Stop Doing, Start Leading

Intention: I want to take a moment to reflect on the impact the Dale Carnegie Develop Your Leadership Potential: Stop Doing, Start Leading course has made on my professional career. I really enjoyed what I had learned from the first Dale Carnegie course and saw growth in my public speaking, networking, and confidence with the tools that I had gained. The Dale Carnegie Develop Your Leadership Potential course builds on top of the foundations created from the Dale Carnegie human relations skills course and looks at Human Relations in a systemic way. When I find out (actually less than a week before this course started!) that this leadership course was being offered and was 100% reimbursed by PayPal’s educational assistance program, I signed up as fast as I could.

The Dale Carnegie Leadership Course was held online via Cisco WebEx every Wednesday from 3:00-5:30pm for 8 weeks. Especially during the pandemic, I’ve found that it’s important to have your camera on so I also had a ring light behind the camera to improve my virtual presence. I also found that it was helpful to have a standing desk to project and give more energy when speaking.

During this week’s session, we discussed creating a plan of how we’re going to make an impact as a leader. What stuck out to me in this session is,

This week we focused on giving feedback and specifically cushioning any constructive feedback that could cause conflicts. What I took away from this session is that it’s important to practice with different scenarios and it’s helpful to have a coach who can give you encouragement and suggestions. We each took turns being the person doing the conflict resolution, the person receiving the feedback, and the coach. We were each given challenging scenarios that really pushed us to think creatively about our responses and brainstorm together how we can improve our feedback. By there only being four of us in the course, I felt like we were really able to dive into the content and have more time to collaborate. Over the past few weeks, we’ve created a space that has allowed us to be more vulnerable yet learn because we’re all so eager to immediately start applying what we’ve been learning.

In this session, we focused on conflict resolution. I got to share about a time where during a code review, I and another team member has different views on how the code should be split into different layers due to the business logic. While both of our opinions were valid, we also each had use cases. Since I did feel strongly about my opinion, it wasn’t as easy for me to just accept my teammate’s suggestions. I decided to take a step back and brainstormed on how to resolve this because we could easily go back and forth. I made sure to communicate that I see my teammate’s points and when I presented my thoughts, I asked for theirs as well. In the end, I suggested a compromise that we were both cool with.

In this session, we focused on improving our self-awareness as leaders to avoid potential blind-spots. In August, I received a book for my birthday titled

by Tasha Eurich. I felt that this book and the feed-forward tool that was shared in this session connect on the same theme: taking a proactive approach to improving your awareness, both internally and externally. In this session, we got to split into two groups and share a trait that we've noticed in ourselves that we're looking to improve upon. For me, I find that I tend to take critiques more personally and am working on changing that perspective to the other person wants me to succeed because this is also my intention when giving feedback and suggestions. In a feed-forward approach, my cohort-mate Julie, gave me some really great advice to

This session focused on self-regulation in the time of a crisis and actively listening. We did an exercise where we had to listen to a time where one of our cohort felt like they weren't being listened to, summarize what they said and any shared previously, and then share a time that we also felt like we weren't being heard. Normally with learning dance combinations, we have a lot of repetition so in case you don't hear/see it the first time, most likely, they'll repeat it again. In this case, we only heard it once which was difficult for me. This is definitely an area that I can improve upon as we have our daily standup meetings and it's important to hear each team member's update. At the end of this session, I had the opportunity to give the closing speech. I decided to share a story that was quite relevant because of its connection to self-regulating in a multiple crises.

This was our last of the sessions and the feeling was bitter-sweet. It felt like these weeks went by so quickly and I enjoyed every single session. We learned a powerful tool where you can categorize what you’ve already done vs what’s currently in your head. It was wonderful to sort out what’s in-progress vs accomplished in my leadership plan and get the cohort’s suggestions and advice on how to proceed further with what’s in-progress. This exercise was a great for collaboration and brainstorming because each member had such unique solutions and advice.

I really enjoyed this experience and felt that there were a lot of great conversations that took place between the classmates and Cayly, our facilitator. Cayly did a wonderful job of facilitating these conversations and in sharing her personal examples. She also gave us great feedforward when we shared our stories. She played such a monumental role in helping us move out of our comfort zone and shine in the breakthrough zone while growing and refining our leadership skills! In addition, there were only 4 of us which made the discussions more diverse and fruitful - each person got to speak up and jump in whenever we wanted to add to the conversation. We fast-tracked our Leadership Plan by Week 4 and actually got to start putting it into motion. I felt that by being able to apply the leadership tools that we learned each week such as active listening and communication, giving feedforward, and self-awareness insights,

Thank you for taking the time to read and hope that you benefit from these takeaways as well!