Creativity is essential in leadership. I totally agree with the statement that “Leaders must be creative to spark innovation and inspire those they lead”. Obviously innovation is simply creativity, and in order to inspire those they lead, it is essential for a leader to get creative and not make things boring or the same. A leader will face a myriad of diverse challenges every day, and the more creative they are, the easier it will be to overcome those challenges. When a leader gets creative, they also inspire their team to get creative. Personally, I have not yet experienced a situation where creativity would have been detrimental. Creativity is also like a muscle, it increases with practice, but you must use it or lose it. By forcing their team to get creative and ideate, a leader will not only make the team more creative in the future, but set the team members up for success in later projects with other people. Creativity comes in many forms, and it is not just for the workplace. The times when I feel most creative are when I am having fun with my hobbies. For example, I love to play trombone, and in jazz band you can really get creative with every single note. The trombone especially has a lot of freedom because it is not reliant on buttons, and as such I can bend notes and go a lot farther with similar techniques than you can on any other instrument. When most people think of creativity in jazz, they think of a solo, where a player can play whatever notes they want and try to make it sound good. However, most of my creativity goes into the little details between notes. The solos are just supports for the main chorus in most jazz charts, so I try to give more love to the chorus than anyone else. Focusing on a less obvious part of the song also gives me more room to do what hasn’t been done. Another area that I like to get creative in is animal keeping. As I type this, I sit next to a 10 gallon reef tank that resides on my dresser. It took a lot of work to get it up and running. A reef tank for me presents a very big challenge. It is one of the hardest things to keep in terms of animals, but I have learned that there is still a lot of room to be creative. For example, each coral in the tank needs a certain amount of light and flow. Too much light causes the coral to bleach, while too little will cause it to die. Too much flow might rip the coral from the rocks, while too little allows detritus to collect on the polyps, slowly poisoning it. Despite these challenges, I have constructed the rockwork, called an aquascape, and placed the water pump in such a way that each coral can get the light and flow it needs while still looking good. Reef tanks also require a very delicate balance of chemistry. Because the ocean is huge, it is extremely difficult to change the concentration of anything by even measures of parts per trillion. For fish and coral to survive, this stability must be replicated in a tank that is infinitesimal compared to the environment it simulates. Even still, there are many ways to go about keeping this chemistry, from calcium reactors to simply changing the water every week. Creativity can come from anywhere, but nonetheless it must be present wherever an effective leader goes.
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It is not often that we listen or are listened to deeply. Listening is a skill that is easy to learn, but nearly impossible to master. With so much going on in the world today, it is sometimes hard to give someone or something your complete attention. Even when I do my favorite hobbies, thoughts about the outside world or future deadlines lurk in the back of my mind. If we can’t even focus on the things we love doing, how can most people be expected to give all of their attention to a project that they probably don’t want to be doing? It is therefore a very rare moment when one feels completely heard, especially by a large group of people. The last time that I felt truly heard was last year, during marching band season. It was my second year as a section leader, and I was also a senior, meaning that I had the most authority in the section. However, wielding authority never correlates to people listening to you, especially the trombone section that I was leading. They had a history of defying the band directors for fun, as no trombone had any respect for the staff. Despite their years of experience over us, the band staff had failed to make any sort of connection with the trombones, instead resorting to their authority to force us into following what they wanted us to do. We were of course obligated to follow their orders, and begrudgingly obeyed, but we obviously weren’t happy about it. As a section leader I had very little actual authority, but the trombones usually followed what I said to do, even if it conflicted with what the directors said. This is because they knew that I cared about them. In my four years of being a trombone I had never let them down or resorted to force and yelling to get my way. I felt heard when I led the trombones, and I listened intently to them when they spoke to me. There was a mutual bond and friendship that lead to a lot of trust in the section that I have not felt anywhere else. Listening is important in leadership. However, I think that the factors that lead to a group listening to their leader (and vice versa) are more important than the result. Listening is important, yes, but I believe that talking about listening or trying to teach it to a group will only result in fake listening. It has to be instinctual, natural even, for the group to listen to each other. They need to want to give their full attention, and not even the greatest motivational speaker can make someone want to listen to them without first forming a strong human connection. The connection and trust that leads to a group truly hearing each other is just as natural as deep listening itself, and likewise has to develop naturally. Fostering these values is hard, but it will lead to many more positive outcomes than just listening.
