The Effective Team Dynamics Initiative is excited to announce the launch of our new podcast series, “The Whole Elephant.” This project showcases the work of the ETDI, which helps students, faculty, and staff learn how to best work and thrive together in teams. Headed by Dr. Mary Lynn Realff and now in collaboration with national and international partners, the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative provides a framework for bringing together the strengths and perspectives of different team members and creating innovative solutions to team-based problems.
“The Whole Elephant” is hosted by Dr. Lee Hibbard. Listen to Episode 3 now on Spotify.
The Whole Elephant, Episode 3 Transcript
[Musical Interlude]
Dr. Lee Hibbard (LH)
Hello, and welcome to The Whole Elephant, a podcast series showcasing the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I’m your host, Dr. Lee Hibbard, and today I’m sitting down with Warren Goetzel, Director of the Digital Learning Team at Georgia Tech. How are you today, Warren?
Dr. Warren Goetzel (WG)
Great. Thank you so much for having me.
LH:
Thank you so much for being here. I’m excited to talk to you about all of the work that you’ve been doing. So, we’re gonna jump right in. I’ve got some good questions for you. And I know you’ve already taken a look at them. And I would love to hear your answers. So, I’d appreciate it if you would tell our audience a little bit about yourself and what you do here at Georgia Tech.
WG:
Great. Well, I grew up in New York and New Jersey and moved to Atlanta to go to Emory for undergrad many, many moons ago.
LH:
[Laughing]
WG:
I then decided to stay in Atlanta to continue my education, which I did at Georgia State University. So, I did all my graduate work at Georgia State starting with a master’s degree in science education. So, I actually started out as a classroom teacher back in the day. And that program, which was in the late 90s, was still very heavy in integrating technology into teaching and learning. And so, I got very interested in that aspect entirely, and started moving away from science education and towards integrating technology in all facets of the curriculum. So, after I finished my initial master’s in science ed., I decided to continue on and pursue a master’s in library and information science, and then onto an education specialist and ultimately a PhD in instructional technology and design.
WG:
And from there, I went on to continue my work in K-12 as an instructional technology specialist, first based at individual schools and then working throughout the district. And then I moved up to a position where I managed the school library programs for Atlanta Public Schools for the better part of 10 years. So, I was supporting the librarians’ technology needs as well as their programming as well. And so now, that led me here to my current role as the Director of Academic Technology and Engagement in the Office of Information Technology. And, like you said, our—our team is commonly known on campus as the Digital Learning Team, and we’re really excited about that brand recognition. We are a small but mighty team of eight amazing academic technology professionals. The team was actually founded in 2017. And I just hit my six year anniversary.
LH:
Awesome
WG:
To specifically support the implementation of Canvas and build a digital learning ecosystem at Georgia Tech. Prior to Canvas, we had a very old instance of Sakai, commonly known as T-Square—
LH;
Yes.
WG:
—that predated the first iPhone.
LH:
Oh, wow.
WG:
Yeah. There were only two integrated applications. And since then, we’ve built an ecosystem of approximately 40 platforms and tools for teaching and learning. And my team provides service management for all the platforms and tools in our portfolio, all the way from licensing to supporting faculty and students with the use of the tools.
LH:
All right. Well, it sounds like you’ve got a—an excellent history with the way that things work at Georgia Tech. I myself avoided the T-Square situation because I’m relatively new to campus, but I have some experience with Canvas here and at other institutions. And so, I have to commend you. It’s not always easy to switch over a learning management system like that in a way that actually works and everybody is able to do comfortably. So—
WG:
Yeah, thank you. And we’re actually just finally sunsetting T-Square right now. So, it has been a journey for sure. And actually a journey that was supported by the Brittain Fellows from the very start. I don’t know if you’re aware, but we hired Brittain Fellows to work on the communication component of the Canvas implementation, and worked very closely with the Writing and Communications Program for years thereafter.
