Reflection

Leadership Experiences Reflection

My leadership experiences span three main areas: personal, professional, and academic. While these three areas are separate, they are also intertwined. Being a good parent makes you a better manager, and being a good manager makes you a better parent. My academic study contemplated leadership's methodologies, techniques, psychology, and philosophy. Reflection is essential to improving one's ability to apply theoretical knowledge for effective following and leading. Applying our knowledge and skills with reflection enables us to hone our skills and improve our craft. We use techniques such as "what worked well" and "even better if" to enable us to continue that which is working while stopping or starting what needs to be changed. With expanded knowledge through the Fort Hays State University (FHSU) organizational leadership program, I reflect upon one personal and two professional leadership experiences.

Early in my career, I tended to gravitate toward team lead roles. I have always been mostly positive and enthusiastic with a thirst for knowledge. Intentionally stopping short of becoming a people manager, as a team leader, I am usually one of the more senior members of the team, with both formal and informal mentoring responsibilities. Being a non-manager suits me fine as I get to help people grow while avoiding the less pleasant parts of people management. In a team leader capacity, I led the messaging and collaboration team at Compaq/HP. Following this experience, I have not been on a more capable team. One of the reasons I started studying organizational leadership was to understand the magic that made the Compaq/HP team great. Before studying group dynamics, I had attributed the team's success to our manager. While he still holds the top on my "all-time best managers" list, I now understand much more about what made our team perform. Team cohesion was perhaps the most influential contributor to our team's success. I can take some credit for that, as I brought a positive attitude to work and had fun while motivating the team. We would hack each other’s workstations when in training classes together. Not destructively, of course, and it made the learning environment more fun. We laughed a lot, both at ourselves and with each other. We followed an unwritten mission – the customer comes first. During one challenging outage, one of my colleagues spent an entire Friday night in the data center troubleshooting the issue. I got up early on Saturday and checked in to learn of his progress. He was still working on the problem. I brought him breakfast and asked him to get some rest. I went to work on the issue and solved it a few hours later. We were all dedicated to ensuring we delighted our customers while presenting ourselves professionally. That weekend, we all dedicated ourselves to solving a specific problem, working and taking credit as a team. It was the best group I had the privilege of being part of, without question.

Following my studies at FHSU, I better understand how our team came to be and, more importantly, how to assemble similar teams in the future. In Leadership and Team Dynamics, LDRS 306, we reviewed Bruce Tuckman’s four stages of group development: forming, storming, norming, and performing. Twelve years later, Tuckman added a fifth stage, adjourning. I like the addition of this fifth stage as it addresses the almost inevitable dissolution of the team. Some teams end as quickly as they began, often marked by the end of a project. Other teams carry on with varying levels of success. We also learned about person-organization (P-O) fit in LDRS 306. Unbeknownst to me, we had applied P-O fit in our team selection. Interview questions for team candidates applied weight to team-fit at almost fifty percent. The core three team members had to agree on team fit to select a candidate. While our manager had veto power, he never used it as he trusted our judgment. Our team also employed the Attraction-Selection-Attrition model, again unwittingly. The three of us who founded the team set the criteria for P-O fit and then established and maintained our group's culture baseline. People who did not fit our culture faced natural or planned attrition. Now that I recognize these models and methodologies in more detail, I am confident that I can build another high-performing team like the one that inspired me to learn more about leadership and teams. I suspect that our star manager guided us subtlety using suggestions while allowing us to take the credit for our successes. I would also guess that he enabled us by serving as a genuine servant leader and that he was more important than we understood. The high-performing messaging and collaboration team at Compaq/HP functioned mainly in the performing stage with a strong servant leader, solid cohesion, and a clear mission.

In my youth, I was a Boy Scout who left the scouting program at the rank of Tenderfoot. Some years later, my then 8-year-old son started asking me questions about my old Cub Scout shirt as it hung in my closet. It occurred to me that it was probably about time to get him involved. So, we got involved, very involved. Our calendar had scouting events every weekend with an annual summer camp. After Cub Scouts, we selected a troop known for delivering a very active program. A Boy Scout troop is a small organization of twenty to eighty youth, governed by a set of bylaws and functioning somewhat autonomously under the national organization's rules. After our first year of acclimation, we discovered that the troop was more adult-led than boy-led. Units can become adult-led when well-meaning parents take over to facilitate more efficient task completion. They do not understand that they are likely taking learning experiences away from the youth. While the state of the troop was less than ideal, it afforded us an opportunity to affect real change. In scouts, we learned three levels of leadership training are offered to the youth. Introduction to Leadership Skills for Troops (ILST) teaches the basics, setting the foundation for the local council’s National Youth Leadership Training (NYLT) at Tahosa Scout Camp, which feeds into the National Advanced Youth Leadership Experience (NAYLE) at Philmont Scout Ranch. Most youth stop after ILST as this level of training is adequate for their leadership roles within the troop. My kids continued past ILST to participate in NYLT at Tahosa and NAYLE at Philmont. NYLT is a week-long leadership course tailored for and delivered by youth leaders. NAYLE follows a similar format with advanced topics and, at the time, was only available at Philmont Scout Ranch down in New Mexico. My son and I staffed NYLT over several years, learning and growing together. Here, we learned about servant leadership, the explain-demonstrate-guide-enable (EDGE) method, the express-address-resolve (EAR) method for conflict resolution, and how to teach these concepts in the outdoor classroom where the youth staffers are the actual instructors.