My interview with Josh Oarhe really opened my eyes to a lot of the things that the class of 2020 had in common in terms of quarantine experience. We were all very excited to hear in mid March that spring break would be extended, and that we would finally get a break from the stress of pre-prom and AP test season. Josh and I agreed that we were both very excited for the break because our school had set our spring break to two whole days. We were happy that the coronavirus, in retribution to the Elkhorn Public Schools Superintendent, had spoken for the people and forced him to give us the spring break that us hard working students deserved. Another thing I learned performing the interview was that asking open ended questions also forced me to be open minded myself. When I ask questions designed to make someone answer in a certain way, I am myself thinking of that same answer and not considering anything else in my head. I noticed during the interview that Josh was very appreciative of the freedom that college provides. He has strict parents that expect a lot from him as they are both doctors and he is a pre medical student. I think he was a little bit tired of them hovering over him as he was quarantined. Josh and I also shared the perspective of being quarantined for two weeks after just the first week of school. Going back to the environment that he was so glad to leave just a week before was hard on him. This is obviously not saying that Josh’s home life is bad but I can understand the feeling of wanting to be free from hovering parents and being able to detach yourself from family after 18 years together. The more open ended the question was, the more we both learned from it. It is important in this type of interview to consider your own answers to the questions that you ask, and to compare them to the answers that your end user gives. Not only can this give you an insight on how compatible you and your end user will be and how to modify your behavior to better suit them, but it will give you an insight into yourself. Most of the time when we ask questions we aren’t ready to answer them ourselves, and this can lead to a lot of overconfidence. In a debate it is especially important to know how you would answer your own questions, but in an empathy interview it can give you a much needed view of yourself. I think that this type of empathy interview would help me connect more with my nonprofit partner on a personal level. It is one thing to help a company or group and a completely different thing to help the people within that company or group. This is why empathy is so important with the end user, as it allows you to see that user’s specific needs, problems, and talents, rather than just seeing a faceless company logo. Design thinking encourages us to go to the roots of a problem to discover a solution. Only there can design thinkers find solutions that are more than shallow quick fixes. For example, in his TEDx talk, Doug Dietz poses a problem: children are scared to get MRIs, which require absolute stillness in order to work. The short term solution posed by the technicians was to sedate the children, which worked from the standpoint of a doctor but still left them scared of the MRI. Doug however, went directly to those experiencing the problem by talking to kindergarteners. With their help, he redesigned the MRI rooms to be much less threatening by using aromatherapy and painting. Speaking from experience, I can testify that MRIs are very scary for a child. In 5th grade I needed one because of a blood infection in my foot. This, luckily, only required a 45 minute MRI with no need to go head first into the machine. Even still, I was very nervous. What if I had metal on me that I didn’t know about? What if I still had metal in my foot from my injury? What if the machine was too loud? What if I couldn’t sit still long enough? I was always a very concerned and curious child, considering everything that could possibly go wrong so I could worry about it, but I’m sure a lot of children shared these concerns with me. For even younger children, the incessant droning of the big metal monster that was about to swallow them for 3 hours and 45 minutes is enough to induce tears. This is why it is important to be in the environment of and be empathetic with the end user of your product. Obviously, for Doug Dietz, it was impossible to become a child and go into an MRI, so he had to do the next best thing by going to the