LH:
Fantastic, that doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve done some learning management system adjustments myself back when I was in grad school. We were switching from Blackboard to Brightspace during the pandemic, so that was an adventure in and of itself. And it’s hard to go from one place and then suddenly another and you’re learning an entire system that’s new. But, especially at this point, the documentation and the tools, they’re very robust and it’s pretty easy to use. So again, I give your team a lot of credit for making my shift to Georgia Tech very smooth.
WG:
Thank you, absolutely. We’ll talk a little bit more about my team and how it’s evolved over the years. But we were also very fortunate in some regards for the pandemic. So, we had only been fully implemented at Georgia Tech on Canvas for one year before the pandemic hit. So, we were still partially focused on implementation activities and trying to train and support faculty on adopting Canvas. And once the pandemic hit, it forced adoption on everyone and so we were very lucky to have a robust infrastructure and ecosystem to support faculty and students through the pandemic. Just for many, it came sooner than they had planned to.
LH:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that—that really speaks to how important the role that you have is at Georgia Tech. It really gives a very specific context for the kind of work that you’ve had to do and the work that you’ve had to do supporting your team, which sort of moves us into the next part of the conversation, which is of course your experience with teamwork. And I’d like to hear what your past experience with teamwork has been like at Georgia Tech, throughout the course of your career, and just how all of that has gone.
WG:
Well, I always like to start with positive things.
LH:
Of course, of course.
WG:
I like to start and end on a high note. So, I will start with the best experience. And that’s the amazing team that I now have here at Georgia Tech. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to build the entire team from the ground up as the founding—original founding members of the team moved on to new and different opportunities. The team was hired all at once, and I remember asking at my very first interview on the phone screening, I asked, “Are you hiring me to build and then lead the team? Or are you hiring everyone, and I will then come in and lead the team you’ve hired?” And I was told, “I’m hiring everyone, so you don’t have to worry about any of the recruiting or hiring.” And so, you know, since then, everyone moved on. I’m still here and have had the opportunity to build an entire new team from the ground up, which is just very exciting. And I think it’s a good segue into the next part.
WG:
I found throughout my career that having the ability to build a team is—is one of the most important parts of really developing team synergy and teamwork. When leaders inherit talent, it can be much more difficult to build that kind of team synergy and effective team dynamics.
LH:
Absolutely.
WG:
So, in my previous role, as I mentioned, I was the coordinator of library media services for Atlanta Public Schools, overseeing approximately 100 library media specialists distributed throughout the city. And so, I had to work very hard to create in person and remote learning and collaborative and social activities to help kind of foster and develop that—those team dynamics and synergies.
LH:
Sounds like a lot of work.
WG:
Yeah, it was. But now, reflecting and looking back. I think it really helped prepare me for managing a remote team. And further on, we’ll talk more about, again, my team and what it’s like to manage a remote and geographically distributed team. Although these folks were distributed throughout the city, I still feel very similarly about a lot of the principles and strategies that I had to impart to build those kinds of team dynamics with large, distributed team.
LH:
And that’s interesting, because I mean, we’re going to talk a bit more about remote work at some point later while we’re talking. But thinking about the fact that the principles of remote work are kind of similar, regardless of how distributed your team is, whether they’re, you know, within the same city as you, the same state, the same country, the principles in a lot of cases, they mostly remain the same. It’s just sometimes if you go further out, you have to deal with stuff like time zones.
WG:
I do have one team member that’s on the West Coast, so we have to be very cognizant of not scheduling 8 am Pacific or—or Eastern meetings.
LH:
Yes, as I expect. And even if someone is willing to get up at 5 am, that doesn’t mean you should make them get up at 5am.
WG:
Absolutely not. Well, I always like to say we work the work, not the clock.
LH:
That’s a great way to put it. That’s an excellent, excellent premise. Any less positive teamwork experiences that you feel like sharing?
