Leadership-Service

As a Senior Field Training Officer for a military police department in the US Navy, I was required to manage a group of eight Field Training Officers who worked 12-hour shifts on a constantly rotating basis.  Communicating training objectives and setting the quarterly training plans required me to clearly develop and articulate those plans well in advance so as to give each of my FTOs time to develop his or her plans.  This experience taught me the importance of long-term planning and clear communication to your subordinates.  I also learned that giving guidance to your subordinates and allowing them to determine the best way to carry out the objectives creates buy-in to the objectives and also fosters creativity and ownership.   My leadership style gradually evolved to the point of communicating what objectives I wanted accomplished without dictating how they should be accomplished.  I found that if I gave my subordinates the space to be creative, they would each meet the objectives in their own way.  I also made sure that public accountability was integral in their reporting of progress. I would have the subordinates update their progress in achieving goals in a meeting setting, and then praise and encourage them in front of everyone present. I also learned over time that when counseling or corrective action was needed, I needed to carefully consider the appropriate time and place to have those discussions. 

Leadership in Bush School Classes

The Bush School provides significant opportunities to work in groups with other students.  One particular experience was instrumental in reinforcing for me the need to encourage a team to work openly during the "storming and norming" phase of team building.  Our group project was to work together over a semester to research and develop a program that would improve parental engagement.  In order to improve parental engagement among parents of eighth-grade students at Brown Middle School, the Atlanta University Center Consortium will begin a pilot program that will coordinate home visits with parents and teachers. The program, Make Education Engaging Together (MEET), is an adoption of a proven program that began in Sacramento, California, and has expanded to 15 states and more than 300 school sites. Eighth-grade teachers will visit the homes of their students three times throughout the school year and the following summer in order to improve the rapport and communication between a student’s parent(s) and the teacher and to build the capacity of the parent(s), who will be better able to guide their child through this transitional phase in his or her life.

Leadership Learned at Disaster City

My public service career has provided me with a number of opportunities to exercise leadership, most notably as the leader of the Disaster City Volunteer Program at Disaster City for the last 10 years.  Most recently, I have been responsible for increasing volunteer participation for trainings and exercises at Disaster City by creating an interesting and exciting opportunity for citizens in the Bryan/College Station area. I am in charge of organizing the events, recruiting, advertising, enrollment and safety of the volunteers during their time at Disaster City.  While this leadership role is related to my full time job at TEEX, the position and program are both done entirely outside of my normal duties and are something that I have volunteered to do on my own.  The project is my creation and, ultimately, I am the one responsible for it's operation and continued success.

One of the things that caused me to stretch over the last two years was in reaching out to underrepresented communities and encouraging them to volunteer and participate in our volunteer activities.  I had to reach out to community leaders and organizations that I had not typically seen in my volunteer demographics.  The purpose of this was to provide a more realistic training environment at our facility, while also ensuring that volunteers better represent the diverse population of Texas.  

These efforts met with mixed results and I was able to learn what worked and what also did not work and how to better craft my recruiting message and to encourage more community involvement.  I want to work on being more accessible to a diverse set of communities in my speaking and recruiting efforts.  I feel that to be an effective leader, I must be approachable by a larger segment of the Texas population and I must work to connect on a personal level with potential volunteers from all backgrounds.  I feel that my presentation style and manner of speaking to some groups does not always connect with my audience.  I will need to change my language, approach and main talking points to better connect with my potential volunteers.