children that ultimately helped him design his new MRI rooms. Though Doug knew the MRI machine inside and out, as he had designed it himself, only the children could tell him why it was scary. This is an extreme example of why empathy is needed in design, as kindergarteners are probably (hopefully) not capable of designing and building an MRI machine, while Doug was, obviously, not a child with childlike fears. Ultimately, Doug’s situation was a reminder to me that a designer needs their clients to succeed. Doug’s initial MRI design didn’t work because he didn’t consult his users first. From Doug’s standpoint the MRI machine worked perfectly, but from a child’s perspective it was very scary and they didn’t feel that it helped them meet their goal of feeling better. When Doug consulted his users, they helped him to design something that worked perfectly for both of them. It wasn’t even a compromise, as it’s not like painting the MRI machine to look like a waterfall hurt its performance in any way. It was simply an improvement for both people when the designer consulted his clients. The book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni was very interesting to me. However, I wouldn’t call it inspiring, rather more of a sobering experience for a lot of new leaders that think that everything can be solved by just telling people what to do. They may know every dysfunction of a team by heart and how to fix it, but in the end people are stubborn and usually don’t respond the first time to someone trying to change their behavior. I think that The Five Dysfunctions of a Team illustrated this a lot better than most of the works or speeches on leadership that I’ve seen and heard. A lot of speakers that I’ve heard especially get really fired up and use a lot of big words, but it’s easy to tell that they’re detached from on-the-ground leadership because they never tell you how to deal with stubborn people. On the other end of leadership, as a follower you must recognize that it’s hard to change your own behavior the first few times around. Many a time as a leader I have given a speech or done something to change the group’s behavior that was met with a lot of enthusiasm, but a day or even hour later it was like I never gave the speech at all. On the other hand, I have received speeches that I forget about moments later, no matter how enthusiastic I was before. But why is this? Why do people, despite being fired up and knowing that their change in behavior will be positive, not change immediately? This is because changing team behavior, as with any behavior, involves breaking and forming habits. Habits take a while to break, 21 days to be exact. This follows about the length of time that Kathryn took to turn the team completely around in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, unsurprisingly. This is why patience is so important as a leader. I’ve seen an impatient leader who came as a motivational speaker to my school before. He just used yelling to get people to listen to him, and honestly, it was a little scary. He was constantly angry, and I was more inclined to do what he said for fear of being singled out in front of 300 other students. He told a story about offering a student a choice. He either gave the student $100 to leave the band, or the option to stay because he was caught on his phone. When the student took the $100 he replied with, “congratulations, you just proved to each of these band members that they’re only worth 50 cents to you (as there were 200 members”. This seemed like an inspirational “gotcha” moment for an undedicated student at the time, but looking back this was the wrong choice. Because of this speakers impatience and unwillingness to change the student’s behavior and make them actually interested in band rather than their phone over the course of a month or so, he instead shamed the student, took his anger out on the student, and alienated him from his peers by telling them that he only thought they were worth 50 cents. While the math checks out, can you really expect a 15 year old to choose $100 and getting to skip a rehearsal over some intangible good feeling that he probably didn’t even think about? Unlike this speaker, Kathryn didn’t overestimate her followers, and was only prepared to let them go when they wanted to go, rather than when she got angry or to prove a point to the other members of the team. Why? Because unlike a lot of new leaders, Kathryn had patience.
