Leadership Capabilities

The final blog post for this course is about leadership.
Fitting, seeing as how the whole course is on leadership.

My thoughts of developing leadership capabilities is just like developing anything else:  It takes time and practice (or repetition).
You don't learn about how to be an effective leader from a book or from a course.  You learn how to be a leader from living.
You can learn different principles so that you can lead under different circumstances, but you can't actually learn how to lead unless you do it.

Principle can only take you so far.

So the best way I can think of to develop my leadership capabilities is to get out there and actually do it.

I think the place where I can develop the most is in my delegation and feedback skills.  I have never been very good at effectively delegating, and my giving and accepting feedback are definitely in need of improvement.
It is hard for me to take feedback in a non-personal way.  I can reflect on a time in my job where I was getting a lot of quick feedback from my supervisor and it was really rough for me.  I took it as me doing a bad job, and her correcting me all the time.  And that really got to me.
But I learned later that she did not have that mentality about it at all.
She was doing small course corrections so that I wouldn't get in trouble with someone even higher up later on.  She was actually looking out for me, because as long as we could catch it and change it before someone else found out, then it would be as if it never happened.

So that is something related to my leadership capabilities that I plan to get better at moving forward.

Sharing Your Philosophy

Over the last couple weeks or so I have had the opportunity to have a phone interview, a formal interview, and a "culture fit" with the organization I will be joining soon and during that process I was able to share my personal philosophy a number of times with others who did not know me that well.

But before I get to that let me share how neat this "culture fit" was...

I have never seen anything like this before in an organization.  Any interview process I've been involved with has been interview after interview after interview resulting in hire or rejection.  This organization, or at least this branch of this organization uses a culture fit, which is an opportunity for every single member of the team to meet the potential new hire, interact with them, and weigh in on whether they think they should be considered for the position or not.
It is done in an informal setting (in this case, a bar) and every member of the team is invited to attend.
This really makes the decision to hire a team decision.  They get into groups of 5-7 and then they sit down with the prospect and interview them professionally while simultaneously getting to them know them personally.  There were three groups and it take about an hour in total.  It goes by quick, but it is a pretty neat experience, and I wonder if more organizations should do this.

So in that informal setting, and in the more formal settings lead up to it I had the opportunity to share my personal philosophy, which I am still attempting to refine.

It ended up being slightly different in each situation, but it was always something along the lines of:
I just want to help people.  I want to help people in whatever circumstance that may be in.  Whether it is mental, physical, spiritual, or emotional I want to help people become the best that they can possibly be.  And so it doesn't really matter what position I am in, or what I am doing, because I can help people no matter where I am.
They liked this, as their biggest concern was whether I would be leaving them as soon as I was done with my schooling.

It feels good to help people.  I am glad that I will be able to do that soon.

Encourage the Heart

This has been my favorite of the blog posts so far!

If you know me you know that I like helping others, and encouraging others!  So getting the specific assignment to encourage three people for a job well done was beyond simple for me.(as it is something I already do regularly)

The first two people that I encouraged were my close friends, the Tuohys.  Fairly simple interaction:

-They tell me about their day at work

-I compliment them for their initiative/job well done/mad skills in a particular circumstance

-They say 'Thanks!'

-We both feel good and move on with our lives

The last person I encouraged was my wife.  This was a different experience.  Not because my wife isn't wonderful in every way, but because she can sometimes be a downer, especially on herself and her accomplishments.

We are very similar in that way.

So the exchange goes a little more like this:

-She tells me about her day at home (she is super pregnant and stays at home now)

-I compliment her for what she got done, and try to point out some positives in her self-described failures and shortcomings.

-She refutes them and feels worse

-I rebuttal

-She refuses again

-This repeats a number of times

-I hug her, because this is far more powerful than words

-She feels slightly better about the situation

-We both feel emotionally exhausted and move on with our lives

This, more than showing me the importance of giving praise and compliments, has shown me the importance of being humble, accepting compliments, and striving to have a positive outlook on life.

While I do love my wife very much, it can be exhausting for both of us to try and keep her afloat in positivity ESPECIALLY while she has all of her pregnancy hormones firing.  But it is a labor of love, and I am glad to do it, so long as I get to make her happier.

Enable Others To Act

From a "following the rubric" standpoint I already failed this blog post.

HOWEVER, from the "follow your heart" standpoint, I crushed it.

This post is supposed to be about what is something that a colleague could learn in order to grow their job.  I am doing this on myself, however, because talking to myself is easier than talking to a colleague.  ESPECIALLY in my current position.

