Leadership Workshop 2007

This summer I participated in the U of Z Leadership Workshop by Ari Weinzweig. It was held over two months, consisting of five sessions and a project.

My classmates were all intelligent, motivated, inspiring, and enthusiastic people. We had different experiences to share, having come from different areas of the ZCoB. Together we read stimulating material on leadership, effecting change, then discussed how it applies to our organization and us personally as leaders.

In addition to the readings, we each picked a project to effect a change in any level of the organization. I chose to do the Zingtranet Forum! The Zing Forum is a new feature on our intranet where staff members can post thoughts, ideas, questions online about various kinds of Zing business. It’s a great way to tap into the collective knowledge of the ZCoB in a structured form.

Following the BLC process, I wrote a vision, compelling reasons and interviewed a microcosm of people across the organization on how to tell everyone about it. Almost half of them suggested running a game. It seemed a perfect fit! A forum follows the Network Effect which means that a service becomes more valuable to a customer as more people use it. A game that incented people to post would increase its value as well as expose it to more users. The game ran for exactly a month. At the end of the game, we had 437 posts, 91 topics in 22 categories, and a bunch of happy prizewinners!

If anyone wants to learn more about what the Leadership Workshop was like, or if you’re interested in the Forum Game, feel free to contact me!