1. What aspect of the class “worked” best for you and why?

I would have to say that the LPI 360 experience was my favorite part of the class, and the activity that I felt was the most rewarding. It really helped me understand and see how other people viewed my leadership capabilities, as well as helped me better see what areas of my leadership needed the most improvement. I also truly enjoyed “Good to Great” and “The Leadership Challenge”, as I found both books full of extremely insightful ways of looking at organizations and leadership. I also enjoyed the GlobalTech experience, as well as the TinkerToy activity.

2. What are of the course didn’t work for you, why, and how could it be improved?

Honestly, we had a ton of articles assigned to us for reading early on in the course, on top of the assignments from the books. This would have been find if I felt that there were stronger tie-ins happening during the in-class discussions. Unfortunately, though, I felt that many weeks went by when I walked out of class at the end of the night thinking, “I’m not really sure why I had to read that.” Now, I understand that the point is just to provide more foundation to our understanding of these concepts, and that the readings were a good way to help reinforce what we were learning in class and in other activities. Still, I couldn’t help but feel like my experience wouldn’t have changed that much if some of those articles hadn’t been assigned. I would simply recommend cutting back on the articles. The books and in class discussions are more than enough to keep students busy and engaged. A few articles are fine, but the number could afford to be trimmed.

3. What else would you recommend to improve the course and strengthen the learning experiene in J506?

I think it would be helpful if a speaker or two were brought in to provide some “interactive” cases. Maybe someone could come in, pose a challenge, and the class could be given time to decide what steps they would take to tackle the issues. Then, the manager could discuss what happened, the reactions that followed, and then engage with the class on their thoughts and questions. This would be similar to the interaction that took place between the professor who had worked at Ford during the “Pinto” experience and his class during the video that we watched. This would require tracking down a leader willing to be open and honest with mistakes, however.
Well, this is the final hurrah. I’ve enjoyed many of the experiences of J506. I think it has given me many takeaways that will be beneficial to me throughout my career. Best of luck to all.

I mean, am I really going to call up these people, many of whom are close friends and fraternity brothers, and say, “Hey, will you consider being on my personal advisory board?” Will I really sit down and write thank you notes everyweek. Will I continue to read and follow the progess of ethical leadership in the business community? Realistically, I started to wonder my my true follow-up would be on any of this.

That, I guess, is the point. How dedicated am I to these ideals, these values, that I have read and spoken about in this course? How dedicated am I to truly becoming a better leader, a leader that people will truly look up to and value as a contributor to their life?

We’ll see, won’t we?

Secondly, though, and more interesting to me, was the passion with which he spoke to the documentary crew about his workers. He became impassioned when talking about how these people just wanted a fair shake, how they had been screwed again and again by people. At one po9int, he just became silent. At this time, he began to cry and get choked up, thinking about his workers. “These are decent people!”

This made me wonder: I didn’t even cry at my wedding. I got a little choked up when the Tigers lost the World Series in ’06. My direct reports, though? Could I ever become so impassioned, so dedicated, that I would literally cry because of how concerned I was for the welfare of my workers? I would love to say yes, but I don’t know if that’s the honest truth. I care, I’m sympathetic . . . but could I ever be passionate?

What about you – Could you ever be passionate for the people who work for you? Could you ever shed a tear for you employee?

Now, obviously one doesn’t need to have an MBA or PhD to see some of the business parallels that are instantly drawn here. With that being said, I still found it an entertaining and interesting analogy to what many people experience at their workplaces. How often have you just been working on “something” without really know what it’s place was in the company’s “grand scheme” , or how often have you felt like you were being limited in the resources that you could use, or how you could use them? And how often has your manager, or whoever else has been in charge of your work, failed to adequately describe the road that lay ahead for you?

Probably the answer for many out there to these questions would be “Far too often”, or even “all the time!”.

The second half of the exercise was pretty entertaining, as now everyone had a shared vision, and we raced to see who could get the house built quickest.  We were brainstorming as quick as we could, and no one’s idea was shot down without at least first getting a trial-run. We were supportive, appreciative, and innovative. Is the perfect vision of a team contained somewhere within?

Me? I’ve never had a direct report. I went straight from undergrad to two different “entry-level” sales positions, and then on to full time law school. I’ve never been the manager of the team. So, alas, I am forced to think back to college. In college, I was what many would have considered the quintessential “campus leader”. I was president of my fraternity, I was the Student Trustee on the Board of Trustees, and these were just two of a plethora of leadership positions that I held.

Out of all of them, I would say that by far my personal best leadership experience came from my time as President of my fraternity, Alpha Kappa Lambda. In my year as president, I felt that I was truly able to give inspiration to my brothers, as well as get them on board the bus for my vision of what I wanted to see in the fraternity. I worked hard at creating a managable budget for the chapter for the first time in years, and held them to a high level of educational excellence. At the same time, I continuously worked to expand our image on campus.  When I was done with my term, I was given very high reviews by both the current brothers, as well as alumni who were members of our Corporate Board.

It could be, however, that I’m selling my current self short. Maybe it’s not fair to say that I am not currently a leader of anyone. I am a leader at my church, being in charge of various projects, and I am also a leader of a small group there. As well, within the law school and MBA program, I have distinguished myself as a leader among several student organizations. This begs the question, though - will my history of leadership in the scholastic and personal environments ever translate to leadership in a professional environment?

I sure hope so.

So, with that said, the big question is – What are MY emotional triggers?