Participating in NYLT was one of the best, most impactful experiences of our lives as individuals and as a family. We applied the four stages of group development to the EDGE method: explain with forming, demonstrate with storming, guide with norming, and enable with performing. To take this grouping concept one step further, one could apply leadership styles, as we studied in LDRS 302 Introduction to Leadership Behavior, to each of the four stages. Directive leadership is more effective when a group is forming as the leader sets expectations and helps the group get started. Moving through the rest of the stages, the leader can apply the most appropriate style based on the group's needs. Coaching or democratic leadership is helpful as a team addresses conflicts through the storming stage. Collaborative leadership is effective for a team that is norming. Once in the performing stage, the leader could apply servant leadership tenets to support the team while clearing obstacles. In Wood Badge training, the adult equivalent of NYLT, I learned how to use these same methods applied to adult leadership in the scouting program.

Graduating from the Wood Badge program requires the completion of 5 tickets, or tasks, encouraging the candidate to give back to scouting with emphasis on making a difference. Through completing my Wood Badge tickets, I set the framework for youth participation in NYLT. Several youth would go on to become staffers in the NYLT program. We changed our troop from anti-NYLT to sending almost a dozen scouts through the leadership program, with several returning as staff. Eight years later, the troop is still sending youth through the program as they now understand and embrace the value of quality leadership training. My NYLT experience inspired me to pursue the Bachelor of Science in Organizational Leadership at FHSU. It provided the foundation for my academic studies and served as the basis of the following data center migration story.

Joining a team of Project Management Professionals, I could have expected my first assignment to be managing a large and complex project. With a limited budget and a matrixed staff, my task was to migrate four large clients and turn down our old cloud platform. The team was matrixed because we all had different managers and existing job responsibilities that would require management and prioritization. Following what I had learned in scouting, I organized the team into several patrols or groups of no more than ten people. The groups represented the systems, storage, network, security, applications, and database disciplines. For each of these groups, I assigned one leader. Every week, I held a meeting with all the team leaders and held them accountable for their deliverables. I managed a high-level timeline, collaboratively developed by involving the team leaders to ensure ownership and buy-in for the plan. I provided the vision and mission and repeated the mantra as often as necessary. My role was primarily coordination and facilitation with problem-solving and decision-making responsibilities. While the team was forming, I was directive in my leadership style, getting the team organized and working together. Once we started moving toward performing, I changed my leadership style toward collaborative and servant leadership. The data center migration project was my first opportunity to apply what we teach to scouts in a professional setting. I changed the terms used in scouting while keeping the methods mostly intact. It proved highly effective and resulted in a successful project.

From scouts, I understood how to organize a team. I knew how to build team cohesion by encouraging a fun, pleasant work environment from my experience at Compaq/HP. I didn't know why these methods worked, nor did I understand how to implement them for maximum effectiveness. Most of my experiences involved a lot of trial and error and learning from my mistakes. While this served me well up to a point, the knowledge and skills I built in the organizational leadership program at FHSU have elevated and enabled me to perform even better. Studying the works of Hackman and Franz in LDRS 306 Leadership and Team Dynamics was an eye-opener. J. Richard Hackman's academic research and the results of his work with groups made it clear why the optimum team size is six to eight. I had followed the example of patrol size from scouts when forming my teams, and then here it was, with all the academic proof backing it up, showing why it works. I facilitated feedback loops, called roses and thorns, or stop-start-continue in scouts, professionally labeled "what worked well" and "even better if" to improve our team performance. Applying real-world knowledge and experience made the lessons resonate as I studied the leadership subjects.

My one personal and two professional leadership experiences were enhanced through ongoing reflection while studying the coursework of the FHSU organizational leadership program. Scouting laid the foundation for my leadership knowledge and inspired me to enroll in the FHSU degree program. My experience with the data center migration project provided ample examples to draw from while building upon my leadership knowledge at FHSU. Finally, and most importantly, I believe that I finally understand the secret sauce that went into creating my high-performing team at Compaq/HP. Being part of that messaging team was a fantastic experience I had hoped I would enjoy again. Through the growth I have experienced over the past five years, I no longer need to hope, as I now have the tools, skills, and knowledge to build a similar high-performing team.