A511.7.3.RB - Inner Work for Authentic Leadership

After viewing the brief video of Bill George (2012), I had these thoughts:

From a leadership standpoint, the most instructional experience for me was my first time supervising a shop.  It was in Iraq, about 10 years ago.  The shops previous supervisors had been reassigned or been injured.  Personally, I was dealing with the birth of my son back home and an overbearing civilian supervisor that was making my life exceedingly difficult.  All of this, combined with my inexperience, resulted in my handling the situation very poorly.  I took a very aggressive tact and spent more time enforcing rules and writing counseling papers.  I didn't have the knowledge or maturity to stop and consider that it might be my own actions and behaviors that were causing my airmen to misbehave and become unproductive.

Enter our flight superintendent (a department manager, if you will).  Rather than come down on me with the same aggressive tact I had taken, he took me aside and provided some very frank and honest feedback.  I didn't have the time or place to reflect, given the emergent and hostile nature of our location.  But, he mentored me, without strict direction of exactly what I should do.  I was given the time and space necessary to learn and grow.  In the end, I salvaged the relationship with my team and got productivity back on track.  When I returned back to my home station, I sought new opportunities that would allow me to learn to be a better supervisor and leader.

These days, I take more time to consider my decisions on how to handle conflicts or when rules are broken.  Learning to pick my battles, how to keep my cool, and choose my words more carefully were all important lessons that I learned from my first experience.  I continue to seek new opportunities to learn and grow as a leader.  Which is why I've grown frustrated in my current position that isolates me from formal leadership and focuses more on resource management and analysis.

Reference

George, B. (2012).  Harvard's Bill George: Inner work for authentic leadership. [Video file].  Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=86&v=SmPu2LQ84ts