After lurking for several weeks I decided its time to become more active
and introduce myself. While my primary job responsibility is marketing
planning, most of my time is currently occupied by an organizational
learning initiative. With top management blessing a core, self-nominated
team has developed a vision of a desired organization. We are now moving
into implementation of some grassroot demonstration projects that are
designed to widen employee involvement without turning the effort into a
major, top-heavy corporate initiative. We feel that a foundation for this
approach to organizational change is self-leadership throughout the
organization. In rolling out some initial communities of practice I
became aware of the lack of self-leadership competency and we are
currently working to develop these skills through experiential learning in
small groups. To overcome the lack of content experts in each group, we
are planning to use a structured agenda and exercises that can be run with
a facilitator role that is rotated among group members. Our hope is that
the content, awareness, and group encouragement will provide a safe
environment for testing new ideas, especially in determining the limits of
current empowerment.
Outside of work, I am combining my organizational learning efforts at work
with the pursuit of a doctorate degree in leadership and organizational
change from Walden University. This move for more education slowly
overcame me as I became aware of how much organizational theory has
advanced during the 25 years since I received my MBA. My personal
continuing education kept me aware of many of the evolving practices, but
did not capture the underlying theory. I am now three years into this
effort with another 1.5 to two years to go.
rwirth@citgo.com
rwirth@waldenu.edu
--"Wirth, Ross" <RWIRTH@citgo.com>
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