the cycles we will complete a major reflection phase for pulling
the threads together, clarifying outcomes and deciding on dissemination
of what we have learnt.
Benefits
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This
research will forward our profession by contributing in-depth research
into the emerging area of online group work.
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We will generate
and test some practical approaches, methods and techniques to facilitate
online relationships.
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We will explore
the usefulness of several research methods for investigating our individual
and group experience online (such as cooperative inquiry, narrative
inquiry, sociometric processing, others brought by individuals in the
research group and those that emerge from our group process).
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Through fully
immersing ourselves in the research topic we are likely to tap into
the collective wisdom and synergies of our research group.
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Through conscious
attention to the differing perspectives of our experience we are likely
to better understand many of the difficulties faced in online groups.
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We will all
learn from one another and potentially build stronger peer networks.
Stephen will report
on the status of the group's testing of approaches, methods and techniques
to facilitate online relationships and will solicit narratives from MFN
participants.
Stephen Thorpe is
a PhD student at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in New Zealand.
He is an IT consultant and has been researching online facilitation over
the last 4 years. Stephen is responsible for the IT functional area for
Zenergy, a New Zealand based group of facilitators, mediators and transformational
coaches. Stephen holds a Bachelor of Business with first class honours from
AUT where he has a background researching computer-assisted group work as
part of a team who researched, developed and commercialised a multi-site
interactive digital whiteboard. Stephen has also co-developed a CD-ROM based
tutorial for online training and has been a part-time lecturer teaching
Computing, Globalisation and Business Information Management on the Bachelor
of Business Degree. Stephen is a member of the International Association
of Facilitators (IAF) and Global Facilitators Service Corps (GFSC) and has
recently co-written a chapter on Facilitator Values and Ethics in the IAF
Handbook of Group Facilitation with Dr. Dale Hunter. Stephen has recently
accepted to be an Associate Editor of the IAF's Group Facilitation Journal.
(see http://elena.aut.ac.nz/homepages/phd-students/stetho09)
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