Reflections on the first week of LeadWise Academy

This was the first week of an online course on self-management run by LeadWise Academy and Enspiral. Part of the homework for this course is to write weekly medium articles with our assignment and reflections on our experience. This is post number one.

Disclaimer: I’m on a train to see my sisters and new niece in New Jersey as I’m writing this, so please forgive the lack of polish :)

First things first, how did I end up taking this course?

My colleague and founder of the Ready, Aaron Dignan, came across it a number of months ago. Upon becoming aware of the class I wanted to participate for two main reasons.

1. To understand the Leadwise/Enspiral perspective on self-management.

At The Ready we’re constantly searching to learn and improve. Within the company we practice our own form of self-management which is a modified version of holacracy. I was — and am — looking forward to seeing where this particular course pulls from in terms of the theory of self-management to compare it to Holacracy, The Ready’s practice, and others.

2. To experience and learn from the actual approach to teaching an online course.

As many of us know, there is no shortage of terrible online training. Lead wise Academy uses a combination of media types/channels to recreate the social component that you would experience if you were taking a course in an actual classroom with your classmates physically in the same space. I wanted to experience this sort of design for personal fun and for professional inspiration. At The Ready we have remote team members and clients with teams that span the globe. Tactics to help teams connect and learn together is an important part of our work whether we’re doing formal “training” or just helping teams work more effectively together.

So, content-wise what did we do/learn?

This week the focus was on exploring the difference between job descriptions/titles and roles as they are used and defined in Holacracy. The assignment was to define 20 roles for either a made up or real organization. You can see the output of our assignment by clicking on this link.

For me, the most interesting points of discussion arose around a few main topics.

The first, defining meaningful metrics that can/should inform decision making and that reflect actual performance rather than metrics that are static and potentially irrelevant to outcomes. It was fun to discuss with classmates because right now I am working on a project that involves implementing Action meetings with multiple teams. One component of an Action meeting is the “metrics review” — a place for teams to collectively review the metrics that are important to their strategic objectives. Most teams don’t actually know which metrics to review. Defining relevant metrics also naturally led to the conclusion that most metrics aren’t a reflection of one person or role’s performance. When you really think about what metrics tell you it becomes painfully obvious they shouldn’t be used that way.

The second, point of discussion was the actual role/need of a manager in an organization where roles and accountabilities are clearly defined. Specifically the lack of need for a person to manage work that they aren’t actually doing. What you do need is someone to advise and coach. Someone to manage the client relationship — a separate role. Taking accountability or responsibility for projects or mishaps isn’t needed because you have a bunch of adults doing the work who know exactly what they own.

The third was around defining the purpose of roles that are further away from the client or final project outcome. It makes sense that it would be a little harder to identify the purpose of these roles, but it also reflects a very common problem. If we can’t define the purpose of a role, how can we expect the person filling that role to feel inspired or connected to the purpose of the organization? Too often we forget to communicate the importance of a role. Formally defining the “purpose” of each role protects us from making that mistake.

Reflections on the format and experience of the class

• It’s hard to schedule with team members in all different time zones, particularly if you’ve got a week full of client-facing meetings/work
• It’s fun to meet new people you would otherwise never meet
• Having small group working sessions is a super useful practice and does effectively make this online class feel more like an in-person experience. I really enjoyed talking with my team members
• The weekly Medium post is also a smart and effective part of the program design. I’ve thought more deeply about the course in the time I’ve been writing this post than I did at any other point in the week.
• While I know this is just the first week so we are getting to know each other and ramping up, I wish we had a little more structure in the weekly discussions to get to deeper exploration of the concepts more quickly. Waiting for volunteers in a video call with 11 people can end up taking more time than is ideal
• While I don’t know if I’ll learn anything new in terms of actual theory, I am already getting value from hearing and participating in discussions that sort through more traditional mental models associated with work. It makes me think that participating/facilitating a class like this would be good training for a less experienced consultant.
• I’m already noticing and thinking about how effective this type of program will be for building a community — getting us to join a Slack channel and have working sessions separate of facilitators gets us building the habit of reaching out to each other informally during the course, making it more likely we’ll maintain connections afterward.

To sum it up, the first week was a fun experience, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it progresses.