It is hard to imagine I am arriving at my one year anniversary of joining Stony Brook University. Yesterday marked one year since I walked out of my office at Penn State for the last time after 15 years and in the next nine days it will mark a year since I walked into my new office at SBU. I am going to work on a reflection, but for now I just want to share that this space has been helpful for me to work through some ideas in public. And while I didn’t write as much as I hoped, I did get at least something out each month — I did get 52 posts in for the year so I guess an average of one a week isn’t too bad. There were times when I even got some comments and that is something I truly appreciate and hope for more of. I am starting to see other people around DoIT use the SB You platform to write and reflect — that also makes me smile as it is one indicator of an engaged organization. Perhaps over time more of us will find voices either through original posts or through the act of leaving comments.
I think using a platform like this is a great illustration of our DoIT Values, number one in particular, “Communicate: We are committed to engagement, communication, and sharing information with a human voice.” With that in mind I will commit to writing and sharing more and I hope that each of you consider how you can show a belief in our shared value. It doesn’t have to be through blog posts, but finding time to share your view of how we do our work in an authentic way is a critical part of what we do.
I have to admit that time does go fast here at SBU! Congratulations on being a year in. I appreciate the new forms of communication that have been made available to us. Even offline I have observed improved communication, so it appears that this core value is gaining traction.
Hey Matt, that is really great to hear. It can seem counterintuitive, but changing the communication culture of an organization is one of the more difficult aspects of all this and to me doing so is critical. Having pathways to communicate with each other and our larger community is really important and often ignored. It takes time and it is always important to give people safe places to try out their voice … it is one of the reasons I’ve always liked blogging — I have place to test my words to see how people react. When you combine it with private spaces like we have with Yammer people can make decisions about how public they want to be. That is always a struggle — finding a balance between internal and external voices.