As a new supervisor or manager, you will certainly have projects and ideas you will want to implement. But you have to remember that while getting a promotion may give you the positional authority to move your agenda forward, positional authority alone is not enough.
In dealing with creativity in an organizational context one of the themes academics have struggled with in their research is how to understand the impact of culture, specifically national culture, on individual creativity. To draw this link has been especially problematic, but in the article The Impact of Culture on Creativity: How Cultural Tightness and Cultural Distance Affect Global Innovation Crowdsourcing Work the researchers (Roy Y. J. Chua, Yannig Roth, and Jean-Francxois Lemoine) have suggested a very fundamental and clear cut linkage between “cultural tightness” (meaning: “the extent to which a country is characterized by strong social norms and low tolerance for deviant behaviors”) and creativity.
They find that individuals from tight cultures are less likely to successful engage in “foreign creative tasks” than individuals from loose cultures. The authors elaborate in detail the relationship, but at it’s core this is a superb academic study that highlights a countries culture can impact individual creativity.
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Hints from Academia is BLG’s effort to highlight those academic pieces we feel offer special insights and guidance to the world of practice.
The Bacharach Leadership Group is excited to announce their exciting partnership with Inc.edu, a corporate university founded by Inc.com exclusively focused on helping entrepreneurs and small businesses leaders to drive growth. BLG will host two workshops, Master the Skills of Influence & Lead Your Teams For Growth, in NYC, DC, and LA in 2015.These two day workshops will help you grow your business, execute business strategy, more effectively market and sell your products and services, and get all of your employees in your business motivated. These workshops will help you get buy-in from employees, customers, business partners, and investors.
To learn more and register, please go to http://www.blgevents-incedu.
Here are the workshop outlines:
Lead Your Teams for Growth, February 26-27
In this 2-Day workshop, you will develop the skills necessary to sustain momentum, motivate your teams and keep the growth ball rolling. More effective leaders and teams result in greater sales and customer satisfaction.
Learn how to:
With free online education gaining attention in The Huffington Post, The New York Times, and at Cornell University at an event where Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera will be speaking, how this modality will shake up the world of higher education remains to be seen.
Cousera originally launched with a handful of courses and a few partnering universities, over just months, it has grown to offer over 100 specialized courses and is increasing its list of partnerships.
Some of Coursera’s partner schools include: University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Caltech, Duke, Princeton, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Virginia, and they just added 17 more partners. Coursera has also partnered with universities in Scotland, Switzerland, Canada, and India, making it a platform for a truly global education.
While virtual learning has been available in certain forms over the past few years, Coursera’s class formats take advantage of the latest technological advances, giving the website an edge. Courses include a mixture of white-board style talks, professor’s narration, and interactive quizzes interspersed at content check-points in order to maintain students’ engagement with the material.
In her intriguing TED talk “What We’re Learning from Online Education,” Koller describes how a digital format is more effective than traditional learning. Koller believes lecture halls are conducive for passive learning. For example when she asks a question during a lecture, many students are still scribbling notes, others are on Facebook, and maybe one student blurts out the answer prematurely.
Online classes are less uniform than lectures. Material can be broken down into manageable chunks of information. Quizzes interspersed at key points can help ensure that students have understood core concepts before moving forward.
Additional benefits are that online class enrollment can span tens of thousands of students, enabling Professors to widely spread their ideas, even internationally. For example, Ng has said that his largest on-campus class consisted of 400 students, compared with 100,000 people who signed up for one of his online offerings. To reach that sized audience at Stanford, he would have to teach for 250 years.
Koller highlights another advantage which is that online courses allow for the collection of data that is not available in lecture hall formats. Data, such as the amount of time students spend on each question can allow professors to further improve their courses.
There are of course kinks that Coursera still needs to work out. For example certain subjects are easy to test online with multiple choice questions. However, with more humanities courses being offered, other styles of evaluation are needed.
Others have looked at the model and questioned the viability of traditional higher education institutions. For example, one article in Forbes draws an analogy to what Craigslist has done to classified advertising in newspapers and what Wikipedia has done to encyclopedias.
At the same time, such comparisons are still premature as the website currently offers only certificates of course completion, not a full degree. And it is still uncertain whether these certificates actually carry much weight in the job market.
For the time being, Coursera has created a global network for idea-sharing and can help people gain knowledge that they want. As the format progresses, Koller believes we can expedite innovation, discover hidden talent from remote parts of the globe, and establish education as a fundamental right.
Photo credit: ted.com
Naturally, as the leader of your company, you support a culture of trust, caring and openness, because you know this generates deep-seated employee commitment and facilitates exceptional performance.
And, uh…how do you apply this philosophy when it comes to paying people? Odds are, you’ve concluded that compensation is just one of those things that’s best kept secret. That’s a problem.
Read the rest of “Why You Should Say What You Pay Employees” on Inc.
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