Personal Best Leadership Project Paper - Twyman
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Personal Best Leadership Project Paper Ashley V Twyman December 16, 2009
Presented in partial fulfillment of Management Project MGMT 595 Dr. Jeni McRay
Personal Best Leadership Project Paper - Twyman
Introduction In this paper I will be discussing the leadership project I engaged in as partial fulfillment for my Management Project course 595. In this class we were challenge to find and implement a project which would put our Management and Leadership education to the test. In this paper I will describe the project I chose to lead and discuss Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership in relation to my project. Description of Project and Organization The first thing that must be understood about my project is that I currently am employed at a bank in a very small rural town. The Chamber of Commerce for my town has mandated that this year, for the very first year, all downtown business are to decorate their store front windows to support the Chamber’s Christmas theme of “Candy Cane Wishes”. The local retail businesses usually incorporate the Chamber’s theme each year into store promotions and discounts for customers. The change this year is that ALL businesses (retail or otherwise) are to decorate their windows to encourage the theme throughout town. At most business, this may mean a storefront display or a glass door. However, at KANZA Bank, decorating the storefront windows is a huge undertaking. This means decorating over 60 feet of windows that are each between 8 to 12 feet tall. Yes, leading and organizing this project proved to be quite an undertaking. Oh yes, and it is also a competition! I headed a small committee of co-workers to brainstorm ideas and ways to implement this project. Below is a list of immediate team members and some positives they brought to the project:
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Personal Best Leadership Project Paper - Twyman
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Ashley Twyman (myself) – CSR/teller – creative, loves to get people involved, likes to be organized and good at leading others
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Mary Lear – VP – loves arts and crafts project, very committed to her community and loves holiday and decorating, also good at coming up with crafty and inventive ideas while holding true to tradition
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Vicki Knapic – Retail Manager – creative, a good leader, member of the Chamber of Commerce
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Jody Gerdes – CSR – loves holidays, good at decorating, has an artistic eye
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Jessica Ball – teller – loves to get involved and is always willing to please, a very hard worker, willing to put in the extra time and effort something needs to be great
This project is important to me because I like to see my organization succeed. This project is important to my organization because right now the town is in the process of having one local banking institution fail and another take over, which has made some of the local community members a little uneasy about their banking situation. We are also getting a new branch of another fairly local bank that is in the process of being built and will soon be open for business. We don’t want to lose business and one way we can avoid that is to prove our community that we want to be involved in it and that we really care. Modeling the Way I knew from the beginning that the best way for me to model the way during this project was to be very openly excited about what was going on. I would talk about how great the bank was going to look. When I had customers at my desk I would tell them about the project that we were all working on and share with them how hard everyone was working. The community seemed to really embrace the fact that all the participants were hand crating large ornaments to
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Personal Best Leadership Project Paper - Twyman
be placed in our street facing windows for everyone to enjoy. The more I talked about it, the more the girls worked hard on their projects. I made sure that when the ornaments were being worked on that I would peak in and see how things were going. I crafted my ornament to be placed in the window first, as an example for what people could do. I was in charge of ordering and picking up all the supplies that were needed and I made sure to do this first thing. Inspiring a Shared Vision In order to inspire a shared vision, you must first create a shared vision. It is important when heading a project that requires other member’s complete participation that you can create this shared vision. If you are unable to inspire a shared vision, it is less likely that everyone will participate at their full potential. In my first meeting with my committee members I asked everyone why they thought we should be participating in this project and why it would be important to us. Between the various answers I informed the group that this project meant a lot more than its surface meaning. I was able to communicate to the group that this project could be just as important to our business and our company as to us personal. It may be something fun to participate in, but it can also be a way to reach out to our community to show them how dedicated our entire company is to it. Challenging the Process Because this was a new project for us, it definitely challenged the process of our regular routine decorating. We usually trim a tree and hang garland in our lobby, but this project added another, more difficult aspect. We had never attempted to decorate all our street facing windows before and really had to brainstorm as a group to come up with ways to make this project work and look good. For example, at one point, we realized the ornaments were too heavy to be held with tape to the windows and my team and I had to come up with another way to make the
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Personal Best Leadership Project Paper - Twyman
