The Crucial Skill for Tomorrow's Leaders

LEVEL: Intermediate +

AGE: Adults

 

DISCUSS BEFORE YOU WATCH

·          

• ·         Which of the following characteristics do you consider the most important in a leader and why? Rank them in order of importance and account for your answer.
  
  
  TRUST                       MINDFULNESS                        CURIOSITY                        SENSITIVITY            A SENSE OF DIRECTION          ACCOUTABILITY                    EMPATHY                        A SENSE OF CALLING

• What is the single most important skill that the leaders of the future will need? 

WATCHING FOR MAIN IDEAS

 

•  Is any of the ideas you've discussed mentioned? 

    WATCHING FOR DETAILS

  

•  Watch some people answer the question "What is the single most important skill that the leaders of the future will need?"  and complete the chart below.

 

	Position/ Company	Most important Skill Leaders of the future will need	Why?
Angel Cabrera
Bill George
Daisy Wademan Dowling
Andy Zelleke
Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld
Evan Wittenberg
Dr. Ellen Langer
Scott Snook

 

    KEY

	Position/ Organization	Most important Skill Leaders of the future will need	Why?
Angel Cabrera	President of Thunderbird, school of  Global management	Have the trust of followers Be reliable/ trustworthy	It’s hard to build/ easy to lose Especially useful in this era of new communication tools with lots of exposure. The leader should use the tools at hand to build and preserve trust.
Bill George	Professor, Harvard Business School	Leadership is not about skill but a question of character of the person within. The leader should be genuine and have an understanding of themselves and a sense of purpose, passion and mission.	If they don’t know where they are going they cannot rally people and align them along this common sense of purpose.
Daisy Wademan Dowling	Executive Director, Leadership Development at Morgan Stanley	Have Empathy/ a relentless desire to build capacity in the people around them (they should be teachers)	Without empathy they can’t understand other people’s motivation and get them excited about the direction they’ve set for the company.
Andy Zelleke	Lecturer in public policy, Harvard Kennedy School.	Having a devotion to the interests of others (that’s a timeless aspect)
Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld	Professor, Leonard Stern School of Business NYU	Having the habit of explaining what drives your actions/ decisions.	It forces you to understand the underlying values that are driving your behavior and allow you to ensure that you’re conveying/ communicating those to others. This creates a dynamic of accountability. The values get aligned with the practices.
Evan Wittenberg	Head of Global Leadership Development, Google inc.	Curiosity/ inquisitiveness	The world is terribly complex and leaders are working more across boundaries. Therefore you need to be able to admit you don’t know everything and not  make assumptions.
Dr. Ellen Langer	Professor, Harvard University	Mindfulness (noticing new things and take advantage of opportunities)	You no longer have people applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems.
Scott Snook	Associate Professor, Harvard Business School.	Having a clear sense of their calling/ purpose	No matter how competent or skilled they are if they don’t have a clarity of purpose, which is the bedrock of what leaders of the future need.

 

Vocabulary for exploitation

·         Followers take a leap of faith

·         Trust  is all you have

·         Use the tools at your disposal

·         Have a sense of direction, passion and mission.

·         You need to understand the people you’re working alongside.

·         They need to have a relentless desire to build capacity in the people around them.

·         They need to have a devotion to the interests of others. That’s a timeless aspect of leadership.

·         The most important trait when a leader is giving direction is to get into the habit of always explaining why.

·         This forces you to identify the underlying values that are driving your behavior or your request.

·         This allows them ensure they are conveying their values to others.

·         The values should get aligned with the practice.

·          Leaders are working across organizational boundaries.

·         Leaders should be curious and inquisitive.

·         Leaders of the future would prosper enormously by becoming more mindful.

Urgent vs Important

Level: Intermediate

Age: Adult 

Discuss before you watch

1.     How hard/ easy do you find it to prioritize your work?

2.     What impact do you think that being good at setting priorities has on your overall success at work?

3.     Do you make a to-do list each morning?

4.     How do you prioritize your tasks?

5.     How can you tell something urgent from something important?

You’re going to watch a short presentation by Jim Tatem, who runs business training programs.

Fill in the quadrants below with the numbers and examples given.

Now, discuss your answers with a partner.

FOCUS ON PREPOSITIONS

Fill in the blanks with a suitable preposition

1.      It’s important to discern ________________the urgent and the important items.

2.      “Let’s take a look________________ our first example.”

3.      An example of something urgent would be a ringing telephone where the customer is ________________ the phone or is coming into the store.

4.      We need to focus our time, effort and energies ________________ quadrants #1 and #2.

5.      The mail carrier coming  ________________the store might be something  that must be dealt  with ________________ that very moment.

6.      Spending time ________________ the Internet or surfing the web fall into quadrant #4.

7.      There are 2 performance points that you can use right away to put urgent vs important________________ effect.

8.      Label all of those things on the list you’ve made and concentrate __________________ things that would be in quadrant 1 or quadrant 2.

Provide examples of your own using the expressions in bold.

