AQIP Committees Edison Community College

Criterion 5: Leading and Communicating

Minutes - 02-13-03

Those present: President Yowell, Patti Ross, Pat Klopfenstein, Bill Waxman, Chip Hare, Jane Salisbury

1. Jane Salisbury mentioned the two training manuals prepared by Carol Rigola and recently added to the Public Folders. They describe in steps, the processes needed to use the forms within the Form Folder and how one locates and opens the “Z” drive for Shared Folders. Carol has announced these Public Folder additions to “Everyone at Edison” and credits the AQIP Criterion 5 Team fall survey for driving their development.

2. Team members were provided several book excerpts to be read for discussion at today’s meeting. They included materials from:

Spears and Lawrence: Focus on Leadership
Pfeffer and Sutton: The Knowing-Doing Gap
Senge, et al.: The 5th Discipline Fieldbook
Tichy: The Cycle of Leadership

Also included in the reading packet was a quote posted in the President’s Conference Room:

“It becomes obvious that if we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum changes, we need to work on our basic paradigms.”

The discussion was lively and centered on common threads needed to weave an environmental fabric purporting broad-based leadership development and open communication.

3. President Yowell summarized comments made by posting the following, to be further discussed.

Goal: Employee Centered Teaching/Learning Organization

Properties: Practical questions to be answered-

• The big picture? (What is it? How does its framing vary among people?)
• Where do I fit? (From the individual’s perspective/understanding.)
• Teaching model? (for example, horizontal or vertical?)
• Learning model?
• Process Protocols?

• Prescribed Attitudes/Behaviors? (How are they yoked by the newly
adopted Employee Working Core Values?)

Objectives: Felt needs of everyone, to some degree or another-

• To understand.
• To be understood.
• To be valued.
• To value.
• To have congruence between self and the organization—to derive
meaning from one’s role within the organization.
• To deliver the product/To make a difference.

Further discussion tied these factors to the College Mission and to a potential organizational structure capable of supporting an Employee Centered Teaching/Learning Organization. President Yowell indicated determining the appropriate paradigm would require an inductive, rather than deductive process, and that a key to long-term effectiveness would be lessening the gap between the rhetoric and reality of our behaviors.

4. Team members were asked to contemplate the discussed issues, to consider their implications to our assigned task, and to tender other relevant materials, if apt. The next meeting will be March 20, 11:00-12:30, in the Board Room.