The me of today is in a really great place right now, being at Sauder School Of Business, figuring out his role in life and trying to reach that goal as efficiently as possible with the help of the various tools I have been provided in my short term here and the various other tools I will be provided in the near future.
Turning into the future me, I should not forget the steps I took that made me reach this pivotal point in my career. So, after careful deliberation I have decided to speak about some of my past experiences and the key takeaways from them as well provide an example of one of the most trying projects I had ever taken part in during my tenure in the IT field.
During my tenure at my last organization, I had an extremely challenging situation that helped me implement all my leadership potential in one project and overcome some of my shortcomings. Being in the IT industry, we always have a plethora of amazing ideas but seldom are able to produce them efficiently and hence, they become shelved for years to come. I was also provided this project by my company’s CTO and was expected to rise to the occasion. An existing idea which had amazing potential had been shelved for the last 7 years and I and my team of 5 were expected to put it in production within the coming 3 months due to existing and new client requirements and market demand. Although new to the helm, I had already proved my mettle by rising above expectations under extreme duress on various projects before this monumental task. In a nutshell, we had to re-innovate an IT application idea from scratch, perform trend analysis on this idea for sustainability for the next 5 years, implement it and make it run as smooth as possible since we were in partnership with IT conglomerates like IBM and HP for this product. All within 3 months.
For me, this project symbolizes the ultimate join between what I strive to handle in my future work since I intend on going back into the IT field which as we all know is an ever-changing environment. Acquiring the necessary tools to handle such a high-pressure situation would enable me to take one step forward towards my final destination.
Although I was able to successfully pull of this project, the amount of effort exerted was not reflective of the completed reward, if I had more knowledge in leadership and team management the process flow would be more streamlined and the hiccups such as in-team frustrations, misinformation between upper and lower echelons could have been mitigated and minimized.
With my current skills I can see myself taking different routes for the above mentioned project and coming out on top with less battle scars (so to speak).
Using a blend of structural and human-resources leadership skills I have polished during my time at Sauder School of Business, following ways could have been implemented by my to streamline my leadership approach:
- From a structural leadership perspective, this project would require all of us to work and but more importantly, work efficiently. Everyone needed to have a specific set of tasks to implement and it was my job to make sure each team member was provided with the tasks he/she were good at and therefore, I needed to know each person’s key strengths and weaknesses so that as a team we could be able to play to our strengths and overcome each other’s weaknesses. Another effective strategy would be to create a hierarchy within the team where 1 team would work on a different requirement such as sustainability of the product and the other team would be working on analyzing and identifying the key issues in re-creating the product for the 20th century and investigation solutions to these issues.
- With respect to human resources, being cooped with the same team under extreme duress creates a “pressure-cooker” work environment which conflicts with efficiency and leads to problems with teamwork. Using this leadership skill, I would have improved mediation among the team members such that everyone always treated each other with professional courtesy and any arguments while analyzing the problems we were facing were dealt without attacking each other on a personal level. But, the main strategy I would implement was I would create an open-door policy among my team members and become a buffer between my team and the higher ups such that they were not in the direct crosshairs of the head echelons like the CTO and the Founding Partner. I would report to them, take any criticism if required and try to make sure my team did not receive the brunt of the blame and were able to concentrate on the work at hand. Another implemented strategy was ensure we would have daily 5-10 minute stand-up meetings so that everyone was able to stretch out and talk in an informal close-knit family way such that everyone was always on the same page and there no surprises among us. An indirect but welcome result of this was that everyone in the team was behaving like a family and they looked forward to spending long durations of time with each other.
With the way things are going, I can see myself getting better with each passing day and the moment where I will be able to successfully link the past, present and future me towards a common destination will be the moment where I would have realized my full potential.
