Networking

The most difficult part of networking for me has been not knowing what to say or do. I thought of networking as socializing with people who have similar interests with the possibility of contacting them for help in future. In that light I didn't really know what to say, and didn't know how to filter to find those who either I could help, or those who could receive help from. I also didn't realize that individuals with experience are more than happy to help someone like me who has little experience or skills. Mckenzie Davies' lecture definitely clarified these things for me, and the 30 second pitch was definitely helpful. I've wandered through networking shows before, where business are all lined up with booths around the room, but now I feel I have more purpose in attending these events than to just get free handouts, haha.

Understanding and having a networking mentality would have been very helpful in my leadership role. I feel I could have assisted and been assisted by more people earlier on and would thereby have been more effective.

Although I feel that networking outside of my Operational sphere is temporarily useless since I will be serving a mission for the next two years, I now know which kinds of spheres to engage in and can network with far more direction and purpose. Now that I know what to say I really cannot think of any fears.

My Personal Code of Ethics

I want to be a successful leader in whatever tasks life gives me I. As an aspiring leader, my top eight values that will guide tough decisions are Freedom, Improvement, Integrity, Love, Principles, Work Ethic, Friends and Family. These values resonate deeply with me and I could never compromise them without feeling a sense of guilt, shame or loss. Therefore I will strive to make choices that are in harmony with these principles, and will stop and think about the consequences of my actions before I make decisions. My goal is that these values will eventually become apart of who I am, at which point I will no longer need to weigh the options but will already know what is most important to me.

Leading Change

1) Brother Ward's lecture helped me learn that risk, sacrifice and loneliness comes along with leading change, and though the these factors may be discouraging, they only enhance the needed commitment and courage of those who lead change. Additionally, I learned these costs of leading change help to ensure that, when long lasting changes occur, the changes are worthwhile. Conversely, it is encouraging and hopeful for leaders who are striving for higher ideals to know that truly good changes are worth the risk, sacrifice and loneliness that may be required.

2) For my leadership role I am going to implement what Brother Ward called, Championing Change. Right now, my team is undergoing a change in our original plans and as we've done this I've found the need to persuade them to adopt the new idea and have found that I can help them succeed in it by taking the risks myself and showing them how to do things. So far our team has been adjusting well, but this weekend we'll be taking a lot of action towards our new plan, so I guess I'll see how committed we really are.

3) In doing my presentation, I learned how important 3x5 cards are to help you stay organized and talk to the audience rather than using a piece of paper, losing your place and looking down to read from it. I also realized how important it is to memorize the outline of your speech as well as key transition phrases so the audience can follow along and so you aren't repetitive.

From the other guys I observed several different styles of presenting. I enjoyed Matt's because he seemed to always be driving to a point and was very focused in where he was going, and that made it easy for me to follow and get excited about what he was saying. I also liked Andrew's because he was very interesting and had an insightful presence which kept my attention even though it was technically a biography. Both of these guys were examples to me, and in the future I will definitely try to reflect the same kind of enthusiasm and presence that they had.

Although I haven't yet received an email about the prompt questions, I just thought I'd give this post a shot anyways.

Conflict Management:

1) What was your most important take away from Adrian Klemme's presentation?

I had two epiphanies during his lecture.

The first was something I already kind of knew, but until now hadn't realized in just this way. It came about when Adrian demonstrated how we perceive and pass judgement on things when we do not understand/have complete information in different situations (when the girls went up and rated the description of the guy). I realized that even though their initial judgements may have been assuming and harsh, there is no solution for those judgements not to be made, and thus it is important to communicate and inform people clearly. When he applied it to business settings I realized how important it is for individuals to understand the Why behind the What, and that as a leader I can really empower those I lead by helping them understand.

The second epiphany was just a connection I made to economics that had to do with Compromise. Like Adrian said, compromise is not when one person wins and one person loses, rather I realized that it is just like trade in economics where both parties benefit and are able to consume more than they would have otherwise (outside of their production possibilities frontier--technically speaking). So like trade, compromise is indeed a good thing both theoretically and in reality.

2) What are two examples, good or bad, of conflict management that you have experienced and/or seen?

Okay, so a good example of this took place in my dorm a while back. We were having trouble keeping the kitchen sink from filling up with dishes and even though there was a rule that said you must put away/load dirty dishes in the dish washer, the rule was rarely followed. Finally we'd had enough and decided to agree upon another rule. We reasoned that if the sink has nothing in it then it is clean, but if just one dish gets put in it then it becomes dirty and then no one feels guilty about adding to the mess; so, the new rule was that whoever's dishes were caught in the sink, that person had to unload the dishwasher until someone else was caught. Since then there has only been one perpetrator. Unfortunately, he's gotten tired of unloading the dishwasher and has stopped which is a problem; so, to avoid unnecessary conflict and to just be nice, I've started to unload it and gratefully the dishes continue to remain out of the sink :)

I've had many experiences with bad conflict management at work with my brother. Although we've learned how to deal with it now, we used to argue about the littlest things, never compromising or admitting that we were personally to blame. For some reason I just didn't let things go and he didn't either, and sometimes it was really embarrassing when we'd be openly arguing on the job and our customers would approach us and we'd have to try and act normal, haha. After that occurred a couple hundred times, we finally figured out that it was best to just admit faults or try things in different ways and that as we began doing so we both began to agree with each other more often an fighting each other completely stopped.