Empathy is a critical part of human interaction. Having empathy is a sign of a developed and mature mind. Very young children are actually incapable of empathy. It is impossible for their brain to comprehend seeing anything from another’s point, and they assume that everyone experiences everything exactly the way that they do. Most people move past this phase, however some mentally ill people like psychopaths have impaired empathy for the rest of their lives. Obviously having someone with psychopathic or egocentric tendencies for a leader is not ideal, because they will not be able to comprehend that others feel different from them. Therefore, that person will not be able to cater their leadership style and change it based on how others are feeling. This will create a dictatorial environment in which the leader is exalted above all of the workers below them. It seems like a stretch, but imagine this: the psychopathic leader starts out like any other good leader, but one day he doesn’t feel like doing a certain bit of work. He pawns it off to one of his workers, and goes about his day feeling much less stressed. Eventually he starts taking entire weeks off and giving his work to the team. Because an egocentrist assumes everyone feels the way that he does, he assumes that everyone is as happy as he is. Eventually all of his work is delegated out to his workers and he becomes just a boss, only present to delegate tasks and reprimand those who get behind. But in his mind, he’s a perfect leader who has made his team very happy. This scenario not only illustrates the dangers of egocentrism, but more importantly highlights the importance of empathy in a leader. It is extremely important to not only be aware of how empathetic you are being, but to exercise empathy whenever you can. Like any skill, empathy proficiency can be increased or decreased by practice or lack thereof. This week I have exercised my empathy by thanking someone outside my family. I decided to thank my music teacher. He has been with me since 5th grade teaching me trombone, save for the years I moved away to Oregon. He has been very patient with my changing schedule in college and willing to work on whatever I want to work on at the time. It is hard to thank people sometimes as it seems embarrassing at first. However, expressing gratitude is one of the most important things that we can do when trying to be empathetic. Especially for a leader, it is important to thank those that you lead because that will make those people feel like they are known and that their work is recognized. Being recognized is very important for humans, and thanking someone is the easiest way to make sure that they are recognized. Empathy is a very nebulous term, and it is as bright and the word psychopath is dark. But broken down into little things such as saying thanks and asking how someone feels, empathy is a very easy thing to understand.
In any group there will be conflict. When trying to get a project done as fast as possible, conflicts can really slow the whole thing down. What I usually do as a leader to keep momentum up is make the conflict into competition. If two groups have different ideas, let them work on them and see which idea ends up better. Groups in competition work fast because they will have high motivation. Obviously this competition will slow the group as a whole down a little bit, but this method avoids most of the reduction in momentum. If I am in a losing group, I always try to do my best for the winning idea, but it is hard to set ego aside completely. If the leader incorporates some of the good aspects of the losing group into the winning idea, it helps the losing group be more motivated. It will seem to them as though they did not completely lose. When creating anything to solve a problem, it is very important to consider the person or community that has the problem. What works for some may not work for others, and it is very difficult to create a good solution if you know nothing about your target audience. One needs empathy if they are to create good solutions. Empathy for the end user includes knowing how culture, location, resources, training, and state of mind will affect how your product is used, and how those things will affect the outcome of your product. The best way to increase empathy, as shown in Extreme by Design, is to actually go and visit the users of your product. Immerse yourself in the culture, and actually talk to the people who need your help. This way, you can tailor your solution specifically to them. This can lead to big leaps in the design process. For example, in Extreme by Design, some students assigned to fix a water problem for a village discovered that there was no water problem at all. While it seemed that the villagers had to walk long distances from a spring to their village for water, this water was only for religious purposes. The villagers had a pump for normal drinking water. Taking the time to visit the village, in this case, saved a lot of time and awkwardness for the students. Imagine if they hadn’t visited the village. They would have spent months designing and constructing a pump and water purification system. When it came time to present it to the village, the students would have learned that not only would the pump not reach the water, but the villagers didn’t even need the pump in the first place! Clients also feel a lot more connected to the product and the team behind it when the team takes the time to visit. This is because empathy goes both ways. Meeting the end user lets the designers tailor to them, and the end user meeting the designer makes them more connected to the product and more confident in it. Another important aspect of designing is starting fresh. Most assumptions are wrong most of the time. If a group starts with a lot of assumptions, they are already starting out with a flawed design.
