In my initial blog post about leadership, I focused on credibility, competency and caring as critical attributes, and after the reading and assignments of the past eight weeks I am more convinced then ever that they are required in a successful change management and/or process management leader.

Kouzes and Posner’s idea that “credibility is the foundation of leadership” (2011, p. 3) is one I share, and I related to their further concept that leadership is build on relationships between leaders and followers, with the strength of those relationships based on a simple question of trust. I believe this trust is created by the three C’s I previously mentioned: does this person have credibility, do they care about me/the issue/the outcome, and are they competent with the expertise required to make the decisions or provide the direction.

I am fortunate that in my current role I am providing foundational soft- and hard-skills to new management for our organization. I am positioned to start the relationship between the new leader and our organization’s vision and expectations of their role, and I am cognizant that during that onboarding I am representing the company. How I represent myself in those two weeks of training will be translated into how these managers view leadership at FedEx, and my mission for each class is to ensure the participants feel their voices are heard, respected, and that they have a seat at the table. I do this through caring about their experiences, building credibility from initial introduction and beyond, and remaining a subject matter expert in the topic to allow the learner’s confidence in my capabilities.

This is a good start, but inevitably, within 6-9 months of management I start to see these no-longer-new managers become burnt out or jaded. I believe this is due to the organization treating leadership development as a ‘one and done’ situation and not investing in continuous development for field-level management. What I would like to see (and preferably be involved with) is a project management team assigned to ongoing training beyond the usual web based LMS annual requirements. An opportunity to apply the change management teaching from this class would be welcome, and something I just might need to discuss with my managers! Perhaps the conversation starts with a suggestion that the University team all receives a copy of Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It to grease the wheels.

I truly enjoyed this class and the introduction to project management and change management!

  • Jessica

References:

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2011). Credibility: How leaders gain and lose it, why people demand it. John Wiley & Sons. Microsoft Word – Credibility (davekraft.org)