Take a Seat at the Table
With the last of the 2016 SASE Regional Conferences wrapping up, I wanted to take some time to reflect on the 2015 National Conference, Leadershp: Confidence, Courage, Commitment.
For me, a large of learning to be a leader was learning to be confident. It is my belief that a leader is not necessarily born, but is rather raised to the position by those around him/her. It follows that part of being a good leader is to learn how to trust in yourself the same way those whom you lead trust in you. It means learning how to stop doubting that your ideas are good and starting presenting them to the team with no apologies or hesitation. Leadership is finding confidence in yourself and your ideas — once you believe in yourself, it’s easier for those around you to believe in you as well.
This idea of being confident in yourself is something that I have been working towards. It’s not easy to throw off the cloak of uncertainty and put yourself and your ideas in the spotlight for everything to see and comment on. Whether you lead from the front or from behind, though, you must be able to be confident in the value of what you add to the team. One of the best lessons I’ve learned has been told in many forms and styles, but the way I like to think of it best is to seat yourself at the table.
I think the visual of sitting at the table is one that many of us can relate to. Picture a conference room with a large table in the middle and seats along the walls. How many of you, like myself, would enter the room, take one look at the table, and start gravitating to the seats along the walls? I don’t need to imagine myself doing that — I know I have in the past. However, once you’ve seated yourself along the wall, you’ve already shut yourself out of the conversation. It’s hard to grab the attention of those at the table when half of them can’t even see you. We all know how awkward it is to have to turn around and speak or listen to someone seated behind you. The turning point for me was in a meeting with a few of my colleagues, again in a conference room with a table and seats along the wall. As the most junior person on the team, I had seated myself along the wall first, indicating that I didn’t value my own contributions enough to put them front and center. The rest of the team filed in and grabbed seats at the table. Before we started, my manager turned and looked at me and said, “Pull up a chair and join us at the table. We want to hear your perspective, too.”
At that point, something clicked. Suddenly, I began to see how often I had not seated myself at the table and how often I had missed key chances to contribute a new and different insight. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have 5, 10, or 15 years of experience in the industry. I had had my personal experiences, which shaped my personal viewpoint on the world, and my team needed that. To be successful, they needed the diversity of knowledge, experiences, and viewpoints. And they needed me to be a leader. That was the point I realized that to be a leader, to be successful, I would have to have the courage and the confidence to sit at the table.
We want to know how you’ve applied the theme of SASENC 2015 to your own life! Please leave us a comment or reach out to blog(at)saseconnect(dot)org with subject line “Leadership means to me…” to submit a longer piece of writing.
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Originally published at www.saseconnect.org.
