Kajal Madeka's Digital Portfolio

Most of my adult life, I have been in a University environment where mutual respect and collaboration is the culture, people are low key and content, earning respect and recognition through their work and the interactions are not laden with formality or hierarchy. I knew I would never fit into the ‘outside’ world where things move on a different set of wheels driven by ambition and profit motive and aggressiveness is an asset. Leadership in these two contexts looks very different. So when plans were announced for setting up a student-led enterprise within CTLT to provide Instructional Technology and Design services for a fee, I jumped at the opportunity, thinking that at last I would be able to practice in the real world without giving up the values of my own world. Learning Design Solutions – the resulting student led company of which I was a founder member – was the best thing that happened to me as it shook up my very comfortable notions of leadership and taught me valuable lessons on several aspects of effective leadership, starting with the interview process. This reflection on the lessons of leadership forms the artifact for this competency. 
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The reflection contains some background information on Learning Design Solutions (LearnDS) and the culture of cooperation and respect that prevailed there. The leadership opportunity was an online course redesign project for a College within Iowa State University for which I was the Project Leader. The reflection narrates the incidences that created the leadership challenges and hindsight reflections on how these should have been handled or could have been prevented. I use the Situated Leadership model to unpack this learning experience.