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#144

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Level 5 Project 1: Lead In Any Situation

#143

Purpose: The purpose of this project is to apply the skills needed to successfully lead in a volunteer or other organization.

Overview: For at least six months, take on a leadership role in Toastmasters (at any level), within another volunteer organization, or in your career. While serving in your role, ask your peers to complete a 360° evaluation. Present an 8- to 10-minute speech about your experience as a leader. Your speech may be humorous, informational, or any type that appeals to you. The speech is not a report on the content of this project, but a reflection of your experience and/or the impact of the 360° evaluation.

Script:

Good evening fellow TMs and guests!

It is said that "Leadership is a series of behaviours rather than a role for heroes"

There was this period at work where I've had to play different roles not only as mentor but also someone who had the onus of teaching others and bringing them up to speed on various concepts.

Why? Because they joined the team after I did.

When I read this quote on series of behaviours, I reflected on the journey that I embarked upon. one of them was by choice which was mentoring someone new while the other just so happened inevitably.

When I joined Amazon as an intern, I was assigned a mentor who not only taught me things and answered all my questions, but also taught me how to ask the right questions and how to think better. So, being an intern I got to learn new things while also observing the series of behaviours my mentor employed with me from the start of my internship to the end of it. 

As months passed by, his responses went from 'Oh sure what do you need help with? Let me take a look at it, to 'Did you first try to find a solution to this on your own? What did you try?' and then guided me from whatever I had come up with. These learnings helped me when I mentored others. 

Mentoring is a process wherein I believe you learn way more about yourself than you can imagine.

From my experience, I can say that it's extremely tempting, especially in the initial set of 1:1s, to be an eager beaver and answer all the questions asked, and if your mentee is facing a problem, see how quickly you can solve it by providing several alternatives.

While this may work for most cases, there are some situations where you just need to take a step back, and listen to what they're saying without saying anything in return. because at that time all they need is someone who can empathize with their problem or what they're facing at that moment and simply nod or not basically try to solve the problem immediately or see it as something that needs to be fixed then and there

One day my mentee came with a doubt on 'I need to implement this algorithm how do I do it in java' 

easy peasy right - due to my experience with java, I knew what she was asking about because I have done the same at one point in time and I just pointed her to specific code links and shared my screen to show her how to code that piece. Done.

Now, another day she came to me with a difficult circumstance she was grappling with and had no idea how to deal with it. At this point I donned the listener hat and rather than shooting answers continuously like out of a golf ball cannon, I had to adapt my behaviour to start asking questions that helped her reflect on the situation by herself and direct her via my questions towards finding a solution. 

Now, keep in mind this solution need not always be a fix right. It can also mean finding common ground between herself and the people she's facing this with.

I acted as a coach and asked her things like 'What do you think you can try doing here?' or when she came up with a solution I asked her 'Hey do you want to give this a shot see what happens. You can try this, come back, we can reevaluate how things went and decide the next course of action. Does that work?'

Often, I would also try to lead by example.

The famous singer Diana ross once said

“You know, you do need mentors, but in the end, you really just need to believe in yourself.” 

By sharing my anecdotes with her from time to time, I slowly but steadily nudged my mentee towards not losing faith in herself and knowing that yes it may take time to build confidence and get to where you want to be but if you start now, you can work on it over time and learn from your own experiences too and not just from others.

After my internship, once I joined back as a full time employee I was still a junior. I was the junior developer in my team comprising me and my manager. that's it. Once my manager announced she was leaving, it was just me and me alone who knew in depth details about the product we were building and the services we were working on. Once an entirely new team of 4 new senior developers and a senior manager joined, the onus was solely on me to ramp everyone up on the projects and initiatives.

Here I saw myself in a different light. When mentoring my junior I could adopt a more confident assertive tone, know that I had more experience than her in certain aspects and could nudge her in the right direction. But here, I couldn't do that. No. There was no way I could talk to seniors in the same manner. That too, coming from diverse backgrounds with tons of prior expertise, I was getting thoroughly questioned on almost everything I tried to teach them.

There were times when I found myself totally blank on how to answer something when I claimed to know the product better. There were other times when I knew my answers were 100% correct, but because of the barrage of questions coming my way, not all of which I could answer immediately, I started to lose confidence.

Yes dear TMs, I know what you're gonna say - Sriya have faith in yourself. Don't lose confidence. You know your stuff, believe in it.

Well, I realized something valuable that day - it's way easier to give someone else free advice but really difficult to follow it yourself. Practice what u preach? Nah! I'll just preach for now. it's simpler.

Ultimately though I was in a sort of a 'leadership' position you could say, in terms of being responsible to ensure my new team was up to speed, I had so many new learnings everyday.

How to talk to senior team members 

How to talk to a senior manager

How to assertively but politely convey something 

How not to lose my stand when I know I've done my research and I'm being interrogated profusely.

All in all, what a great 6 months that was! ramping up people, learning to argue professionally, handling conflicts, participating in difficult discussions, mentoring someone from a different team - wow!

I am so grateful for having the opportunity not only for facing these situations but also for being able to share this reflective experience with you all, because now I get to see how far I've come. I'm currently working in my new team and if I think about it - I'm much more comfortable ramping up people. Doesn't matter if they are senior to me or not. Any conflicts arising? No worries. Been there done that.

Yes of course the learning never ends. It's not like i'm an onboarding expert or a conflict master if you will. I just have to remember that every situation is going to be unique. Yes there may be similarities but at the end of it:

What did i learn?

How did I adapt to it?

How did i evolve as a leader?

Reflecting on these 3 main points - that's what will help me on my path of self-actualization [WOTD] and of course, to 'lead in any situation'.

As Darwin once said:

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."

Thank you, over to you TMOD.

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