WG:
Well, like I mentioned, I came into what I about referred to as a “team in a can”—
LH:
Yes.
WG:
—when I—when I started here. And so that came with an inherent set of challenges in that I was not involved in the recruiting or hiring. I didn’t know these people at all. So not only did I not have any pre-existing relationship with them—even if that relationship was just through the interview process, which can be a very powerful relationship-building opportunity, even if folks don’t take the job or are offered the job. It still helps to build those kinds of relationships. So not only was it challenging to develop those relationships with each and every one of them from the ground up, but then to develop the team dynamics amongst them. And, as I mentioned earlier, they all moved on to other opportunities, which—that’s enabled me to develop a whole new team, which is just—just been a wonderful opportunity.
LH:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it sounds like regardless of the good or bad experiences, you’re still in the process of having a good teamwork experience. And that’s really what we’re here to talk about today and how the team that you have built from the ground up, as you said, is growing and thriving and how that relates to the work that’s being done here on campus with the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative. So, I’d like to hear more now about how you encountered Effective Team Dynamics, how you started to implement it, and what that process sort of looked like.
WG:
Sure. I can’t tell you that it was definitively process oriented. But I can tell you a little bit more about the background and how we came to be involved with Effective Team Dynamics. So, like I said, my team was founded to support the implementation of Canvas back in 2017. And Mary Lynn was actually part of a pilot faculty group that—that started teaching in Canvas in the fall of 2017. So, her and several other faculty members were part of a pilot. We piloted 50 courses in the fall of 2017. I started in mid-October, so those courses were in full swing.
LH:
Oh, wow.
WG:
And so that’s how I got to meet Mary—Mary Lynn. And since again, I was tasked with leading a new team, I saw that there was a great need to rely on any existing resources that we had at Georgia Tech instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. And so, I started talking to Mary Lynn about StrengthsFinders, and we jumped into that pretty quickly. So, I started in October of ‘17. And I think we did our first strengths workshop with Mary Lynn in the winter of 2018. So, probably six months later. And I actually came from another strengths organization, so that was very helpful. As I mentioned, I came from Atlanta City Schools. They were partnered very close with Gallup and put pretty much all the employees through Strength Finders workshop opportunities. So, I was familiar with Strength Finders. I did other team building activities and programs as well. WLPD—the Workplace Learning and Professional Development Department—here at Georgia Tech has some—some good opportunities in that domain, including Myers Briggs. We did that. Which—I know there’s some debate whether that’s as rooted in research as Strength Finders is sure. But I still find value in those opportunities with team members and learning a little bit more. Like I quickly learned that I was the only extrovert on the team. That in and of itself is a very important kind of dynamic to understand.
WG:
And so we’ve just been building on that for all that time since 2018. And so most recently, we brought Mary Lynn—or actually, Mary Lynn didn’t do the workshop. We had the workshop from Lesley during our fall retreat or a spring retreat, sorry. Just—just this year. So, we had a retreat for our entire directorate in OIT. Let me back up and explain a little bit more about the organization I work in.
LH:
Sure.
WG:
So, my—my team is part of the Academic and Research Technologies directorate in OIT. So, my team is one of three teams. So, we are commonly referred to as Digital Learning. And then there is High Performance Computing, which is commonly referred to as PACE. And then most recently, there was an addition to our Directorate and that addition is the Technology Applications Group, commonly known as TAG for short. Because everything has an acronym of Georgia Tech. And so, TAG came to us in—just about a year ago from the Provost Office, so they were new altogether. And they came without a senior leader. And so, we hired a senior leader to oversee that team. And so, we really had a lot of team congruency and building and dynamics to work through as really a new directorate with two teams—with three teams instead of two. And so, we brought everyone from all three teams to campus in the spring because OIT as a whole is remote and growingly more distributed. And that’s indicative of not just campus but the larger workforce in general right now. OIT alone has approximately four hundred full time employees that work entirely remotely. We gave up all our real estate. We had just moved into the brand-new Coda Building a year before the pandemic. We literally spent years of planning to move all of OIT into one central location on campus and then we all got sent home during the pandemic like the rest of the world.
