Special Thanks to This Year's Sponsors!
LeadIT Abstracts
Exceeding Expectations: Managing Your Staff's Performance
As a manager, it is a challenge to monitor and evaluate staff performance. It should be an ongoing process and not a once-a-year form that is filled out for your HR department. Some managers are required to determine if their team members “meet expectations.” What are the expectations? How do we best document performance? A manager needs to assess performance individually as each person on a team works differently and has different motivators. Let’s talk about some ways to make this process easier, share ideas on what works and what doesn’t work, as well as discuss how to handle performance problems. Rewards and motivation are also important and we will share ideas on how to give your team those things they need to keep going, especially in our current economic situations.
Hear from those of us who have been around... Where did we come from and how did we get here? What career mistakes did we make? What right steps did we take? What are your options? What is your career trajectory? What do we suggest?
This panel of seasoned Higher Education IT professionals will discuss these issues, sharing real life career experiences. Part of what we¹ll talk about are the differences between technology departments at a variety of institutions; private-public, large-small, college-university, to help one get a feel about where they might be most comfortable. We¹ll discuss the good times and the bad, both personal and institutional, including the effects of the current economic woes on the kinds of institution we come from. This session will focus on generating audience participation and questions. Hopefully it will help you think about your personal path and direction. We¹ll be happy to offer advice, but remember, everyone is on their own journey and we can only share ours, not map yours.
How To Talk to Your CIO – Elevator Talk
We’re all busy, have multiple tasks to accomplish in any given day. How do you bring an important issue, idea or proposal to your Director or CIO? How can you capture his/her attention? Consider using the elevator talk. The elevator talk is the 15- to 30-second talk you would give to a senior executive while both of you are in an elevator. It’s your chance to impress that person, so make the most of it.
An “Elevator Talk”:
- Is 30 seconds or less.
- Is highly focused.
- Is designed to snag someone’s interest so they will ask for more information.
- Is carefully crafted to send the message you want to send.
- Is specifically targeted to the recipient and his/her most important priorities.
- Is full of enthusiasm.
- Begins with a very grabbing first line.
- Ends in an invitation of some sort.
Come to this session to discuss how to “speak up.”
I Don’t Understand What You’re Saying
Communication skills are essential for the success of individuals in the workplace and to the accomplishment of organizational goals. Working with people requires effective communication skills. Managing a staff requires understanding interpersonal communication styles--both yours and theirs'. We have all heard the theory but how does it really play out in the workplace. We will explore barriers/hindrances to communication, components of communication, non-verbal language, and the impacts of communication climates.
If You’re Not the Lead Dog…How’s Your View?
Would you like to be in more of a leadership position – with a fresh view? Do you feel your position is so far in the back of the pack that your view will never change? This session will enlighten you: You do not have to be the “top dog” to influence your colleagues or even your supervisors. This session will discuss how you can change YOUR view! We will discuss the difference between management and leadership, ways in which you can learn to communicate effectively as a leader to increase your personal power, and how you can actively engage in this communication.
According to Educause, mentoring is a learning collaboration—a developmental caring, sharing, and helping relationship with a focus on the enhancement of the protégé's or mentee's growth and skill development. Mentoring is just-in time help, insight into issues, and the sharing of expertise, values, skills, and perspectives. Mentors function as a catalyst-an agent that provokes a reaction that might not otherwise have taken place or speeds up a reaction that might have taken place in the future. In this session we will explore real life mentoring experiences – what has worked and what hasn’t worked. We will also explore the feasibility of finding mentors within the SIGUCCS community.
Recruitment and Interviewing Skills and Strategies for Hiring Managers
Hiring people is one of the most critically important responsibilities of leaders and managers. The results will potentially affect you and your team for years to come. In this session, participants will help each other discover essential skills and strategies for conducting the recruitment and interview process. We will focus on how to find and recognize the best person for the job, and what it means to find a "good fit". We all know what we can and can't ask during an interview, but this session will help participants plan a recruitment and interview process that yields the information needed for the best possible outcome, hiring the "right person for this job, on this team, in this organization".
Want to have an opportunity to follow-up with Jason Young regarding his keynote presentation? Have specific questions about how to create and sustain a culture of customer defined excellence? Dealing with a staff member who does embrace this philosophy? Having trouble picturing how your organization can be transformed? Come to this session to get continue the conversation about customer-defined service.
The One-Minute Project Manager
You are not a project manager, you have never received project manager training, and yet you find yourself leading a project or planning for a major change or implementing a new initiative. In this session we will focus on the key skills necessary to be a project manager. We will also explore different project management models that exist within your organization and help you develop strategies to “do it all.”
What Can the IT Department Do to Decrease Your School's Environmental Impact?
Across the country, higher education administrators, students, faculty and staff are expecting their school’s Information Technology (IT) departments to function more sustainably. But what does that mean? What can we do, and what do we need to do, as IT professionals, to meet these expectations? How can we change our workload to make sustainability part of our jobs, not an additional burden? During this session we will work together to clarify what it means to “act sustainably” as Information Technology Officers. We will discuss what we are already doing to support sustainability and generate ideas of what our options are to do increase our support without making dramatic changes to our workload or department’s budgets. Participants will leave with concrete actions that they can put into place immediately upon returning to their campuses, without any additional costs to their school. They will also learn about more complex actions that have worked well at other schools and can be implemented without dramatically changing the workloads of the IT staff. Together, we will become part of the solution to operate in a more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable way.
What does it mean to be a woman in the IT field? What unique challenges and opportunities do we face? Have you ever found yourself being the only woman in a meeting? How can you successfully navigate and negotiate that experience? What do we need to do in order to succeed how do we or should we adapt to the environment? Come to this session with the expectation of sharing stories and strategies with your colleagues
logos are trademarks of the Associaton for Computing Machinery, used with permission.