Social-Media-for-Professional-Growth-Final

Social Media for Professional Growth Frank Weber Virginia Commonwealth University... Before I summarize the discussion and how I’ll use social media and digital resources to initiate and

Social Media for Professional Growth

Frank Weber Virginia Commonwealth University

Social Media for Professional Growth Ken graciously invited me to participate in his “A Team” chat last week Before I

summarize the discussion and how I’ll use social media and digital resources to initiate and create sustainable change, I’m going to take a slight detour by sharing one of my recent blog posts

I created a Twitter account shortly after Twitter was established 12 years ago At the time, I was Director of Learning and Development at Genworth Financial, and we were looking for different ways to reinforce training once a course was over For example, let's say a new manager took a coaching course We could then leverage Twitter to give a good example or practice to follow when providing feedback In retrospect, I think it was

a good idea However, at the time, we had a ton of other things going on so using Twitter fell to the bottom of the list The idea didn't go anywhere, and I haven't used my Twitter account since

The tweets that are cited in the news are often garbage which has reinforced my lack of interest, and over the years, I just forgot about how I can leverage Twitter to share ideas and learn Being active in social media is one component of the Ed.D in Leadership so it's time for me to start leveraging my account after all of these years Members of my cohort recently shared how they use Twitter which was a huge help So far, I've created two lists and have started following some big leadership and change experts including John Maxwell, Patrick Lencioni, and John Kotter I'm looking forward to seeing where this takes me

So, Ken’s thirty-minute chat was my first foray with Twitter and I didn’t know what to expect As it turned out, the discussion was an incredible experience Ken divided the chat into

three segments with one question per segment He then gave participants ten minutes to respond

to the questions and each other before moving on to the next segment The three questions included: 1) On a scale of 1 to 10, how comfortable are you with conflict? 2) How do you make your team more productive through using conflict? And 3) Why is the ability to engage in

productive conflict important to a team? Participation in all three segments was quite good I was the only person outside of “education”, however, as we’ve discussed many times during class, leadership is really industry agnostic

During the first segment, most participants indicated they were somewhat comfortable with conflict with scores averaging an eight overall As expected, there were people who

weren’t comfortable with conflict at all but also those who were very comfortable with it

During the second segment, participants discussed the importance of leaders modeling and encouraging constructive conflict, so team members see that conflict is ok and how to deal with

it effectively During the last segment, we talked about the importance of working through conflict, so any issues are out in the open and dealt with appropriately I found the discussion to

be quite insightful, but the real benefit for me was seeing the power of social media

As I mentioned in my blog, Twitter and other social media platforms can be leveraged

to share ideas and learn from others, but I now understand they can be used for many other things as well I see how I could leverage Twitter and other social media platforms to initiate and create sustainable change For example, my team and I could brainstorm how to solve a problem; we could engage experts directly on how to handle a situation; we could provide real-time updates on progress; we could share quotes from stakeholders on the impact we are having; key leaders could participate in chats to share their future-state vision, create the burning

platform for change, and mobilize stakeholders; and we could inform key stakeholders of the

specific changes required and why Of course, these are only some of the many possibilities I have to say that this experience was incredibly powerful Definitely in the top three assignments since I’ve been in the Ed.D program!