Since I will be moving into a new position shortly (before the start of the new year), I have decided to focus on that and what I could do to grow my position there.  I will be in a unique role that is somewhat of a hybrid between customer support/tech support/and triage.  My role is to take the issues that come in from customers, track patterns, help where I can, and escalate the issue to actual software developers who can fix the issue if the need should arrive.
The greatest thing I could do to grow my potential in this position would be to learn some amount of coding.
I already know customer service. (I've got that experience leaking out of my pores I have so much of it)
I already know it look for patterns. (More personal life than professional)
I am a pretty techy guy. (Not to the level that these people are, though)

So my real shortcoming is in the techy aspect of the position.  And I am willing to learn and grow there.  I know a little about coding (I've done it for about an hour of my life) but I don't know it to the extent that the actual code monkeys do.  And so in order to be better at translating the issues from "customer speak" to "programmer speak" it would be incredibly helpful if I knew just a little bit about it.

And I am sure that I will be picking up some of that along the way, and I am excited for it!

Challenge the Process

When I look at my organization, specifically the small chunk of the organization that I reside in, I can see one massive way in which it could improve.

I'll give you some background...

My job is to do simple, routine tasks over and over every day for a group of legal analysts.  This entails preserving data, sending data to external vendors, loading data to a database, and other related activities.  It is not a complicated job, but it does require attention to detail.

Do you know what else is really good at doing simple, routine tasks over and over every day that could entail preserving data, sending data to external vendors, and loading data to a database?  A computer program.

Now, I am not a programmer.  I do know a little about coding, but not enough to write an actual program.  And I can tell that my job could be replaced by a number of specialized programs.  No fancy robotics.  No multi-million dollar deal with a recognized software developer.

Perhaps two weeks with a college graduate working out of their garage would suffice.

That being said, I am glad they haven't done this because then I would have no job.

But really.  It just seems so easy.

The only thing that the program couldn't do is staple and/or 3-hole punch papers sometimes.  And it could probably do that if they got a fancy printer.

More Than Sharing a Vision

For my Leadership class, we were tasked with speaking with someone that we work with, or are close to (or both, if you're just fortunate like that) about their vision for the company they work for.

I noticed a trend.

And it was very counterproductive to my assignment.

Because people around my age don't seem to be developing visions for organizations.  They develop visions for themselves.

After the first individual failed to give me the information that I needed I decided to seek out additional help.  And was met with the same lack of organizational vision.

I don't know if this lack of vision is related to any one specific variable, but I have a hypothesis of a few that I will share here:

-Having lived on this earth for a while now, it seems very easy to believe that an individual cannot change the world.  Or the country.  Or their organization.  Or their own family, even.  It is a dominant state of mind amongst my colleagues to believe that the only real thing you CAN control is yourself.  So why hope and strive to change something else if 9 times out of 10 it is going to be fruitless?  You're much more likely to get a higher rate of return if you invest in yourself than if you invest in an organization.  Only in very rare circumstances can an individual make a large, lasting difference (usually made into a movie or a book or both).

-I associate with a lot of individuals who are lower on the corporate totem pole.  It is hard to develop a vision FOR the organization when you don't even have proper vision OF the organization.  So it is easier to develop a vision for yourself.  Where you will move in the organization and how you and your life will change along the way.

I can relate to both of these things, even if I don't fully accept them as truth.

The takeaway from this?

I need to associate with higher-ranking people.

After all, you are what you surround yourself with, right?

Modeling the Way

I remember in my retail sales experience having many instances of people modeling what they expected of me.

That seems to be the way that retail sales work.

Watch.

Learn.

Repeat.

Monkey See, Monkey Do.

I can recall at my first job at American Eagle upon returning from my two-year church mission that we had to get people to sign up for credit cards.

That was the big deal.

Credit cards.

You could sell 500 pairs of jeans to 500 different people, but if they didn't put it on their American Eagle Credit Card it was almost worthless in the corporate mindset.

We were a good store.

We had fun and we liked each other a lot. (Almost to a freaky, uncommon level for retail)

We even sold well!  Rarely, if ever, did we not make goals for sales.  But we constantly fell short in terms of Credit Cards.

Even the management wasn't stellar.  They were better than most of us regular employees, but they weren't swinging for the fences by any means.

And then there was Nathalie.

Nathalie was amazing at getting people to sign up for credit cards.  I don't know how she did it (TO THIS DAY) but she was always the top sales person each month, and she had the most credit cards!

Now, before any wild accusations are made, yes, she was an attractive girl.  But not overly attractive to the point where she could use her looks to get people to do things.  She also wasn't that shallow that she would stoop to such a level.

She was just really, really good at what she did.

So the managers would stick us with her.  We would watch, try to keep track of what we saw, and then usually fail horribly when we tried to repeat it.

By the time we all left American Eagle I think most of us had a pretty good idea of how to get people to sign up for cards.  So much so that we weren't one of the worst stores anymore!  We weren't the best, but we were further from the worst than when we started.  And that is the definition of progress!

And it was all thanks to Nathalie and her patience in modeling how we should be doing it.