Blog #14 — Lessons From CSC

As I do my best to readjust to normal life after CSC, I have spent time thinking about what lessons I will carry forward with me. After reflecting for a couple of weeks, these are my thoughts on what skills I developed, and how I intend to use them moving forward.

Focus on the Top Priority

For as long as I can remember, I have always taken pride in the fact that I can handle a lot on my plate. As a result, it was a new experience for me to “unplug” from the many competing priorities of my day job and truly focus on making the most of my time in Argentina. The significant value I created for my client, the deep relationships I built, and the space I created for personal reflection was only made possible by my complete engagement with the experience. Now that I am back to reality, I once again have competing priorities and “too much” on my plate. However, my goal moving forward is to fully engage with whatever task I am working on in any given moment. There may be more tasks to accomplish, but I have really learned the value of focusing on the most important one until it is time to move on to the next.

Discuss Differences Openly, but Respectfully

Despite our sub-team’s immediate connection and incredibly strong group rapport, we often ran into situations that required consensus despite initial differences of opinion. For small decisions such as what time to start our work day, and large decisions such as how to best reset expectations with our translator, we worked hard to ensure that all options had been evaluated before moving forward as a team. It took time to develop sufficient trust such that each of us felt comfortable sharing dissenting individual opinions, but the decisions we made were better for it. Our Design Thinking workshop, our two deliverables, and our final presentation all benefited from healthy debate among our team on the best path forward. While not every decision can or should be made by team consensus, I will work hard to build the level of mutual trust and understanding on my future teams as well.

Decide Which Battles to Fight

One of the greatest challenges I faced was getting past my assumption that the “right” way of doing things at home would also apply abroad. In some instances, I pushed for what I believed to be best practice, for example reviewing PowerPoints in extreme detail to catch typos, inconsistencies, and missing page numbers. However, other norms that I’m used to didn’t apply, such as putting in face time at the client site. Our client truly had no preference for where we worked, and in fact met us at the hotel business center on several occasions due to general strikes and local holidays that necessitated closing their office. Learning when to advocate for my point of view vs. when to adapt and learn from the local culture was a challenge I struggled with throughout CSC. My goal upon returning is to continue keeping an open mind to the different “cultures” of my teams, but to speak up when my suggestions will improve overall team performance.

Ask About Your Client’s Accomplishments

I have often found myself working to build relationships with clients from backgrounds very different from my own, but CSC presented the greatest challenge yet. In addition to the normal differences in age, gender, etc., we also had to overcome a language barrier and cultural differences. A tip we were given was to ask our clients about their greatest accomplishments. Engaging in conversation about what our clients were most proud of allowed them to gain confidence going into our project together, and gave our team meaningful insight into their priorities. This lesson is incredibly applicable with any client relationship, and I will make an effort to ask these types of questions now that I’m back.

Lead From the Bench

I wrote an entire blog on this topic, but the concept is related to leading a team without an official title. On CSC, we worked in teams of four with no designated lead or project manager. Despite my initial concern about how the team could operate effectively with this dynamic, I learned a number of leadership tactics, including always put the team first, press pause and validate, build personal relationships, know your strengths (and your team members’), and set an example. This is certainly a skill I will carry forward beyond CSC. While I will continue to learn and grow in formal leadership roles, my ability to lead my peers, my clients, and even my leaders (from the perspective of managing up) will also increase in importance over time.