Leadership Lessons in Northeast Indiana
A couple weeks ago I got an email confirming my registration for some sort of leadership conference downtown Fort Wayne. Once I checked my bank account to make sure I did not accidentally buy a ticket to something, I was very confused. Thankfully, my wonderful bosses Trent and Barbara had signed me up to go to the Catalyst Leadership Experience -a conference organized by Scott Druhot with general sessions led by recognized thought leaders from around the area discussing their life and career journeys, both failure and successes. Going into this event I did not know what to expect. I had never been to any sort of professional conference before.
My first observation was that they had Starbucks coffee for everyone (which was very good and gone in about seven minutes) in a room full of business leaders.
But I can assure you that my takeaways from this event go beyond a coffee observation. Here is what I learned:
Successful leadership = tools + training + support + positive mental attitude.
According to Retired Col. Perry Collins who served 39 years in the Air Force.
A spoonful of sugar (love) helps the medicine (truth) go down.
Mike Kelley the founder of Caliente LLC had a very interesting presentation on the Theology of Mary Poppins. He talked about the balance of truth and love in leadership and how having too much love can lead to you being a pushover, and too much truth can make you an authoritarian or a tyrant.
Leadership in the workforce is much like climbing a mountain, having poor or no leadership can be fatal.
This is according to Mark Hagar, a turnaround professional and small business expert, related common leadership failures he sees in failing companies to a story of a disastrous climb up mount K2. He talked about some of the obvious signs that failure is coming that many companies ignore. The climbers who nearly all died in this tragic climb lacked time, resources, planning to survive. As do many poorly led companies. Also refuse to make changes and adapt much like these climbers did in the expedition, even when they saw signs of failure coming. The last big thing that the climbers lacked as do many companies, was a contingency plan. They did not have anything in place in case of failure, as lots of companies also do not. Many companies do not even see failure as an option which is disastrous when they do in fact fail.
Sometimes you learn about good leadership through experiencing poor leadership.
This comes from my personal favorite speaker: Curtis Smith. While I have met him and enjoyed him when he was a local weatherman, I found his message to be clear and very relatable. He talked about “What Not To Do” in leadership. He has experienced many leadership mistakes during his twenty one years at a local news station and he was very open about them, which was very beneficial to hear about real life experiences. Some of his points I found to be most important were not to be an absent leader. If you are a leader who is hardly in the office or hardly available to your employees it can create a closed off culture at work. Even having an open door policy does not mean you aren’t absent if your “open door” isn’t welcoming. Also being too focused on the work side of things and never building a personal relationship with your team is not a good leadership style. Knowing that your boss genuinely cares about you and your family and puts family before work is very comforting and motivating.
Taking interns to a professional conference can be more beneficial than sending established leaders.
This is more of a lesson for anyone possibly reading this in a leadership position at a company. While I may have been the youngest and most inexperienced person in the entire conference, I can say that this conference was just as valuable if not more valuable to me than it was for the already established leaders. Taking interns or even entry level employees to events like this is very impactful as we are just starting to develop and sharpen our professional skill-set. I highly recommend giving other interns the opportunity to attend events like this just as I was fortunate to get the opportunity to.
