Staring at YOUR Shoes

There’s a saying: “How can you spot an extroverted engineer? They stare at your shoes instead of their own.”
Sometimes we engineers are so focused on the numbers and science that goes into our studies that we forget to work on the soft skills. Communication, teamwork, leadership: these things fall on the wayside. Here at Miami University we have the Lockheed Martian Leadership Institute, a three year program that develops its engineers to become effective leaders. It puts its members through a transformational leadership journey, and improves the leadership qualities needed for them to succeed in their careers. I am going to go through and lay out this journey that the Lockheed Martian Leadership Institute puts us through, and expand on how people can develop their leadership abilities as well. So who is a leader?
Leaders can be extraverted and outgoing, other leaders might not like to be so direct, but allow others to have accountability and make decisions for themselves. How can leadership envelop such a broad array of seemingly contrasting techniques?
There is no singular way to be a leader. Leadership is a personal aspect of each of us. In order to best improve ourselves as leaders we must understand in what ways we can lead best, and that depends largely upon each of our personalities. 
So what does this mean? In order to grow as a leader, you must actively shape your leadership style. Because it is so personal to you, you must examine your own strengths and weaknesses. You need the good judgement to realize what aspects of yourself work well with other people and the humility to admit what characteristics of your personality could be causing friction. “The Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute has been an instrumental program in developing myself as a leader, it has taught me about personal leadership, leadership within teams, and transformational leadership.”
In the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute we have been assessing ourselves in order to improve aspects of our leadership styles ever since day one. The first activity we took part in was taking a Myers Briggs personality test. This test has 4 categories with 2 options within each category. You can either be extroverted or introverted, intuitive or sensing, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. For example, I was placed in the extroverted, intuitive, thinking and perceiving personality type, or ENTP. What does this say about me? My strengths are that I am very outgoing, I socialize well and enjoy collaboration during brainstorming. These are all aspects that I can focus on and use to optimize my teamwork abilities. What about my weaknesses? I can be too blunt or abrasive, I am impulsive, and I could use some lessons in constructive confrontation. Understanding this about myself can allow me to be cognizant during my interactions with others and if I see myself beginning to display any of my weaknesses I can rein myself in and actively prevent them from becoming a problem. 
In shaping our own personal leadership styles, we have also made what we call leadership development plans. These were massive binders that we filled with various content focusing around helping us understand our current leadership styles by having us lay out what we were doing as leaders at the time. It allowed us to explore different types of leaders so we could understand the broad range of characteristics a leader could possess. We then mapped out what we wanted in our life, we wrote about long term personal and career oriented goals, how we would get from where we were to that point, and what type of leader we would like to see ourselves become throughout that journey. This let us understand how to grow into the type of leaders we want to be in the future.
Another tool we learned about for improving our leadership, which is also the most crucial motivator of change, is crucibles. Crucibles are those events in your life that are triggered by periods of stress or confrontation that present you with the opportunity to shift your perspective and think differently about certain things in your life. What we learned was that when we become presented with a crucible there are two critical paths that we can take. One path is pushing blame. Blaming your teammates, blaming your boss, blaming your friends, blaming whoever you can in order to not take blame on yourself. This path can cause negativity and stunt your development as a leader. The other path is to accept your crucible and be accountable for the results of it. This helps you understand how to better yourself moving forward. 
Our crucible in the Lockheed Martian Leadership Institute was Listen4Insight. We set out to create a podcast website that centered around asking knowledgeable professionals about the themes of creativity and innovation. It’s a fun subject to talk about, you meet passionate and interesting people, and it’s fulfilling to see your work wrap up and be displayed on the website. Well that’s of course our first thoughts as we entered into the project, but to be able to pull this off in a professional manner, run it like a business, and to continuously come up with content and work together with all the other Cohort members showed us that there would be a lot of frustration and hurdles to overcome. As we started off on the project we realized our deadlines were a bit too unrealistic and our communication a bit too underutilized to create the content we wanted. But we were determined to make the podcasts happen. We laid out all of our work in steps so we could understand how much time and effort would be spent on each step, what was to be required of the steps, and when to hand off and communicate things with other people. We talked with each other about how we should work together, what was expected of everyone, and what we considered to be reasonable quality of work and deliverables. By the end of the project we were a well-oiled machine, running smoothly enough to be able to document all of our progress so we could pass it down to the next cohort to run.
So how has the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute prepared me to take all these things, crucibles, personality types, plans for developing ourselves as leaders, and implement them to make a difference in my work, relationships, and life? It has taught me what personal leadership is, that in order to improve myself I need to be honest and authentic with myself. I have to recognize the bigger picture of what I want my life to evolve into in order to become the best leader I can be.
Now this has strangely enough taken me down a path with a different tone. In being authentic with myself I found the root of leadership. I have to keep in mind above all else that the goal of my personal leadership is to bring out the potential of others. My leadership should be a catalyst that helps my peers access improvements within themselves. When I’m leading people with…. When I’m leading with other people as the priority, I can become a true, authentic leader.
Leadership is where the concept of, where “them” is central. Leadership is about bringing out the true potential of the team. This is what the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute has shown to its members.
So where is your transformational leadership journey taking you? How are you evolving to become the type of leader you envisioned for yourself?