Communication

One of the first lessons I learned in this class was that leaders are people who get things done; they don't just talk, they ACT. But that doesn't mean words aren't important. When the book talks about leaders giving voice to values, good communication skills become critical. One must be able to rally people around a cause and articulate meaning to that cause so that people can make it their own.

But this doesn't just apply to the grand scale of leadership, it applies to leadership on an individual level as well. In class we talked about interviews and more importantly what we say during them. You have 30 minutes to leave a lasting impression on your interviewer, what can you say to make them remember you? It's surely not enough to just rattle off some generic adjectives that they've heard a hundred times before. Save it for your resume; the interview your little window of opportunity to paint a picture of who you are to the person who may be hiring you. Communication is dire here. What good are my accomplishments if I cannot communicate what I've done to other people? It's not enough to say I'm a good problem solver or that I'm creative. I need a story to support these statements, I need to back it up with hard evidence--or at least something believable that illustrates what I mean by such broad and generic terms as "creative" and "pragmatic."

From my experience of interviews in the past, I know that many times the interviewer may give you an opportunity for such a story. Questions that stand out in my mind are "Tell me about a time when you did something special for a customer," or "Tell me about a time that you accomplished something that made you proud" or something along these lines. The problem is the story that you have prepared may not have anything to do with the question they ask you, in which case you can either think fast and improvise completely or try to adapt your story to answer the question. Feinberg talked about making an opportunity to tell your story if you need to, which may be necessary in this case. If they don't ask you about your story, you need to find a way to tell them anyway! I think one way to prevent such a situation is to find out what the organization values most. The first question that I mentioned above was from my interview at Gap. Gap is a very customer-service oriented company and that is a huge organizational value for them so it makes sense that they would ask me a question like that, and luckily I had a suitable story prepared.

But I am not always so lucky, and I tend to strike out more often then not. I bombed my Macy's interview, and my Target one (even thought I still got the job) because of my inability to communicate effectively and express myself as a valuable asset to their company. Last blog, I talked about self-improvement and acknowledging one's own shortcomings and then working to improve them. One of my biggest shortcomings is communication. The lack of eloquence is detrimental to success in the real world and is a major barrier to me becoming a good leader of myself and others.