FOCUS ON VOCABULARY

Collocations

   

These are some common collocations associated with the video. Join with arrows and say how they relate to what Jim says.

1.     Set                                a. your work/ your tasks

2.     Make                             b. a vital role

3.     Prioritize                        c. on the latest news/ statistics

4.     Develop                         d. the phone

5.     Play                               e. a to-do list/ a purchase of equipment

6.     Attend                           f. priorities/ goals

7.     Spend                           g. a skill/ an ability to do something

8.     Label                            h. to somebody or something

9.     Catch up                       i. time/ money

10. Answer                         j. the items on the list

Words & Expressions

Do you know the meaning of the idiomatic expressions below? Spot them in the video and try to work out what they mean. Then join them to their definitions.

1.      TAKE SOMEBODY OFF COURSE          a. advantage                                      

2.      DAY IN DAY OUT                                     b. in the wrong direction

3.      WHETHER OR NOT                                   c. immediately

4.      PAYOFF                                                     d. continuously for a long time

5.      RIGHTAWAY                                             e. used to introduce two possibilities

Writing   

• Write a summary of Jim’s presentation using as many of the words/ expressions seen above.

Speaking

• Fill in the quadrants with examples that might be relevant to you and your work. Then present them to the class

Follow up

Related articles

·         http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Prioritize-Your-Time---Urgent-vs.-Important-Activities&id=271328

·         http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/learning-how-to-prioritize-urgent-important-or-later

PAIR WORK: You can ask students to read one of the articles above at home in order to present it the following class.

KEY

FOCUS ON PREPOSITIONS

Fill in the blanks with a suitable preposition

1.       It’s important to discern __between__the urgent and the important items.

2.       “Let’s take a look_____ at__________ our first example.”

3.       An example of something urgent would be a ringing telephone where the customer is _____ on______ the phone or is coming into the store.

4.       We need to focus our time, effort and energies ____ on____ quadrants #1 and #2.

5.       The mail carrier coming  __ into_______the store might be something  that must be dealt  with ______ at___ that very moment.

6.       Spending time ___ on____ the Internet or surfing the web fall into quadrant #4.

7.       There are 2 performance points that you can use right away to put urgent vs important____ into______ effect.

8.       Label all of those things on the list you’ve made and concentrate _ on______ things that would be in quadrant 1 or quadrant 2

FOCUS ON VOCABULARY

Collocations

1. f                         2. e                         3. a                         4. g                                        5. b                                        6. h

7. i                          8. J                          9. c                         10. d

Words & Expressions

1.       TAKE sby OFF COURSE                           b. in the wrong direction

2.       DAY IN DAY OUT                                       d. continuously for a long time

3.       WHETHER OR NOT                                    e. used to introduce two possibilities             

4.       PAYOFF                                                         a. advantage                                                      

5.       RIGHTAWAY                                               c. immediately

Script  (by Marcela)

Welcome to “Your motivational minutes”. Today’s topic is urgent versus important.

One of the key skills to develop the ability to discern between the urgent and the important items, between those things that are going to take me off course and those things that are going to help me build the business from where I am to where I want to be.

In order to do that, we’ll take a look at the four quadrants that play the most vital role here: those items that are urgent or not urgent and those items that are important or not important. And to do that let’s take a look at our first example: Quadrant #1 where we find items that are urgent and important.

And example here would be a ringing telephone where the customer is on the phone or is coming into the store and is saying “I must speak to the business operator”. Obviously our customers are very important to us and that matter that needs to be attended to, is as a matter of fact very urgent. So, this is something that we would tend to.. and this happens to us day in and day out when we’re operating on business.

The second quadrant, quadrant #2 are for those items that are important but not urgent.  This is where the biggest payoff is but unfortunately, where we have a tendency to spend the least amount of our time. When we’re talking about urgent, not urgent and important items, what we’re specifically saying is the long term planning, the goal setting, the evaluating the  employees, the evaluating of my pricing, determining whether or not I should make that next purchase of equipment. Those are things that impact the long term success of my business so, therefore, they are important but very rarely are they very, very, urgent.

What we’ll find is that the most times what we need to do is we need to focus our time, effort and energies on quadrants #1 and #2.

Now, when we’re looking at quadrant # 3, there we’re gonna find things that are not necessarily important but they are urgent. So for example, the mail carrier comes into the store today, drops off the mail for the day, that’s something that’s urgent, It’s happening right now but is not necessarily important that I deal with it at this very moment.. Or, for example, just any ringing telephone. A ringing telephone  is screaming “Answer me” and therefore, it becomes urgent but again, is it important that I as a business operator answer that phone or is it more important that I have someone in my store delegated, in my business delegated to make sure that that phone gets answered in a timely fashion. Again, that’s not something that I necessarily need to do.

