Leading other specialists and coordinating professionally and personally heterogeneous teams are demanding and laborious tasks that, however, reward emerging leaders with valuable insights into their occupational aptitude. The need to fulfill the leader’s role might require intensive self-learning and honesty with oneself. This essay will explore my leadership-related takeaways and increased self-knowledge derived from guiding and leading a small customer research team a few years ago.
In 2017, a local Internet service provider employing me on a part-time basis tasked me with leading a group of eight specialists responsible for user research activities. The data collection phase lasted for three weeks, and I planned and coordinated phone surveys targeted at the provider’s core clientele of users, quick online questionnaires for prospective clients willing to change their service company, and data entry activities. My area of responsibility as a leader also extended to managing conflicts, keeping the team motivated, and empowering the team to approach the task creatively.
My strong orientation to learning from failure became the first crucial takeaway from contributing to the project. Team members’ initial data collection attempts had mixed success, leading to short-sighted conclusions concerning users’ lack of interest. Dissatisfied with that explanation, I encouraged the team to make all calls in the morning and ask respondents to highlight any verbal constructions they perceived as IT jargon, and we achieved an increase in response rates after rephrasing the questionable parts. It was the burden of responsibility for the team’s ultimate success that evoked assiduousness in searching for the core explanation of the initial failures. This personal quality, I assume, can be transformed into valuable assets.
Next, the responsibility for effort coordination and meetings urged me to explore my natural proclivities and preferences concerning leadership frameworks. Specifically, the methods of participative leadership with local authoritarian elements became my solution, which supported me in realizing my leadership identity. Since the team was heterogeneous in various ways, including professional abilities, years of experience, and even psychological characteristics, such as independence in decision-making, I supposed that the leader’s flexibility would be a crucial expectation. Despite my first experience of leading in a professional context, I found it rather easy to participate in the team and guide everyone but offer clear expectations for those expecting unambiguous directions. Understanding one’s prevailing type of leadership could offer priceless and practice-oriented takeaways when making any career decisions, so this takeaway will not go unnoticed.
Another point of learning relates to my areas for improvement in emotional intelligence (EI) and its various dimensions. The three weeks of leading, including a few minor conflicts affecting the team, revealed my need to monitor and improve my social awareness skills. The recognition of team dynamics in its emotional dimension, which is a central part of EI and empathy in organizational contexts, became rather challenging to pursue, requiring me to seek relevant advice from the department supervisor. “Reading the room” concerning the fluctuating levels of motivation and the emerging cold conflicts at the inter-group level was rather difficult, so I had to study intensively and instrumentalize one-on-one conversations with specific team members to comprehend the team’s internal emotional processes. To succeed in the future, I should engage in self-learning to improve this element of the team leader’s skill set.
In summary, the selected case became a great source of learning that can be instrumentalized in the future. My personal qualities linked with goal-orientedness and the readiness to transform process organization failures into valuable knowledge became clearer as a result of that experience. Similarly, I had the opportunity to explore my role specialization and flexibility as a leader. Finally, the project shed light on the critical personal development areas, including the social awareness component of EI.