3) What are you going to do to apply the things you learned about conflict management to your leadership role?

At the moment I can't think of any conflict that my team has, we're pretty smooth functioning. That said, I will strive to prevent conflict by better informing my team mates about goals and project ideas so they can be empowered. I will also prepare myself to deal with conflict by remembering that there is usually a solution/compromise that can benefit everyone more than any one sided solution could, and that such a solution only needs to be discovered.

I hope this works for the blog post :)

Of the leaders you interacted with, which leader stood out to you? Why?

The leader that stood out to me was Caesar. I can't remember who acted him, but the guy who did must've been a history major or something because he knew a lot of facts. What I liked about Caesar's form of leadership was that he cared about the men he led into battle and established trust between them and himself. Also I think he was really good at leading with vision, and he was definitely good at seeing qualities in others and then giving them recognition and positions where they could lead and find fulfillment in helping him to a greater extent as well.

What did you learn about motivating others from researching your leader?

I was Mitt Romney, and as a business man he was very good at creating and organizing teams of people to accomplish things. He is a good inspirer, but also knows how to appropriately use money as a reward/motivator. Besides those unique qualities, he is just a guy who has done a lot of caring in his life and I think the greatest leaders/motivators are those who value and genuinely care about others.

What new element of motivating others will you apply in your leadership role? How?

Currently, the team I am leading is experiencing a lull in motivation, so this is ironically timely. I've even felt a loss of motivation because one of the projects that we invested a lot of time into wasn't as successful as we had hoped, and that took a lot out of us. Because that didn't go so well, we are actually looking for new options and haven't yet decided on anything. At the same time we are becoming a little stressed because of our impending deadline. Anyways, we just need to buckle down and accomplish our team goal.

After learning about how to motivate in this class as well as in my business classes, we need to just set a goal that we can accomplish in the next two weeks, along with a reward if we reach it. I will sit down with the team, we will talk about our past project, recognize people for working extra hard and also try to learn what we did wrong, but then we'll move on and I'll explain our goals and exactly what we will do to do to hit them. Then to get them excited about it we'll plan a pizza party or something if we make it. Then we're just going to go for it. I think this deadline for our reward will work well, because without it we will probably just let time pass without accomplishing anything. So yeah, I'll make it work :)

Decision Making

A cool decision making principle that was new to me was that because we never make choices outside of our alternatives, we should increase our alternatives by shooting high and broadening horizons. Although it seems obvious, I think a lot of the time close mindedness and a lack of creativity limits my available options and therefore realized outcomes. Having realized/learned this, the next time a weighty decisions arises I am going to make sure to take a couple steps back and think big so I can reduce my self-imposed limitations and find better courses of action.

The biggest problem I have as far as decision making goes involves me properly weighing costs and benefits when I have limited information. Usually when these situations occur, I pick whatever is most familiar, comfortable or easy, when perhaps I should choose some safe "risks" more often. For instance, one of the choices I will be deciding on for this weekend is wether to go to the campus dance, or instead go country dancing with my sister. I know how campus dances are, and they're fun, but I've never gone country dancing, I don't know much about it, and I don't want to miss out on a guaranteed fun dance.

I'll see what I decide, but the fact that something so inconsequential is one of my hard decisions just brought to my attention that for the most part I have already made most of my decisions as far as school and scheduling goes. Like we talked about in lab, I have already chosen to attend every class and get all homework assignments done, so I have reduced the amount of choices I would otherwise have to make on a day to day basis. I guess if it weren't for new decisions--even like which dance to go to--then life would be pretty boring and uneventful. But to answer the question (how I will combat my problem), a good criterion that I've picked up from my leadership book is to always consider your options against your priorities. Thus for my dance situation, since family is one of my lifelong priorities and because it is hard to get enough family time in here at college, I will go to the dance with my sister.

The hierarchy of decision making involvement was quite eye opening to me, and for my leadership role I am definitely going to start thinking of the different choices that need to be made in that light. Lately I have noticed that I've been seeking approval from everyone on the team for just about everything, but by having the hierarchy in mind and by considering the effect that my decisions will have on my teammates, I think I can be more efficient and effective in decision making, and thus a better leader for them.

My Mission Statement and how I Measure My Success

Real success for me is success with self. It’s not having things, but in having mastery--attaining victory within. Success for me is found in doing the things God would have me do and in becoming the person He knows and wants me to become.

So that's it, it's pretty broad, but to me it means that I can do absolutely anything I feel I should with the time I have been given. Some of the specific things I wanted to do in life is to be a teacher/mentor for others, I want to raise a wonderful family, I want to start and run many, many businesses, and eventually I feel like doing some public service something like that.

Time Management is so important as a leader because they must first be able to take care of themselves and must also be able to accomplish and coordinate lots of different things for others too. I know that in my leadership role (business team), if I hadn't been ahead in my classes I would not have been able to drop everything and go and work on our business. So time management really is important, and I wholly agree with trying spend the most time in quadrant one where you are doing what is important but not urgent (because you have planned ahead and have not allowed important things to become urgent).

To better manage my time I am going to make a chart with a list of the Important things that I need to do, and I will break those down into Urgent and Not Urgent categories so I can always be get done what I must and also plan ahead for the future. Another thing I want to do is to better track the time I spending studying and socializing, because as important as studying is, socializing and taking time for people is pretty important too.