1. N0-Value Added Negativity – People are completely free to have differing opinions. That is often how the best ideas come to light, when many ideas have been contrasted, examined, and skewered. Often times, though, people find much more delight in tearing down another’s ideas than actually bringing their own ideas to the forefront.  When someone starts simply tearing down someone else in a meeting, nothing makes my blood boil faster. The defender inside me wants to leap to the front and help out the abused party, whether I really agree with them or not. This then tends to make me get much more confrontational and aggressive.
2. Failure to Commit to a Decision – One thing that was reflected very clearly in my Leadership profile was the fact that I am a decision maker. I make a decision, I make it quickly, and I stick to it. I’m not going to sit around and debate for three days when I could make the decision in three hours. Some people, however, will take every single second that you’ll give them, and even after time is up, they still want to debate whether the right call was made. NO! Just make a decision. Even now, my temperature is rising.

So, those are my two biggest Emotional Triggers. Knowing this, I have to work to make sure that my emotinoal triggers do not ride up and blind me to making good, sound business decisions, and treating everyone with kindness and equality in meetings.

1. Self Evaluation – My biggest inconstancywas my own self ratings of my leadership practices versus those of my Observers. Overall, I consistntly ranked myself much lower than my observers. My self evaluation was also, on average, below the 30th Percentile in comparison rankings. This can mean a few things. First, I’m possibly to humble when evaluating my own leadership abilities. Secondly, this could mean that I need to trust more often in my leadership abilities and practices and be more willing to speak up when leaders are being sought out.
2. Of the five leadership practices (Model the Way; Insipare a Shared Vision; Challenge the Process; Enable Others to Act; Encourage the Heart), my lowest rated practices as a whole were “Encourage the Heart” practices. Compared to my other leadership practices, my weakest practices involve my ability to adequately praise people for the work, and truly recognizing people in their efforts when apart of my team. This is something I feel I can most definitely work on.

On the whole, I was encouraged very much by my LPI, but I have definitenetlycome away with some areas for improvement which I look forward to working on.

This seems, then, a good week to also be reading “Managing Oneself”. The article  by Drucker focuses on multiple questions that we can ask ourselves in order to evaluate the amount of “excellence” that we are acheiving in our lives.  The questions include “What are my stengths?”, “How do I work”, “What are my values?”, “Where do I belong?”, and “What can I contribute?”.  While these may seem like easy enough questions to answer, they actually require a level of self-examination that many do not participate in on a regular basis.

Possibly the hardest question to answer is “What are my values?” How does one start to tackle this question. One qualifies as a “value”? How do you know what are your true values, and what are just aspirational goals? If you can’t really answer this question easily, then its possible that you need to sit down and truly devote some time to answering this question, as well as the others.

The week before, our team had combed through the interviews, and identified who we though would make good change team members, a premier “change agent”, and we also figured out the “force field” operating around the company. We did all of this in approximately 45 minutes, and there was pretty resounding consensus on opinions and evaluations of both the personnel and the challenges that were to be tackled in the simulation.

This week, once we went off to our own are, we were quick to go to work. First, we pulled up all of the tactical options available. We agreed to go through each one, and quickly identify ones that we could agree that we never wanted to do. In doing this, we also found options that we were split on as a team, so we highlighted them as “we’ll tackle it if we have to” options. Some options were obvious and clear as “must-dos”. We then went to work, enacting the options in the order that we felt best fit our “force field” conclusions. In the end, our team reached a successful 61% approval, with only having used about 60% of the budget and about 70% of the time allotted. We also saw that by the end of the night, our team had posted the highest score.

Reflecting back, our interaction as a team and our way of acting throughout the simulation was a perfect sync-up with our I-Opt team report. In fact, this simulations format probably played perfectly into our teams strengths. To quote from the reports executive summary:

“The team also has substantial action oriented (RS) resources to draw on. . . . valuable when confronting new or unstable situations where known methods, procedures and techniques may not apply but an immediate response is required. . . . If team members can be “wired together” properly and if mechanisms can be designed to offset the natural vulnerabilities, outstanding performance can reasonably be expected.”

This assessment turned out to be dead on. We made quick assessments as a team, and even when not every member of a team was on-board with an idea, there was enough trust in the majority opinion that minority dissenters were willing to “give it a try”, often times with success being found. In the end, I thought our team played out exactly as it was predicted we would, and in fact, an “outstanding performance” was delivered.

In remarks about this past year, Buffett was quick to admit that the company made major mistakes in buying up shares of ConocoPhillips during oil’s peak prices last year. He then went on to describe that economy “will be in shambles” this year if not longer. (source: Bloomberg.com, Buffett Says Ecomony “In Shambles”, Promises Recovery (March 2, 2009)) Some would wonder why on earth, in this economy and environment, would Buffett want to come out with such gloom and doom.

Thinking upon this, it just illustrated to me why Buffett is without a doubt one of America’s best examples of ethical business leadership. It would have been the easything to do to come out and say, “Hey, things happened, how could we have known, but this year is gonna get better and no more looking back!” or “This year is definitely the year we turn this thing around!”

Instead, Buffett showed signs of what Jim Collins called the “Stockdale Paradox” in his book, Good to Great.  In the book, Collins notes that all good to great companies do two things at once: 1) Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and; 2) Confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

Coming back to Buffett, while noting that the troubles in the market are horrible and not going anywhere anytime soon, he still came back to the notion that there was good cause for hope on the horizon:

“[T]he economy will be in shambles throughout 2009 – and, for that matter, probably well beyond . . . “

AND

“Though the path has not been smooth, our economic system has worked extraordinarily well over time. It has unleashed human potential as no other system has, and it will continue to do so. America’s best days lie ahead.”