Welcome to the third course in the Leading Technical Organization specialization. This specialization is put on by the Engineering Management program, University of Colorado Boulder. It is the third in a progression of leadership courses that we offer. First, leading oneself, moving to the second, leading others, then progressing to leading technical organizations. I want you to think of this specialization as an applied form of leadership. You're going to use all of the things you've learned in the previous two classes if you have taken them plus some new skills that we are introducing and applying them to leading a technical organization. So if you think about leadership as a pyramid with the foundation being knowing yourself and knowing your own personal leadership style through that first position that you have when you begin to lead others and you move from being a peer to their leader up to leading an organization filled with programs and portfolios of projects all the way to maybe the top of a corporation structure. So we are going to be talking about those top two tiers, the responsibilities associated with leadership and we're going to do it in a scenario based way. We're going to explore topics through reading and writing through scenarios using a technical organizational structure. We're going to learn from others experiences and opinions and form some of our own. Course number three is value creation and building enduring relationships. So let's take a quick look back at where we've been, course one covered your own unique leadership style. We explored that through taking assessments, identifying your top strengths and your personality type. Then we talked about building a high performance team to include talent management and what it means to build operating principles that a team can use to be successful. Course two then covered accountability and employee engagement. Accountability in three forms, your own personal accountability as a leader, how to build team accountability and then a culture of accountability. We also covered employee engagement and looking at yourself as an authentic leader. Now in this course we're going to cover value creation and building enduring relationships. These are the final pieces to putting together what is going to be hopefully a holistic way of looking at leadership of a technical organization and I hope you think of it that way. So my name is Kathryn Toby, I've had 34 years in the aerospace industry before I retired and I have been a part of leadership in all program phases from innovation through operation and in many functions like strategy and business development, research and development, engineering, manufacturing and program management. I have a Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from CU, Boulder as well as a Masters of Science degree in Engineering Management. I am now a scholar in residence teaching organizational leadership at CU, Boulder. In this class, we're going to come at these topics from different perspectives and what's true to one may not be true for another. So let's approach the topics and when we do our peer reviews with an open mind and one that is focused on learning. So expectations for completing this course, you are to take all three courses in the specialization. I highly suggest you do it in order of course one, then two, then three you will take the strengths assessment and personality assessment that I introduced in course one. There are five modules in each course, so there's five modules here in course three. There will be articles to read, videos to watch, there will be practice quizzes embedded and then five leadership learning scenarios. Let's talk about assessments first. This entire specialization uses the idea that playing to your strengths is a much more successful way of thinking about your leadership style as it pertains to various situations. So we focus on our strengths and we manage around our weaknesses. These talent themes and your personality type are neutral. They're neither bad nor good nor are they labels, they are descriptions. Understanding similarities and differences are an advantage and we need one another for our strengths and our weaknesses. Take these assessments as described in course one, there are two different types of strength assessments and two different types of personality assessments, one free and one paid. Scenario based learning. We're going to use this technique many, many times in this specialization and in this course. So LTO is a fictitious corporation that has broad experience in completing complex technical projects. It's a large government contractor established in the early 50s and has grown through a series of mergers and acquisitions and has been quite successful. The corporation has four business areas as you see, we typically concentrate on the LTO Space business area and very specifically you are usually put in a role as a leader in the military space group under LTO Space. Through this course, we are going to explore leadership topics through scenarios and we're going to write about them. If you don't remember or want to read more about LTO Corporation, I presented that background in course one, module two, lesson two. So now let's talk a little bit about the expectations for your response to a leadership learning scenario. These will be peer reviewed assignments. Again, as I said, there will be five in this particular course, they will be graded by three fellow learners against a rubric. They are 350 words plus or minus 20 words. And writing a very good one page paper can be more difficult than writing a much longer paper. So use this also as a learning experience. And it is important as it is a practical kind of writing that you need to master. Here's an example of a rubric and this is always the same. There are three criterion each worth five points for a total of 15 points for your scenario response. The first two criterion are going to be specific to the prompt you're given, the third criterion is always the same. Just one more plug to do a good job as a pure reviewer. Feedback is used to improve performance and that is what you are doing, but not only that being able to provide very good concise feedback, models the kind of collaboration that's done in many, many fields, it encourages critical thinking within yourself, it enhances your communication skills and it improves your own writing. So as a peer reviewer, I want you to give good concise feedback and you will learn from them. All right, now we're going to move on to the next topic and that is going to be the difference between stakeholders and shareholders. Now, why would we do that? Because a leader's role is to create value for stakeholders and we need to know the difference between these two. I hope you enjoyed that first video that introduced this entire course, be a Mr Jensen. I hope it reminded you of your motivation to be a leader, to think about your employees as unique talents that need to be nurtured and protected, but also supported. So with that the next thing you're going to do is a reading and watch two videos on stakeholders versus shareholders to get that clear in our mind before we move on. So I'll see you soon.
