I chose to attend this session to improve my leadership skills. I was hoping to take away some tips on how to more effectively manage The Northerner staff. The speaker only got through two points because he was a talkative one, but those two tips will make a difference. Before starting his presentation, we split into groups and made a list of skills that a good leader should possess. From that list, my group’s top skills were dedication and leading by example.

Here is what else I took away from the session:

• Skills to develop: Organization/time management (create schedules for yourself for all aspects of life, set times for when you’re not available to the staff) and trust in the staff (choose a staff with skills that compliment each other, challenge the staff and yourself, don’t micromanage)
• Set up shifts for the staff to chronicle when the staff is actually working on their stories or in the newsroom.

The first thing I’m going to do when going back to the newsroom is setting up a check in/check out system so I can see when each staff member is actually working and how much time their putting into stories. Hopefully there will be a correlation between time and story quality and if not, then I can work to improve that.

–Claire