Be the Superhero You Can Be

Spiderman in a battle to the death with the Green Goblin, if Spiderman cannot stop the Green Goblin thousands of people will die, including the love of his life, Mary Jane. The Green Goblin with super human strength, super intelligence, super speed and the technology that is like nothing the world has ever seen. Spiderman, having gained his abilities through a transformation, must now use them along with his intelligence, which he had before, to defeat the Green Goblin. Spiderman uses his knowledge and skills to eventually defeat the Green Goblin and save his loved ones and many others. How did he do this and how have superheroes throughout the comics and movies become superheroes? The answer to that is transformation. Peter Parker gets bitten by a spider and gains the ability to shoot webs from his hands, climb walls and have super human strength. At first he wants to use it to get money, but that results in his uncle dying. That was Spiderman’s crucible moment, which defined the rest of his life. That moment made him realize he could use his powers for good and not just for his own personal benefit. A transformation is a dramatic change in form, thought or appearance. The transformation that Peter Parker went through was led by a crucible and propagated through his experience with fighting crime to make him strong and smart enough to stop the Green Goblin.
The Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute is the crucible needed to transform an engineering into a full and distinguished leader. If the real world is fighting the Green Goblin, then Lockheed is the crucible that transformed Peter Parker into the hero he really was, Spiderman. Over the three years I spent in the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute I have learned more things about myself than I would have ever learned in any other way. Working every day to improve myself and to improve how I focused on others. Leading people in the real world doesn’t always require you to be the manager, or a really high position in the company. Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute teaches you to lead from within. Everyone can be a leader, you just have to know how to apply your leadership skills in different forms when working with different people. During the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute there were many different experiences that we went through, this included reading leadership books, taking cultural intelligence quizzes, a Myer’s Briggs test, speakers and assignments to guide us to what we want to accomplish in our life.
Every crime Spiderman stopped, every burglar his thwarted, is a book read in the Lockheed Martin Leadership Society, or a speaker that came into to talk to the class. These books included the 7 habits of highly effective people and an HBR top 10 book on leadership, taking the first step in learning why leaders are so effective .Some of the speakers included Madison Albright and Jeff Wilcox. Learning how to shoot a web, was like taking the Myers Briggs test and doing activities about in class. Learning the first thing about being a leader, understanding yourself. Spiderman making his outfit, was like creating a leadership development plan, to set out what our true goals were in life and create heading for the rest of our life. We worked to create a mission statement and purpose statement. This allowed us to think ahead in the future about what we want to do with our lives and how we can accomplish what we need for our future. Foiling a bank heist for Spiderman was learning the true extent of what he could do. In Lockheed, we created a podcast website from scratch, which taught the class to work together and showed us the true extent of being a leader. The constant changing environment, working in teams to accomplish everything we needed. Spiderman needed to plan his approach and plan how he was going to accomplish the large feat of taking on a dozen robbers with a plan to rob a bank. Setting up and using the agile training we received allowed us to take a blank website to a website with over 5000 views in under 6 months. Finally Spiderman planning how to stop the Green Goblin, is like finding our True North. Filling out the book showed us exactly what we need to do to accomplish what we want, to become leaders wherever we are in whatever we decide to do. It allowed us to figure out what we need to improve on in order to become the most effective leader.
Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute provides a way to transform from the leader you were to a better and more intelligent leader. The Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute is the crucible that every engineering student needs to become the leaders and the superheroes of society that they know they can be.