Jason Staten

Last week I was given the opportunity to interview with a company I’ve held an internship with for the past three months. Sitting in a room across from four men, each scanning my resume, I was bombarded with questions about my past experience, thinking patterns, and technical abilities. One pattern that seemed to stand out amidst the inquiries was the leadership theme. Questions like “how would you handle a poorly performing teammate” or “what roles on projects have you had in the past” were frequent. With this single experience alone, a clear display of the importance of leadership abilities within the workplace of any company is shown. My own personal beliefs on the roles and responsibilities of a leader have grown throughout the FC301 class and have found five important steps in taking a leadership position.

The first building block is to work with what you have. Allocate what strengths and weaknesses that your team has and adjust accordingly. Whenever you are placed with a new group, situation, or even morale, a recalculation of this is vital. If your members primarily held a strength in roofing houses, you wouldn’t also take up wiring the electrical or pouring concrete for the driveway. Sure, it might be able to be accomplished, but with the time and training required to learn the new skills you could’ve put three more roofs on. Making an emphasis on what you’re good at is a must to stay afloat. When it comes to individual member of a team, the same rule applies. Don’t put your database architect on the user interface portion of a computer and expect the quality you get when they do back-end work. It just doesn’t make much sense.

Next, you need to organize the process that the team works with to produce output fast, yet reasonably. This theory came to me during my internship when we used the Agile SCRUM methodology for developing software. Now without getting too in depth on SCRUM, it’s based around having visible output every day and having a working product at the close of each two to four week “sprint.” Having short spans between each release of a project allows a team to frequently compare their direction with a customer’s vision. Because of this format, the greatest amount of loss is a single sprint’s worth the time. Another factor is to have the personnel responsible for a specific portion of a product estimate the amount of time to complete their part. This prevents you as a leader from blindly cracking a whip on those who have been working to their fullest potential and well as make more accurate release dates for your customers.

Knowing how to evaluate your options to take risks is a skill that requires a lot of prior experience. However, anyone new to making risky decisions should not use this as a reason to cower and always play it safe. It’s been said in many different ways in the past that those who have had the most success are the same people who have had the most failures. A good metaphor to this principle is the Microsoft Windows game of Minesweeper. Occasionally you are met with a situation where you are uncertain where a mine lies, but need to make a move so you don’t just fill the timer with “999.” There are essentially two options when you click on any square within the game; if the square is a mine then you lose and must start over. However, if the position is safe, you are provided with the positions of more mines. This is not so different from the real world. Risks have consequences and rewards, and the only way to learn to handle them is to experience them.

One must always remember the reason why you are working on a team. In most situations it is coming together to complete a task that all members hold some form of interest in. Keeping this in mind, you must understand that it is okay if everyone on the team is not always pleased. You are not on the team to be best friends, share personal secrets, and grow old together; you’re there to accomplish a task. This is where I find it appropriate to “tilt the scales” just a bit in your procedures towards finishing the objective of the team in place of attempting to make every member happy 24/7. If you fail to meet a deadline, you can be assured that no one will be happy.

Think about the last time you drove somewhere in your car, did you just go and start it up? Or did you pop the hood, check your fluids, your tires, and change your air filter? Most people I know would trust that those things would be okay on a day to day basis. This same Idea applies to working with a team. If you’re constantly checking them and not trusting that they’re okay then the team’s “car” won’t get anywhere. Not that knowing what your members are doing is a bad thing, but there’s no better way to degrade the performance of someone than to be watching and criticizing over someone’s shoulder. Often times, when someone is relaxed and has space to do things without worry of making a small slip up, they are the most productive.

Overall, leading a team is an important skill for anyone to have that works in a company with more than one employee. There is no set way for someone to be the best possible leader in all situations, but trying different methodologies, taking risks, and trusting your team are all ways towards finding your own optimal form. After studying about a different form of leadership within FC301 this quarter, I’ve definitely gained a stronger position on how I need to lead a team in the future.