Imagine! Leadership Development Group Update

Imagine!'s 2018-19 Leadership Development Group. Left to right: Paula McCormick, Emily Walsh, Victoria Thorne, Gabbie Norton, and Jessie Michaud

Imagine!'s Leadership Development Group has selected "Fostering a Collaborative Culture" as our project for the year. Recent changes in the leadership of Imagine! service departments have identified a new vision that focuses on developing a more collaborative culture to improve service delivery and employee experience. With that goal in mind we are looking at what strategies Imagine! leadership could potentially implement to foster a stronger culture of information sharing and collaboration. 

Why did we chose this project? 
We eventually realized that we had begun collaborating with each other by sharing information learning about the departments that we each work in. we were excited at the prospect of getting to look more closely at how the idea of collaboration could best serve Imagine! as a whole. We also feel that it can be hard to communicate with other departments at times and not being to collaborate as well makes the job harder.

What does collaboration mean to us?

• Being able to reach out to members of different departments to gather information and knowledge in order to tackle problems (why reinvent the wheel you don’t have to?). 
• Being able to utilize the resources in other departments and the knowledge that another employee might have of best practices so that we can deliver the best customer service.
• Gaining new information about other departments so that we can become better ambassadors of Imagine! 
• Making new connections with people who you don’t work with every day in order to better understand what goes on day to day for your coworkers. 

We hope that in the end we will have better communication with each other and a greater understanding of Imagine! as a whole and what goes on in the different departments. When was the last time you chatted with someone who doesn’t work in your department? The LDG group challenges all of you to give a try. You never know what you might learn!