Recently at my office, we had to do a fair amount of conflict resolution with regards to the schedule for a new single person IT Help Desk position. The issue we ran into involved getting adequate manning for trained personnel in order to cover vacation time, and also to rotate out individuals that had been working the position for several months already. The biggest challenge in scheduling, besides the fact that our local rules specially call for using highly experienced individuals, is the fact we're basically pulling a person away from their normal job and duty section for several months, and we're required to provide 24/7 coverage. The root problem, though, was the fact we could not get volunteers to fill slots, nor were any of the other duty sections willing to give up personnel. There was also a problem in which we didn't have one person to call the shots for all of the duty sections, but had multiple senior leaders with multiple opinions.
My role was being the officer in charge of the new position, and ultimately, I had to bring the issues to my management's attention in order to get everyone talking, and create a unified picture of the "health" of our position and what was needed to ensure we had coverage without relying too much on a small group of individuals. In a sense, I was a mediator between the leadership that wanted to have the position, and the people that actually had to man it.
The other participants were the individuals sitting at the new position, the new "backshop" created to support it, the leadership of the other duty sections from which we obtained personnel, and the leadership of our overall office that had to balance the needs of all the duty sections and make sure we were getting our work accomplished.
After an extended period of going back and forth between different sections seeking bodies and meeting resistance, myself and my backshop had to go up our chain of command to make as clear as possible for them what was happening and that we needed them to lay down some firmer orders to meet the needs of a position that they themselves created. Eventually, they spelled out who would sit in the position, and they've rewritten our local rules to more clearly state how we would go about training, who would provide manning, who would control the overall schedule, and how we were to go about requesting time off in order to have adequate time to make adjustments.
To this day we're still working on the overall execution of the new guidance, and still joke about the constant state of change, but we've since been satisfied that leadership is aware of the potential for problems and is continuing to work with us. Personally, I think we can still improve in terms of creating a single point of authority for any changes ("The Buck Stops Here"), and I think we can get improvement from all parties involved on matters of communicating our concerns, suggesting alternatives, actively listening, and ultimately creating mutually agreeable solutions.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Sunday, March 25, 2012
A520.1.6.RB_SienkiewiczRaymond
So I'm now finding myself about a week deep into the course and have read through a fair share of posts involving thoughts on Self-Awareness, and I've also taken the post learning assessment. Although I haven't had any grand epiphanies or otherwise, I do now find myself mulling more on the topic of how well I know myself and how it relates to my leadership. Indeed, after having been on hiatus from that line of thought for the better part of a year, now coming back into a leadership role at my job, coming back to this is something of a sobering experience.
I didn't see a very broad range of change in my assessment. Certainly, I feel like I still hold the same general values and still think roughly the same about my personality. But what sticks out is I scored myself a little lower on how well I grasp the idea of emotional maturity, and my understanding of how I cope with ambiguity. I'm also taking interest that although I scored as a Creative cognitive style, in some ways my habits are more in line with a Knowing style, namely I do like creative tasks and keeping busy, but I really like having very set procedures and rules.
Having read the material, although I still acknowledge I'm more grown up in comparison to when I first entered college, now I feel like I've still got a little ways to go in really knowing myself. This line of thought makes me think back to a New York Times article I read several years ago on this newer idea of young people in their early to mid 20's experiencing "Odyssey Years", where although they may legally be independent, they're experiencing more of an extended adolescence, wondering what to do with their lives and how. Perhaps this is just part of my experience of that idea, but I'd certainly like to give some focus to improving my emotional intelligence, and get a fix on how people cope with ambiguity so that I may improve my ability to lead, and maybe one day know how to lead myself.
I digress though...the bottom line is that I will likely begin to develop another lens in which to observe the workings of my organizations and how they might better themselves (although hopefully, I won't be trying to solve every problem with self awareness!)
I didn't see a very broad range of change in my assessment. Certainly, I feel like I still hold the same general values and still think roughly the same about my personality. But what sticks out is I scored myself a little lower on how well I grasp the idea of emotional maturity, and my understanding of how I cope with ambiguity. I'm also taking interest that although I scored as a Creative cognitive style, in some ways my habits are more in line with a Knowing style, namely I do like creative tasks and keeping busy, but I really like having very set procedures and rules.
Having read the material, although I still acknowledge I'm more grown up in comparison to when I first entered college, now I feel like I've still got a little ways to go in really knowing myself. This line of thought makes me think back to a New York Times article I read several years ago on this newer idea of young people in their early to mid 20's experiencing "Odyssey Years", where although they may legally be independent, they're experiencing more of an extended adolescence, wondering what to do with their lives and how. Perhaps this is just part of my experience of that idea, but I'd certainly like to give some focus to improving my emotional intelligence, and get a fix on how people cope with ambiguity so that I may improve my ability to lead, and maybe one day know how to lead myself.
