Preparing Students for Collaborative Leadership: Lowering the walls and crossing boundaries using business-based professional assessments to develop interdisciplinary teams

1. Preparing Students for Collaborative
Leadership: Lowering the walls and crossing
boundaries using business-based professional
assessments to develop interdisciplinary teams
Dave Gosselin, Director
Environmental Studies
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Ron Bonnstetter, Senior VP of Research and Development
Director, Center for Applied Cognitive Research
Target Training International

2. Big Challenge
Negotiating
Silos
The silo effect:
• Is an isolation and lack for connectedness of systems components.
• Leads to the inability of anyone within one silo to see the others.
• Results in thwarted communication, potential redundancy, wasted energy,
wasted resources, internal competition, limitations on collaboration, and,
frustration.
Note:
Assumptions
Promote
Silo Effect

3. Address Silos through the
Practice of Collaboration
Relationship Complexity Increases
Coordinate CollaborateCooperate
Communication
• Align work of
individuals to
achieve increase
efficiency and
completeness.
• Share & support
each other’s goal,
• Something new may
result, result of
individual, not
collective effort.
• Share a vision or goal.
• Something new created
by combining, knowledge,
skills, talents, and ideas.
• Synthesis, co-production,
and collective effort
occurs.

4. An Approach – ENVR 201

5. An Approach – ENVR 201

6. Adapted from Friend and Cook, 1996
Voluntary
Shared Goal
Parity
Shared
Responsibility
Shared
Accountability
Shared
Resources
Emergent
Characteristics
of
Effective
Collaboration

7. An Approach – ENVR 201 – Collaboration Rubric

8. An Approach – ENVR 201

9. An Approach – ENVR 201

10. “….assessment tools to hire, retain, develop
and manage the best talent in the market.
Business
assessment
tools can be
“Silo Busters”
Team Building Support Materials

11. 1. Knowledge
2. Skills
3. Behaviors
4. Motivators
5. Values
80%
20%
●Traditional
Academic
Focus
●Intrapersonal Skills
Affective
Domain
C & B
Domains
●Behavioral
Characteristics
●Motivators
●Values
Apply a business-based professional
assessments
Team Building Support Materials

12. Adapting for Success is Required by
Everybody on the Team
Team Building Support Materials

13. ● Know yourself and your teammates
(Boundary Objects)
● Adapt for success
Keys to effectively putting
the team pieces together
Assessments HELP:

14. ENVR 201 TEAM Wheel - Behaviors
Team Building Support Materials

15. ENVR 201
TEAM Wheel
Team Building Support Materials

16. Team Building Support Materials
Potential
Behavioral
Roadblocks

17. ENVR 201 TEAM Wheel Motivational Drivers
Team Building Support Materials

18. Motivators
Reminder
Team Building
Support Materials
• Knowledge of an individual's motivators help
to tell us WHY they do things. Energy and
time.
• Motivators – initiate behavior and are sometimes
called the hidden motivators because they are not
always readily observed.

19. ENVR 201 TEAM Wheel Motivational Drivers
Team Building Support Materials

20. ENVR 201 TEAM Wheel Motivational Drivers
Team Building Support Materials

21. ENVR 201 TEAM Wheel Motivational Drivers
Team Building Support Materials
Potential
Motivational
Roadblocks

22. ENVR 201 TEAM Wheel Motivational Drivers
Team Building Support Materials
D
S I
C

23. 1. Instructors better understand how information may best
be delivered to students
2. Insights into the motivations behind student choices
3. Framework to open lines of communication (Boundary
Object)
4. Unique learning experience that helps them better
understand their behaviors and motivators and those of
others
5. Tool to communicate their strengths, ideal work
environment, and unique personal skill sets
6. Teams are more productive because students more clearly
see roles, strengths and potential areas of weakness
7. Student understand their own strengths and personal
attributes
Benefits of Assessments

24. Get a Team to
Dance – More Quickly
Bottom Line Assessments HELP:

25. Questions

26. “Over 80% of the people who move up in corporations
are promoted because of their people skills, NOT
technical ability.” (Bonnstetter and Suiter, 2013)
“Academia has become a silo…making a broader impact
(on society) is seen as a distraction. Given the enormity
of unsolved social and environmental problems facing
our planet, we need to re-embed academia into society
and turn it into a vehicle for social change. But how?”
(Stephan Manning, UMass-Boston)
Challenges for Higher Education

27. The Report: What is it telling us?
Team Building Support Materials

28. ● Ways of knowing and researching are different
(Epistemology)
“You and me, we come from different worlds”
Hootie and the Blowfish
Knowledge and Skills Expertise Create Silos

29. Policy
Makers
Scientists
Policy
Knowledge
And
Expertise
Content Knowledge
And Inquiry Expertise
“You and me, we come from different worlds”
Hootie and the Blowfish
Everyone looks at the world differently
Knowledge and Skills Expertise Create Silos

30. 1. Knowledge
2. Skills
3. Behaviors
4. Motivators
5. Values
80%
20%
●Traditional
Academic
Focus
●Intrapersonal Skills
Affective
Domain
●Behavioral
Characteristics
●Motivators
●Values
Iceberg Competency Model
Behavioral, Motivational, and Values Create Silos

31. Communication
Foundational Skills
Practice Makes Perfect