More Accidental Leadership

Since my last post on this blog, I've encountered more accidental leadership. For the past four fiscal years, I've served as Chapter Secretary and have been re-elected for the next fiscal year. I've served as webmaster and chair of the Electronic Communications Committee for the past eight years. These are intentional, not accidental. However, during this past fiscal year, I've taken on the Programs Committee and agreed to co-chair a committee for our chapter to host the 2014 National Convention and the 2016 Region Conference. I'm also completing my first year as chair of the Institute Awards Committee and have been selected to chair that committee again the next year.
 

At our firm, I've been co-leader of a studio team for the past year. Myself and another senior associate at the firm manage a team of 10 architects, their work load, and various other aspects of the firm. We coordinate schedules and work load with the leaders of the three other architectural teams, our interiors team and our urban planning/landscape architecture team. For the past year and a half, I've also been preparing bi-monthly studio utilization reports for the partners. What does all of this mean? I spend significant amounts of time managing people. I tell my children this is not what I studied in college!

 

This advancement into leadership has lead me to a couple of thoughts and some change in behavior. I no longer read fiction. I wasn't a particularly tenacious reader to begin with, but I used to have one or two novels on hand to read. Now, I'm reading more non-fiction: business and management books mostly but I'm trying to get through Freakonomics right now and I've enjoyed several of Malcolm Gladwell's books, especially Outliers. I find the business books and these non-fiction books cause me to think about situations differently and look at conditions and conflicts differently. For example, one of the lessons of Freakonomics is that data does not always tell the most accurate story. There are emotions, culture and ethics that play into nearly all situations. The utilization reports, for example, are only as good as the data inputted into the individual time sheets and collectively do not tell the whole story of an individual or a team's experiences during a select time period.

 

The other thought that I have had that has led to a change in behavior is how people conduct their business. For much of my career, I've tried to work with consultants who tend to treat their clients and the projects similarly to how I treat them. Sometimes that is difficult, but when you find a team that can gel and reach good results, I like to keep them together for multiple projects. I'm learning people within a firm can be the same way but not always. For several years now, I have worked closely with the same partner in our firm. He is about 7 or 8 years older than I but we come from similar backgrounds and have similar work histories. I've made a few mistakes across those years and I've watched how he handles those situations and how he addresses them to me. He and I clearly conduct our business in similar ways, so we get along well with few conflicts.

 

There are others in our firm who are just as qualified as I, but he looks to me first because, I presume, he's more comfortable with my skills and how I conduct business. It is clear that not everyone conducts their business the same way he does or the same way I do. The more I work closely with other team members and ultimately manage them, I've come to some conclusions on that point. At first, it was difficult to delegate work to others and then watch them do it differently from how I would do it. As long as the end result is the same, who cares right? Wrong. I have struggled, mightily at times, with this simple delegation of work. Email doesn't help. It is quick and easy, but it rarely contains the whole story or can completely contain my agenda for the day or for a particular issue on a project. I wonder, though, how many chapter leaders fall into this trap?

 

There have been recent discussions on the CSI Leaders Group on LinkedIn about the end of term blues, the problems with changing culture in chapters and other items that relate to interpersonal communications. It seems to me that leadership is in large part related to communication and expectation. My mother likes to say, "You get what you inspect, not what you expect." That's always implied to me a larger level of involvement that some chapter leaders can provide. While chapter president, I attended all of the Programs Committee meetings because of the critical importance programs play in the member experience at our chapter. However, I neglected the hard work of the House Committee which also affects the member experience.

 

Leadership, no matter at what level or in what organization, is a struggle. I would bet few of us in the A/E/C industry studied management in college. Fewer still are the natural leader types that you see occasionally. Leadership takes discipline, consistency, adaptability and open communication. It takes listening, thought and a willingness to be told you are wrong. If you are moving into a level of higher leadership in your job, I strongly recommend that you join CSI and become a leader in your home chapter. It is an outstanding place to hone your leadership skills, receive mentoring from others and have a great time doing it.