I digress though...the bottom line is that I will likely begin to develop another lens in which to observe the workings of my organizations and how they might better themselves (although hopefully, I won't be trying to solve every problem with self awareness!)
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
A520.1.2RB_SienkiewiczRaymond
As I suppose could be expected of any good course designed to improve our management skills, I was faced with establishing a baseline...in this case, running through what I must admit is one of the most comprehensive leadership and personality surveys I've taken since college and ROTC.
The results were an interesting mix from my point of view. If you were to sum me up as a person based upon my results, I could be described as a having a creative style and high self awareness, but also possessing less than stellar emotional intelligence and a distaste for ambiguity.
A lot of this rang fairly true for me. In my last few years of feedback during ROTC and active duty Air Force service, I usually assessed myself as preferring a lot of guidance and having a high awareness of how my own mind "ticks". My creativity was apparent to myself and many people, as I had somewhat of a reputation as a solid writer and, at least in a structured setting, a strong public speaker. I noted that I had a very middling self assessment score, and that I ranked a little low in the emotional intelligence survey. I do have to admit, I'm not exactly a social butterfly, and in most circumstances I'm the quiet member of the group. Even now, although my profession demands a certain level of networking and sociability, I can get by but I don't necessarily enjoy it.
Having said that, some results were in line with what I expected. I seemed to gravitate most closely to a creative cognitive style and landed in the top percentile on self awareness. I also had a top quartile score in the tolerance for ambiguity scale, which matches up to my tendency to seek a lot of direction and guidance with everything I do. Another thing I wasn't especially surprised with was my relatively dead center score on the last self assessment survey, somewhat indicative of the fact I can be my own harshest critic at the time, and I don't necessarily give myself a lot of credit.
I was a little surprised with my relatively low score on the emotional intelligence survey. I would've expected a more mid-land result, although given the most passive responses I selected for some of the scenarios, I suppose this isn't such a huge surprise. I did have my interest piqued by the survey on defining issues and how the responses were divided into stages of moral development. I can't necessarily draw too much from that information, but I very well might look up the scoring manual in the future.
Knowing all this information, I'll keep this on hand as a baseline for when I started the course, and also as an early benchmark in my development as an officer. There's certainly points I'd like to work on (such as my emotion intelligence and tolerance for ambiguity), and having some measurable points to keep in mind for conscious improvement is definitely helpful. I'm also reminded that I don't seem to have had a lot of development in my leadership within the last couple of years, and having this spelled out a little more statistically rather than just by gut feeling might be just the extra push I need.
The results were an interesting mix from my point of view. If you were to sum me up as a person based upon my results, I could be described as a having a creative style and high self awareness, but also possessing less than stellar emotional intelligence and a distaste for ambiguity.
A lot of this rang fairly true for me. In my last few years of feedback during ROTC and active duty Air Force service, I usually assessed myself as preferring a lot of guidance and having a high awareness of how my own mind "ticks". My creativity was apparent to myself and many people, as I had somewhat of a reputation as a solid writer and, at least in a structured setting, a strong public speaker. I noted that I had a very middling self assessment score, and that I ranked a little low in the emotional intelligence survey. I do have to admit, I'm not exactly a social butterfly, and in most circumstances I'm the quiet member of the group. Even now, although my profession demands a certain level of networking and sociability, I can get by but I don't necessarily enjoy it.
Having said that, some results were in line with what I expected. I seemed to gravitate most closely to a creative cognitive style and landed in the top percentile on self awareness. I also had a top quartile score in the tolerance for ambiguity scale, which matches up to my tendency to seek a lot of direction and guidance with everything I do. Another thing I wasn't especially surprised with was my relatively dead center score on the last self assessment survey, somewhat indicative of the fact I can be my own harshest critic at the time, and I don't necessarily give myself a lot of credit.
I was a little surprised with my relatively low score on the emotional intelligence survey. I would've expected a more mid-land result, although given the most passive responses I selected for some of the scenarios, I suppose this isn't such a huge surprise. I did have my interest piqued by the survey on defining issues and how the responses were divided into stages of moral development. I can't necessarily draw too much from that information, but I very well might look up the scoring manual in the future.
Knowing all this information, I'll keep this on hand as a baseline for when I started the course, and also as an early benchmark in my development as an officer. There's certainly points I'd like to work on (such as my emotion intelligence and tolerance for ambiguity), and having some measurable points to keep in mind for conscious improvement is definitely helpful. I'm also reminded that I don't seem to have had a lot of development in my leadership within the last couple of years, and having this spelled out a little more statistically rather than just by gut feeling might be just the extra push I need.
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