Leadership is not always so obvious. When most of us hear the word leader, our mind conjures up images of a president, manager, king, or CEO. However, leadership can be much more simple and under the radar than most of us think. For example, experienced musicians lead their peers in music so that the whole band sounds better, such as in the documentary It Might Get Loud. The musicians display leadership in the form of trust in their peers that they will stay in time and in tune without needing to listen to them. While the audience might not notice it, this almost always happens within each section of a band or orchestra. The principal player or lead player sets the mood, tone, and or inflection for the rest of the section. In a jazz band, this phenomenon is especially apparent because the lead players all sit in the center, with the most important member (lead trumpet) sitting in the middle of the back section. In this manner, they lead the entire band. For example, the Bari sax listens to the lead alto sax, who listens to the lead trombone, who listens to the lead trumpet. Jazz bands are the perfect metaphor for leadership in any capacity. If the leader is off beat, so will the whole band. If basic maintenance is not done (percussion), then nothing can get done. Even if the lowest ranking player isn’t playing exactly how the lead trumpet wants them to, the whole band will sound off. Most importantly, if the lead trumpet doesn’t inspire the rest of the band with their playing, the band will not play with any passion. Without passion, leadership and the group as a whole is dead in the water. Luckily for the group depicted in It Might Get Loud, they had plenty of passion to go around. But why does anyone have passion for anything? The ultimate goal of most human works is to matter to somebody and receive praise or attention from them, whether it be classmates, parents, or even God. In the end, humans are social creatures that seek praise from their peers. To matter is to make a difference in this world, to be of importance. Mattering is being impactful. Like it or not, most people evaluate their worth based on the impact that they have made on the world and people around them. The artists in It Might Get Loud are all well respected musicians, and they most definitely mattered to their fans all around the world. But does anyone really matter to themselves? What does mattering to yourself even look like? I think this question is hard to answer because it’s impossible to matter to yourself or not matter to yourself. Mattering is a modifier of the value that a person has, and ultimately we hold the same value in our own lives. It takes a very strong bond for someone to even consider laying down their life, whether it be for another or for a cause. The concept of “Mattering” only applies when one factors other people’s opinions into the equation. Most people know this, and they will try and say that you shouldn’t try and matter to those around you. While having self care and not being too focused on what others think of you is obviously a good thing, denying that other’s opinions mean anything is insane. Winning the approval of others is at the very core of human nature, and trying to forgo that is far more unhealthy than letting other people’s opinions affect you. The culture that we as a society have towards self love and self care is usually harmful if taken far enough. That culture would like to see millions of antisocial, shut in, undisciplined, and ultimately unleadable teens that don’t see anything wrong with their situation. Why? Because without the standard of our peers, there is no reason to improve ourselves. Mattering is exceeding the standard that society sets out for us and impacting others in a positive way. Don’t get me wrong, the standard that society sets out is more than flawed, but how a person matters is nonetheless in the hands of society, not that individual. For example, take a musician who has worked extremely hard throughout his life, but his career has gotten nowhere. Only a few people listen to his song, and he regularly plays at an underground club whose attendees aren’t there to listen to music. Now contrast that to a star musician who didn’t really work that hard, she just got lucky with her first song and she blew up after that. At the end of their lives, who mattered more? The unfortunate truth is that while the first musician probably mattered a lot to a few select people, the latter musician had a bigger impact on the world as a whole. She simply mattered more to society. In my own life, I have been lucky enough to matter to a few people. This was simply a result of my socioeconomic status and the things I chose to do. In the future I hope to be an infectious disease specialist. Positions like those matter as a matter of necessity. I am concerned about being a good doctor so that I can matter more. If there were no people around me, no God to watch my every move, what reason would I have, or what reason anyone would have, to do anything but the bare minimum? I’m not saying I would only work hard to please others, not at all. I honestly could probably stand to care more about what society thinks of me. But our psychological reward ultimately comes from society. Mattering is an odd way that we humans value ourselves. We all want to matter to society, but at the same time reject that society and its values, and somehow this doesn’t seem to contradict. Does it even matter?