And that brings us to quadrant #4. Not urgent, not important. Examples here might be for example spending time on the Internet or surfing the web or just catching up on the latest sports statistics or highlights. Now, again we’re not saying that you shouldn’t have relationship building going on with your staff, etc, etc, but we do wanna make sure that we’re..??? of the time that we’ve been given and, therefore, we’re focusing most of our time, as we said earlier, on quadrant #1, the urgent and the important, and quadrant #2 the not urgent and not important and we’ll leave quadrants #  3 and #4 alone.

So here are 2 performance points that you can use right away to put urgent vs important into effect.

#1 make a list of all the things that you need to do and #2 label all of those things on that list #1, #2 #3 or #4 and then purpose yourself only to concentrate on things that would be in quadrant 1 or quadrant 2.These have been “Your motivational minutes” thanks for joining us.

Workplace of the Future

Level: Elementary +/ Pre Intermediate

Age: Adults

link to youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZJJz_wIckw

link to CBS news video: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6850541n

Before you watch

·        How do you imagine the workplace of the future?

·        Say if you agree or disagree with the following statements. Account for your answers.

-                    Everybody will have their own offices.

-                    There will be multi-purpose facilities.

-                    There will be lots of interactive technology.

-                    There will be more face to face meetings.

-                    Most employees will be staff, not contractors.

-                    All the work will be done by teams.

-                    People will work from 9 to 5.

After you watch

Watching for main ideas

·        Which of the points above are mentioned in the news report?

Watching for specific ideas

·        Watch and answer the following questions:

1. Where is Accenture based?

2. What kind of company is it?

3. Whose needs does their workplace meet?

4. Why do they implement such advanced technology?

5. Where do people work?

Watching for details

(if you want to convert the video to MP3 format you can do it for free at: http://www.video2mp3.net/)

·         Listen and fill in the blanks:

If you re like most people in this fast-paced world maybe it feels like you’re stuck on a treadmill. But in one office in ________________Houston, that’s the way some people like it. ________________ Accenture, a global _____________________________ that has built what some consider the office of the future.

“It is individual work space it is meeting space, it is cafe space, so it’s multi purpose.”

The idea is to get ________________________________ out of every space. The idea is to cater to generations x and y.

“So the office of the future will embody concepts that are around supporting ________________________________ and the way they work and the way they ________________ and the way ________________. So, multi tasking, highly technologically advanced.”

Accenture’s office of the future is packed with all kinds of interactive technology. This is called media escape, and it allows a person sitting here in Houston to _____________________________ or even ____________________________ with someone sitting in Atlanta, for example, and it’s all________________.

And the people on the other side of this conference table are ________________ on the other side of the world. India.

It’s the kind of technology that’s expected to ________________ the company 35 million dollars ________________ in travel expenses alone,

“And no one has ________________________________”

“No one.”

Not even the top executives. Like everyone else here, he settles in wherever he can.

“The reality is we’re a client service business, and we want our people to be ________________and not in the office.”

________________ it is the office of the future

Focus on vocabulary

• Join with arrows

Group A

1.      Consulting                    workforce

2.      Young                          technology

3.      Face-to-face                company

4.      Advanced                     meetings

Group B

1.      Meet                           in Houston

2.      Be based                     money

3.      Do                               somebody’s needs

4.      Save                            work/ your job

Speaking 

• Retell the news report using thenew vocabulary
  

Free expression: Discuss
 

• How do you like the office of the future?
• What are its advantages and disadvantages?
• What aspects of the present workplace would you like to keep and why?

 

KEY

 

After you watch

Watching for main  ideas

Ideas mentioned:

-          Multi- purpose spaces

-          Interactive technology

-          Face to face meetings (with people overseas)

Watching for specific ideas

1. Where is Accenture based? In Houston, Texas

2. What kind of company is it? It’s a Global consulting company

3. Whose needs does their workplace meet? The needs of the employees of the future (generations Y and X)

4. Why do they implement such advanced technology?  To save money

5. Where do people work? Wherever they can but mostly outside the company.

Watching for details

(script)

If you’ re like most people in this fast-paced world maybe it feels like you’re stuck on a treadmill. But in one office in downtown Houston, that’s the way some people like it. Welcome to Accenture, a global consulting company that has built what some consider the office of the future.

“It is individual work space it is meeting space, it is cafe space, so it’s multi purpose.”

The idea is to get more than one use out of every space. The idea is to cater to generations x and y.

“So the office of the future will embody concepts that are around supporting a younger workforce and the way they work and the way they need to work and the way they work best. So, multi tasking, highly technologically advanced.”

Accenture’s office of the future is packed with all kinds of interactive technology. This is called media scape, and it allows a person sitting here in Houston to collaborate on a project or even share a spreadsheet with someone sitting in Atlanta, for example, and it’s all face to face.

And the people on the other side of this conference table are actually on the other side of the world. India.

It’s the kind of technology that’s expected to save the company 35 million dollars a year in travel expenses alone,

“And no one has their own office here”

“No one.”

Not even the top executives. Like everyone else here, he settles in wherever he can.

“The reality is we`re a client service business, and we want our people to be with our clients and not in the office.”

Even if it is the office of the future