WG:
And so, this was the first opportunity with our new directorate to bring everybody to campus. So, in spring of this year, we brought everybody to campus for a two-day retreat, and we knew that there was no better way to spend a good chunk of that time than working with strengths. And so we had an afternoon-long workshop in person where we were able to further grow and expand the work we—we did with strengths. And since then, we’ve been working with OIT as a whole. I’ve been tasked with, you know, continuing the strengths journey, not just with my directorate in OIT, because there are like six directorates in OIT. And so just most recently, on Monday, there was a strengths workshop for all the senior leadership team in OIT. So, including the CIO and the six or seven executive directors had their own strengths workshop. And we are also planning for February, I believe, for another strengths workshop for all of the managers in OIT, which will come together on campus for an in-person workshop. We’ll have a remote component for that as well. So I guess it’ll be hyflex. So, anyone in a management position—mostly all people leaders, people managers, —will be able to dive into strengths because many of them have not at all.
LH:
That’s fantastic. It sounds like there’s a lot of stuff going on now. A lot of good structure, especially post-pandemic or post-main pandemic experience that you’ve managed to adapt to in a very specific way. And it sounds like Effective Team Dynamics has been really helpful, especially from a remote perspective. Which, at this point, I’d really love if you could tell the audience a bit more about how now all of that works with a fully remote team and—or a primarily remote team.
WG:
Yeah, absolutely. So, like I said, we were fortunate to bring everyone to campus for an in person workshop in the—in the spring. So that was really that was really an amazing opportunity because I hadn’t even met some of my team members in person yet. And so, like I said, so we’re going to structure the OIT managers strengths workshops so it is hyflex, so both groups of individuals can participate. But specifically, with my remote team, what we’ve focused on is staff meetings. So we still meet weekly. So, since my team is not only remote, but like I said, geographically distributed across the country, we don’t get many opportunities to meet in person.
LH:
Of course.
WG:
And so, we use strengths to help build connections and understanding when we meet virtually. And so, primarily at the weekly staff meetings where we all get together, we typically incorporate small micro-strengths related activities into those meetings to continue the work we’re doing. I think what is commonly seen in training is—it’s kind of typically a one and done. There’s not usually scaffolding or other opportunities to extend or implement the learning. I really taken it upon myself to make that a priority. That strengths was not just something we did at the retreat, and we’re done talking about it. I keep my whole stack of strengths documentation here on my desk at all times. I keep my top 5 of my top 10 strengths in front of me first and foremost all the time. And I asked my team to do the same. And I think it’s been it’s been really helpful. So, I don’t think that the geographic distribution really—hadn’t been an impediment at all.
LH:
That’s great. Just off the cuff. Do you have any examples of what some of those strengths activities might look like? The things that you’ve been sort of trying to scaffold in? The stuff that you’ve been trying to re-up on the regular?
WG:
Well, I think most recently, what we did is made sure we took a look at—so we did the full strengths last time. And so, we wanted to make sure we just weren’t looking at our top 10 strengths, that we were looking at the bottom strengths as well. So really expanding on the kind of balcony and basement premise, where don’t just focus on your top strengths, but also make sure you’re keenly aware of what your bottom ones are as well, so you can leverage on the team to respond accordingly.
LH:
Awesome. I think that’s a really good technique. I think that it’s very easy for us, especially just as people in general to try and focus on what we’re best at. We want to really be, you know, bringing ourselves into the things that we’re great at. But if we ignore the things that we struggle with, or the things that we are not quite as good at—I mean, those things are just going to stay there, they’re not going anywhere, and they could potentially get worse. And if you acknowledge them and find better ways to support those things, it’s going to make your life a lot easier, I think.
