We're focusing on three main clusters of skills that enable effective action. We've highlighted the skills that are important right now in the context of students' action projects, and in their future as leaders, managers, change agents, and participants in a wide variety of organizations and groups. This is a working list based on our experience teaching many dozens of student teams, an extensive review of the literature, conversations, interviews, and surveys of key stakeholders, and, most importantly, the students' own ideas.
Our focus:
Giving and getting feedback
- delivering appropriate feedback
- effective timing and frequency of feedback
- separating the descriptive from the evaluative
- how to ask for the feedback you want
- getting feedback on your idea/project and on your skills and personal performance
- responding to feedback
- setting ground rules and expectations for feedback
Building shared commitment
- describing what you want to achieve in specific and succinct language
- clearly explaining why (the causal linkage between your goal and the problem you're solving)
- understanding who you are talking to, in terms of where they're coming from
- framing the idea and the work in compelling and motivating terms
- presenting your project so as to motivate the request you are making
- persuading a reluctant audience
- inviting participation
- presenting a complex idea memorably (sans powerpoints!)
- setting joint goals and plans
Getting results at every step
- personal practices for following up
- personal, team, and stakeholder action planning
- pairing incremental progress check-ins (weekly tracking) with more radical reevaluations
- planning effective meetings
- running effective meetings
- testing the feasibility of your ideas in multiple ways, including creative new ones
- making sure you and your team use all your data including the qualitative
These three areas emerged from a consideration of a longer list of skills, habits, practices, and, to some extent, the worldviews, orientations, and perspectives that my students consider key to effective action. We took ideas from class discussions in 2006 and 2007 on readings and an in-class exercise that looked at effective managers in particular. Please see the original list--and add comments or email us!