ASU Management Shared Leadership in Promoting Sustainable Energy Discussion

Context

Because the MSL Capstone Project is designed to be experiential, it is important to identify a context such as an organization or system (such as government) in which leadership is practiced. While using your place of current employment has its advantages, other opportunities in which to examine leadership practice are certainly viable options. One source of capstone projects can be non-profit organizations of all sizes and shapes! The timing of your study is also flexible. While exploring and researching a current situation makes data collection and research more available to you, a retrospective Leadership Practices Assessment based on a previous work experience is also a possibility.

Topic

Your project can be a broad organizational Leadership Practices Assessment for an entire organization or narrowly focused to a single area of an organization, a process, inter and intra organizational relations. In choosing a topic, it may be helpful to make the object of your study begin with a single Area of Leadership Practice. If, for example, you chose to explore leadership at a local chapter of the Red Cross and you feel that Communication needs attention, that is a perfect beginning. From there you may feel that Digital Technologies, in particular, is an important area needing development. Through discussions with Red Cross personnel and by reviewing the two matrices in this week’s lecture, you can begin to see some key areas of inquiry that can become your topic.

That said, remember to think broadly about choosing a project on Leadership as Practice. As you have learned, Leadership cannot be confined to the development of a handful of individual behaviors or competencies by leaders alone. While individual leadership competencies are an important foundation of skills, remember that you should approach leadership development from a collective perspective, or what was shared as Dr. Joseph Raelin’s Leaderful Practice along with other models of shared leadership. In our Red Cross example, looking at the Communication skills of the highest level executive or even just those with leadership positions would be insufficient since you want to identify how Communication for leadership could be more collective and shared throughout the organization.

Using the Leadership Practices Big Questions & Ideas Matrix

The MSL Leadership Practices Big Questions & Ideas is the first step in developing your project proposal. Just reading through and reflecting on all you have learned and experienced is valuable itself. It is designed to be edited and you are encouraged to make it your own by editing any of the Primary Questions, Secondary Questions, Contextual Questions or Big Ideas to fit your own experience. Once those three columns are aligned with your experiences, supplementing with your own questions provides a handy touchstone as you research and write your own leadership intervention. 

You will also want to carefully review the second table found in this week’s lecture titled Leadership Practices Integrated Questions. ( This is attached so disregard the link please) While you probably won’t be using these questions until you develop your own Research Matrix this week, it might be helpful for you to see ahead of time the array of possible questions and the types of questions you will need to be asking yourself when selecting and defining your project idea.

While choosing your topic is structured as an Assignment, please think of it as an invitation to launch a conversation with the instructor as you brainstorm ideas and refine your thinking. This can happen most easily by email and, hopefully, begins even before the beginning of the class. If needed, the use of the phone, Zoom or Google Meet can also be used before submitting your project proposal at the end of the week.