A good leader is important for every group to have. Without a leader, groups lack inspiration, direction, and purpose. For me, a leader is somebody who provides all those things to the group, and allows each member of the group to reach their full potential. A leader provides direction without stifling. There is also a big distinction between a leader and a boss as well. A boss does not participate in the work, but rather only serves to delegate the work to the lower member of their group. In a leader’s group, there are no lower members, and the leader not only does their fair share of the work, but serves the other members of their group in order to make sure that they have all that they need in order to complete whatever task is at hand. In my personal experience as a leader, it is very hard to completely direct the will of a group, especially as the groups get larger and tighter knit. It worked best for me to make compromises between my goals and what the group feels like doing at the moment. In the best possible scenario these would align, but this rarely ever happens. The next best thing that a leader can hope for is slipping the goal in the cracks of the group’s preferred actions. Everyone works best when they are doing what they already wanted to do. Changing a group’s course is the same as changing the course of a bowling ball. It’s not hard to do, but once the ball has to go a different direction it loses some speed. It’s much easier to let the ball go on its way. Benjamin Zander says to never doubt the capacity of those you are leading. If someone on your team is not up to a certain task, that is their problem and not yours. There is not anything a leader can do to improve capacity except to induce passion in the person. This ties into Benjamin Zander and his idea of “sparkling eyes”. Sparkling eyes really just means passion. Nobody can truly produce their best work apart from passion. That’s why children are told to “follow their heart”. Forcing someone to do something never results in good work. Forcing things only results in the bare minimum, as the worker just gets by, does work that is just good enough, in order to get back to the things that they are truly passionate about. If what they are working on is also what they are truly passionate about, then they have no reason to stop working. Imagine an avid video game player speed running through the story of their favorite game just so they can say they did it, then never opening the game again afterwards. This seems crazy to anyone who enjoys video games, but if you asked someone who hates or is not passionate about video games to complete a video game, this is exactly what they would do. A good leader would be able to make the previously indifferent person passionate about a certain subject. Even better, a leader would be able to assign someone already passionate about a certain task to that task. They could also show the passionate person more aspects of the task, so as to make them even more avid then they were before, even more so than a previously indifferent person could hope to become. This is truly when Zander’s sparkling eyes can be seen. They can be seen when a passionate person is made even more passionate by a great leader. In Zander’s case, this was taking an already passionate musician and turning them into a “one buttock player”. This is turning passion into sparkling eyes. Sparkling eyes is just true passion. Unlocked passion, even. This is the core duty of a good leader, to unlock and increase the passions of everyone within their team. For a good leader to be a great leader, they must also be able to wield and direct this passion towards the goal at hand. This is what responsible leadership means. There was a great distinction in this in my life during high school. I was a section leader for the trombone section, who were known for being very passionate, energetic, and tight knit, but usually for the wrong reasons and definitely in the wrong directions. My junior year was a mess for the section. It was my first year leading, and there was a ton of pressure on the section. Myself and the two other section leaders easily unlocked the passion of the section, but we found it very hard to control and turn into positive energy. The result was a very passionate and tight knit section. However, this passion was mostly directed toward messing around and trying to do their own thing, rather than working towards improving our marching show. My senior year I learned how to direct this passion into something more productive, and the trombones had one of their best seasons as a section.It is also important for leaders to be passionate themselves. An uninspired leader leads to an uninspired group, which is much worse than just one uninspired member in the group. Groups tend to follow the disposition of their leader. I have found that it is very easy for a group to get sidetracked if the leader is distracted themselves. The same goes for laziness as well. Ultimately, for a leader, the group ends up becoming an extension of themselves and their will. Most any leader that knows what they’re doing can induce passion, but only responsible leaders can direct that passion into something that is not destructive. In the case that the passion does become destructive, a responsible leader can learn from their mistakes and learn a new group as they lead. Most leaders can open up and increase passions for those that they lead. Great leaders can direct passion and induce Zander’s sparkling eyes in those that are passionate. A great leader is hard to come by, but hard to miss once you see one. |
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