Leading Diverse Professionals
The Summer/Fall 2021 EMPSA Public Policy Capstone comprised twelve students in various stages of upper management in high-profile careers. I was nominated as team captain to organize and lead this crew of leaders from law enforcement, emergency management services, education, non-profit management, and city services. My responsibilities as team captain included working directly with our client, our professor, and the assistant captain. During Residency Week, I helped the team analyze our assigned topic by walking them through the process of creating subsections with guiding questions, team formations for research and work, and deadlines formation. The rest of the summer session was spent helping our professor create discussion questions to guide the furthering of our work. This included encouraging well written survey questions to be used in our research and then taking those questions and putting them into a usable document for our Qualtrics process for the Survey and Data Team. I led numerous team leader calls in both the summer and fall semesters, getting progress updates, encouraging them, and ensuring the teams’ work stayed on topic. When individuals were unable to make team calls, I would work with them one on one to ensure they remained on the same page as the whole group. My work included creating the final paper outline for the team to follow as well as a timeline for manageable completion of the project’s elements.
Growth Through Leadership
Leading a large team of individuals with a very diverse skill set will stretch even an experienced leader. I quickly realized I needed to keep communication lines open with each member to understand their comfort levels and desires to best match them with others to make teams that would work well together. While wanting each person’s strength’s highlighted, I also wanted to facilitate growth in everyone as well so everyone would come away feeling they had improved in various ways because of this experience. Nearly 15 years as an educator well prepared me for teaching project management to a team, but keeping some individuals engaged in the work without any external motivators caused me to get creative. Things as simple as a humorous meme or a text pointing out positive work I’d recently seen went a long way in changing souring attitudes and exhausted minds. Leveraging peer partners and the assistant captain to reach out to those who went quiet for periods of time were positive ways to exercise a fresh voice and keep the team engaged with each other and the project. Planning social events for us in College Station during the course of the project provided opportunities to bond outside of coursework and learn to trust each other more.
Rolling With It
While I appreciate constructive criticism, I still tend to get my feelings hurt when undue criticism is leveraged against me. I have to learn to separate where the negativity is coming from. This year, several of our team members faced incredibly challenging experiences in their personal lives. Often, that stress was dumped on me by means of anger and frustration that had nothing to do with what I had or had not done but people needed an outlet to relieve stress. I want to do a better job of recognizing these instances instead of taking them personally and responding by meeting them where they are through positive encouragement and grace. Eventually, I want that to be my default reaction, not what I have to remind myself to do.