Blog #7 - Class Presentation from Dave Leding

In class last week, we had a guest speaker named Dave Leding who gave a lecture on his multitude of management experiences in the lumber, particleboard, and composites industry. Dave had a wealth of knowledge to share about organizational communication, backed up both from academic and work experience backgrounds. His talk focused strictly to management and how to make work productive (where previous managers have gone wrong and his approach to management), leadership systems and styles, motivation, tools, and "war stories": some of the more memorable moments of his career.

I found Dave's lecture to be highly informative and descriptive in term of solving managerial issues in organizational communication. He lectured us on several different methods to management such as the Lean Management strategy, Socio-Technical Systems, and the more traditional methods, while teaching us the pros and cons between them all. He provided examples of ideas from his own management that did work and ideas that were not so effective, even in one case leading to his termination. Even so, you could tell that Dave was a very humble person and that he really enjoyed what he did throughout his career and made it his intention to find the best out of every situation he could, even faced with some incredibly hard times.

One of the more notable examples I remembered from his talk was the nerf ball example. One day, when his work team wasn't exactly cooperating together, he stopped everyone from working, put them all in the same room, and gave them all a nerf ball and told them that they could throw it at  the person that was bothering them the most as a means of trying to get the group to release tension. Although it was a simple example, I thought that this was a creative way to release group tension without having it escalate any further. It really helped me understand via Dave's perspective that being a manager involves creativity in order to solve a problem - no problem is going to have one perfect solution. As a manager, you have to be willing to be creative, patient, and willing to go above and beyond the call of duty for your workers because only then will they respect you and trust you to be their manager and leader.

Another example that he used to promote team leadership was "I don't care if the cat is black or white, as long as it kills mice." I found this to be another simple yet effective saying to explain that it doesn't matter what walk of life someone comes from, if they get the job done and become a faithful and hard worker, that is all that matters in the end. I've found no different in my own experiences working - some of the hardest and most passionate workers I've met were people that I wouldn't have ever thought of to be that way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ubRzzirRKs

I found a video by a Youtube account named Scott Williams where he describes ten differences between being a leader and being a manager. He uses an acronym titled "BECC" - Believe, Encourage, Challenge, and Correct. As a leader, these four ideas are critically important to organizational communication. He also talked about how "leaders have followers". In order to be a successful leader, you must have a direction you want to go and followers that want to go that direction with you. I found it synonymous with Dave Leding's talk because I felt that a lot of the elements Dave described in his lecture were absolutely elements of being a leader, despite that he was titled "manager" for virtually all of his career. If I were able to ask him a question again, I'd ask him what his thoughts would be towards the differences of being a leader vs being a manager.

Overall I found his talk extremely enlightening and helpful. Dave provided many comical and serious real-world experiences that I was able to concretely relate to some organizational communication topics and ideas we've learned about in class the last couple of weeks.