WG:
Yeah, and as—as a people leader, it’s a little bit easier for me because I always have the ability to delegate. And so, I use strengths to inform that delegation and make sure that work is aligned with people’s strengths. But I also recognize that not everybody on the team may feel as comfortable reaching out to others for help. So, we really focus on building that kind of trust on the team that enables the work to be done according to strengths. Because I can look at everybody’s strengths. I also keep the matrix out of my entire team and what their strengths are, both the top and the bottom to review when I’m thinking about, you know, projects and what components of the projects are best suited for individual team members. But really to build that trust on the team so team members are comfortable saying hey, this is not a strength of mine. Can you help me with this? I really understand that—that that you are good at this. That this is a strength.
LH:
And in a lot of ways, I think the strengths sort of help us have the language for that sort of thing. It’s very easy on a team to feel uncomfortable with something but not have a good way to say, “I feel uncomfortable with this.” But if you have the language and you say this is not a strength of mine, that’s an immediate shorthand for something that can very easily be talked about amongst the team.
WG:
That is a great point. The common language is critical and it really has provided that for us.
LH:
Absolutely. The last big thing is just how things have developed and changed over time since you’ve been working with strengths and Effective Team Dynamics. So, what aspects of working with your team would you say have notably changed and improved since you focused on the strategy of Effective Team Dynamics and using strengths and things like that?
WG:
Yeah, well, I’ll start off with the team has finally fully staffed as of this August and so we have one team member that hasn’t been through strengths yet, and we’re really looking for an opportunity to engage that team member more in strengths. And—but that’s the kind of nature of teams. They’re dynamic. They change constantly. So overall, I think we’ve come to develop a deeper understanding of what each of our strengths are and use them to develop areas of responsibility on the team, like I mentioned before when it comes to—to divvying up the workload on projects. That way, members can work on the projects or the components of projects that are most aligned with their strengths, and like I said, know who to call upon for help on based on strengths. And so, I believe the quality of our work has really improved because of that, as well as our customer satisfaction. So, one thing we really haven’t talked about—excuse me—one thing we haven’t really talked about is the overall goal of our team, which you know, is helping our customers. We are a customer-focused organization. We support faculty and students, and we consider all of them to be our customers. So, I really think it’s helped build customer satisfaction first and foremost. Lastly, I think developing an understanding about each of our strengths helped improve the culture and the climate on the team as well. And personal relationships since we now know each other much better than we did before.
LH:
Fantastic. And as a customer of Canvas and all of its related issues, I can really speak to the fact that your team is doing an amazing job. Because anytime there is an issue, I know exactly how to handle it. So, it’s certainly in practice.
WG:
Yeah, well, we appreciate that. We actually provide 24/7 support for Canvas through the supplier Instructure, but my team also handles support on campus during the regular workday. So hopefully—hopefully you haven’t encountered too much trouble. But if you do, you now know where to come for help.
LH:
Absolutely. And our listeners if they are local will know where to come for help as well, which is always a good thing.
WG:
Yes, they should email canvas@gatech.edu. And that goes directly to my team. And somebody will get back to you ASAP.
LH:
All right, wonderful.Well, that wraps up the main talking points that we had. Is there anything else that you would want to share with our audience? With anybody who’s interested in implementing this kind of structure on their team? Anybody at all?
WG:
I think if folks are thinking about it, they should go for it. Not only is strengths a wonderful opportunity for building effective team dynamics, but Mary Lynn is just—just an excellent collaborator, somebody that everybody should be fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with. And so, I would just say, go all in. Don’t think about it too much. It’s definitely worthwhile.
LH:
All right, fantastic. Thank you so much for talking with me today.
WG:
Yes, thank you.
LH:
For more information about the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative, visit etd.gatech.edu. Stay tuned for more podcast episodes about the other ways ETD is making an impact across the Georgia Tech campus and beyond. You’ve been a terrific audience. This is Dr. Lee Hibbard. Signing off.
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