presentation work. With the group’s compiled ideas, we were able to figure out a way to string them from the curtain rods near the ceiling. It was a challenge for some people to come up with their own ideas, or be creative. When you work at a bank you are not always challenged to be creative, you are encouraged to learn the rules. Therefore, some employees did find it hard to challenge their everyday process and tap into their creative sides. I encouraged them to take lessons from other places. I even Google imaged Christmas Ornaments and printed out some ideas they could start with. This really helped but the best ideas came from group collaboration. One member would want to know what she could make buttons out of and three other people would give her ideas. Enabling Others to Act It was important in this project to enable others to act because the entire project was dependent upon other people acting! Sometimes it felt as though this project was going to drag on forever, because when we were getting ready to hang ornaments three people were not done yet! It really took some encouraging and motivating to get them working. In talking with these employees I found that the biggest constraint was lack of creativity and lack of self-confidence! I think some members of our team thought they would be unable to create something of equal value compared to the other team member’s ornaments. In the case of this project, I found it was essential to encourage the heart in order to enable others to act, which is discussed next. Encouraging the Heart In my opinion, one of the most important aspects of Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership is Encouraging the Heart. Working on any sort of project, be it short term or long term requires the work of a masterful encourager. One key issue that plays into the encouraging the heart practice, is knowing your team and subordinate members. What makes
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Personal Best Leadership Project Paper - Twyman
each tick and what motivates or distracts each person from reaching the proposed goal? Lucky, I was in a situation where I already knew my immediate team members and other contributors in this way. In order to do any of the other practices of Exemplary Leadership, you must know how and when encouragement of the heart must take place. During this project I encouraged the heart of the contributors by finding different ways to verbally reward them, but let’s face it, you can only say “That looks great!” or “You’re doing a good job” in so many ways. So many times I heard the excuse that a team member was just not creative enough to do something. I would stay very positive and reassure them that everyone has a creative side; we just needed to find it. At this point I would take the time to listen to the ideas they had for their ornament and help them refine them by asking them questions about the implementation of their idea that would eventually cause them to hone their idea into one solid project. A few participants were concerned that their ornament wouldn’t be a good as another member’s and that they would ruin the project for everyone. In these cases, I would remind them that we aren’t participating in this project to necessarily win (sure it would be a good perk) but that we wanted to participate in this project for other reasons but most importantly that it was a group effort that everyone was putting time and effort into. If someone doesn’t want to do something to benefit themselves, they most certainly care about what other people think of them and don’t usually want to let the group down with their actions. The best encouragement will come if we are named one of the top three entries in the window decorating by the chamber. However, if we are not one of the winners, maybe this will serve as encouragement for next year!
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Personal Best Leadership Project Paper - Twyman
Tying it All Together - Lessons Learned It’s amazing how a leadership project so simple can tune you into the members of your team. I definitely learned a lot about people’s personalities and their own views of personal inabilities or inadequate feelings. I learned that I love leading, but I also need to work on positive communication. This is one of the most challenging areas for me because I get frustrated so easily with incompetence. I don’t understand people who say “I don’t know what to do” or “I can’t do this – I’m not creative enough”. I have also learned that I love to lead. I love to figure out different ways to lead each individual because each person you lead needs something different from you. I enjoy being a recognized leader and rewarded for hard work. I am an ambitious leader and if there is a problem I love to figure out ways of fixing it or doing a process or procedure in a better way. Future Learning Opportunities The foundations that we have built during this project can be used as a spring board next year. Each year I expect this project to get better and better. The first year, the learning year, is always the hardest. Future leaders of this project, be it myself or someone new, will have, at the very least, a good starting point. Hopefully this will open doors for future learning opportunities within my current organization because it will show management that I am able to lead a group and accomplish the goals that are set before me. I plan to volunteer for more of these opportunities as they arise. Conclusion The project turned out very well, better than I would have hoped. This is a true sign that an effective leader can take a new idea and implement something wonderful. I hope this project is built upon each year and that it becomes better and better each time. I also learned that leading
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Personal Best Leadership Project Paper - Twyman
is fun, but also so much hard work. You have to be tuned into each member of your team, their desires, wishes, feelings, ect., in order for an entire project to be completed. Most of the leading wasn’t something technical that I could show them or do for them; it was encouraging them and helping them find their strengths when they seemed to believe they had none. Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership workbook really helped expand my project oriented thinking and helped me apply the information in the text to the current project at hand.
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