Caitlyn told me to write down these experiences, so here I am.
Whenever I think about my future with my business, it always incorporates some form of personal development coaching. I know it is my passion. However, I also do not want to approach this path solely. There is a part of me that doesn’t want to get stuck doing one thing. Maybe this is because I still follow the thought of wanting to be a jack of all trades, and I do not want to be an expert in one thing, even if that is where I can bring my best self. I also have struggled to believe that developing people leads to real value for an organization. It’s less tangible and whenever I discuss with people that care about the tangible, it’s clear that they don’t see the full value in what I am doing. Since I put weight on what other people think, I probably get stuck here a little too much. Either way, long story short, I have hesitated to dive deeper into the professional development side and have kept it as more of a hobby in addition to my other responsibilities. This week, a lot of that changed.
Leading up to this week, I had discussions with one of our leaders at PIUS. He is probably the first leader I have met who believes deeply in the importance of developing people. He has told me that another colleague in Switzerland is in charge of Talent Development and that I should consider what my future could be in that realm. I continue to stand by my belief that I need to be ‘on the ground’ to some extent. I need to be working and leading to really sway people’s thoughts. Otherwise, it’ll be even harder to reach people and impact them to become leaders. I am at my best in a one-on-one discussion. Regardless, I know this leader is working in the background to highlight my capabilities of development, and I think that has a big part in what occurred this week.
Additionally, I have recognized that I am starting to coach the senior leadership more and more. In addition to the leader I mentioned above, we have another leader on the production floor who continues to reach out to bounce ideas about improving culture and focus on development.
The last thing leading up to this week was that our division leader was going to stop by for a business review meeting, so I sat down and prepared my deck. My general manager told me to leverage the Early Career Experience program to show what we are doing to develop our future leaders. I was excited about this opportunity because I have been contemplating how to share my insights into the ECE program so that other leaders would leave me alone to do what I see fit for the program. It felt like some sort of divine timing, but also I think the other leaders were pulling strings in the background.
Now to the actual week.
I was stressing a lot about what story to tell for the ECE program, and I knew that I could become too passionate and spin in too many directions. I needed to create a storyline that was direct and simple to follow. Of course, it wasn’t easy, and while I worked on it, I had a lot of events that pushed me into this coaching/ mentoring space.
The first thing was the production leader told one of his direct reports to reach out to me to discuss how he could get better at presenting information to senior leadership. So we spent some time discussing presentations. I shared my growing slide deck with him and told him the basics of making a slide look good without too much additional effort. I also discussed with him how leaders think and pointed out how he needs to avoid falling into the traps of taking things too personally. He seemed appreciative of the discussion and said that a lot of what I was saying was resonating with him, and he wanted to work on it.
In addition to that, the universe kept me at work for a little while longer because of rain and that opened up the opportunity for an order manager to ask me about how she can pursue innovation. We talked about how she needed to carve the time out for herself to get there. In her role, this is not easy because it’s all firefighting.
The other mentoring was a lot more normal, however, there was still a lot of it! The highlight was talking to our newest ECE about how we can inspire others. He was discussing how we should strive to make it easier for people to get the opportunities they want. I told him that it requires effort from the individual to make it happen. Even though it’s not always easy, people make a lot of excuses to avoid taking that step. Until they do, even if everything was handed to them, they’d still be stuck.
All of these conversations helped me with my presentation and creating the storyline that I did:
During my presentation, I started by mentioning this topic was my passion. Then I asked our divisional leader what makes a good leader. I liked that he turned around to face the two ECEs I was highlighting and shared what makes a good leader with them too. I then continued to talk to his points of leadership and mentioned that I was interested in how experience played into it. How can we develop leaders faster? I talked about how when I started at MT, I was told they didn’t hire anyone without experience. However, I was able to show that I could become productive in a very quick amount of time. Fast forward to now, and most of the newly hired engineers are younger. It doesn’t matter who you are and what experience you had, there is some amount of time it takes to turn you into a Mettler Employee, especially with proper guidance. I pointed out some of the key talented individuals that I worked with and showed that they became better engineers faster than me. I then learned about Design Thinking and this gave me a tool box for how to solve problems by understanding problems and continuously striving to tackle them. It helps navigate ambiguity, which I believe is the nature of leadership. I pointed out the important qualities that these candidates have or need to be successful and how combining what I learned with my development and development of other talent and Design Thinking, we can develop powerful leaders.
After the presentation, the divisional leader commented on how good my deck was. In general, I do think he does a great job of always saying good job to people in their presentations. So I wasn’t sure exactly how to take it.
Then at the wrap-up session, we sat around and he talked through the day. Even though I was the first to present after finance, he kind of skipped over my section and talked about everyone else’s. This bothered me a little at first, but I also chalked it up to just that he was more focused on the criticality of the business. However, at the very end, he turned to me and said he wanted to especially recognize my presentation. He called it the highlight of the day for him to see the ECEs talk about topics they are so passionate about and motivated by, and he said how that was thanks to my leadership.
Later on, my General Manager doubled down and said that he really meant that it was the best part of his day. He also is eager for me to get two more ECEs coming and described them as headcount into business transformation.
I am excited to see where all of this leads. The amount of synchronicity lately around it has been interesting!
