Facilitator Excellence...
is an intensive workshop for both new and experienced leaders, managers, and facilitators who would like to develop or improve their facilitative leadership skills. The workshop is offered twice a year, in the fall and in the spring.  Go to the Professional Development Registration System and search for Facilitator Excellence to learn more about it and to find the next session. 

A variety of other leadership learning opportunities are also available: Lead 21, NELD, Great Lakes Leadership Academy, Leadership Assessment Center.  Contact your regional director for more information on these.

 All Michigan State University Extension staff members are expected maintain active and involved Extension councils and advisory committees.

Working with Your Extension Council provides a checklist of organizational details to help make the council operate most effectively.

MSUE Councils is a presentation to be customized locally and used to introduce MSUE and council roles to council members.

MSU Extension Councils—Telling the Extension Story provides suggestions for councils on strategies for communicating effectively about MSU Extension.

Extension Councils -- Suggestions for establishing and maintaining an effective county advisory group for MSU Extension.

Tips on Sharing Your Views with Policymakers offers basic information to help citizens communicate their views on virtually any topic to public officials.  

Citizen's Guide for Communicating with Elected Officials helps citizen get their point across to decision makers.

Tips for Writing a Letter to the Editor in Support of Extension. When budget cuts loom, volunteers, council members, and partners may use these guidelines for organizing and fleshing out a letter to the editor.

Charting Your Course to Success

CED Development Series 2009

Join your colleagues on the Adobe Connect & conference call

Third Friday each month, 10 AM

Complete Schedule, including URLs, call in numbers, and links to recordings of past sessions. 

LeadNet is a philosophy of leadership, an informal network of MSU Extension Educators, and a rich set of resources for helping people learn about and practice facilitative leadership.  It was formed in 1994 and functioned much as an Area of Expertise team for 15 years. 
     LeadNet began with a review of the academic literature on the evolution of research and thinking about leadership that has taken place over almost 100 years.  It focused on approaches to leadership emerging from the literature in the 90s—those that espoused leadership as a shared process leading to change. LeadNet formed to link people from all areas of MSUE interested in learning about and practicing the key forms of this approach:

• Transformational—leaders help others become leaders and act as catalysts in inspiring them to rise above challenges and contribute their best.
• Servant—leaders work alongside others, learning with not doing for, and enabling them with education and other support.
• Shared—leaders recognize that power is collective, include others in decision making, and create an environment where others lead from their strengths.
• Collaborative—leaders join with other leaders to integrate their resources and networks in order to create systemic change.
• Facilitative—leaders engage people using change process tools for shared idea generation, consensus decision making, and participatory planning and action.

LeadNet focused on several barriers to practicing shared leadership--mistrust, complexity, conflict, need for power, and focus on self--and developed educational programs, processes, and tools to help address these.  We are beginning to compile a variety of these tools and processes online, to make them more easily accessible to MSUE staff.  Below is a sample--a learning activity on the stages of a team's development.  More are on the way!
- Team Stages Activity
- Team Performance Model