This week’s post is inspired by Margaret Darcher, who is a Principal Designer at Amazon and introduced everyone to Amazon’s leadership principles. Three leadership principles that I have used in my previous workplaces include Earn Trust, Learn and Be Curious, and Insist on the Highest Standards.
- Earn Trust: Two of my first jobs were working as a summer camp counselor at a full-day art camp for kids and working as youth counselor at an organization that served homeless young adults. For both of these jobs, earning trust was probably the single most important thing needed in order to be successful at the job. When working at a summer camp, I had to earn trust with the parents on day one. They needed to feel confident and safe about leaving their children with me to learn and do projects so that they could go to work without worrying. Some steps I took to earn that trust included setting up my classroom in a friendly, inviting way, letting everyone know what activities would be planned for the day, taking time to answer questions, and making sure that each child came home with a successful project (or more!) each afternoon. I also sent out emails describing our day each afternoon with questions that parents could ask their children about what they had learned. When working with homeless youth, it’s important to understand that many of these young people have been through serious trauma in their lives. Probably adults have failed them in some important ways, and one way that they might protect themselves is by not trusting. Earning trust in this setting takes a very long time, so it’s important to be very honest about what’s happening, even if the news is bad. At the same time, when there is bad news or something unpleasant happens, it’s important to react calmly and thoughtfully, not to be a person who might potentially break down or explode when the going gets tough. It’s also important to make sure that you never promise anything you’re not able to do and that you establish a consistent routine so that everyone knows what to expect from you. I worked really hard to be a consistent, calm, communicative, and trustworthy person in both of these setting.
- Learn and Be Curious: I also used to work at a science museum where the company values were all about curiosity and discovery. This was a great place for me to work for a while because I love learning and find that, when I’m in a job where I can no longer learn, I stop feeling fulfilled, and it becomes time to move on. In this job, there was so much opportunity to learn about science as well as to try working in different ways, with technology and in settings with visitors. One area that I especially enjoyed working in was the planetarium. During my training there, I was introduced to the constellations of the northern sky and some related Greek mythology and the very basics that I needed to know to make the planetarium work during my presentations. Once I got comfortable with the basics, I took the initiative to learn more on my own. I learned more about constellations beyond the Greek and Roman ones so that I could incorporate a more multicultural approach into my presentations. I also went out of my way to incorporate fancy tricks to impress the audience, such as simulating a smooth sunrise or giving the appearance of flying through space, and I took opportunities to do extra work getting the sky set up for a new season. Eventually, I moved into roles there with more responsibility, and because I had done that work, I got to be part of the team creating and programming new shows such as a preschool show and shows about ancient stargazing to go with special cultural exhibits. This led to getting to learn new tech programs that were specific for the planetarium and that knowledge helped a lot when I eventually became a supervisor and started running a NASA-funded program at the museum. All in all, I loved learning about astronomy, and continuing to learn and be curious helped me not only to move up a career ladder while also getting to explore my interests.
- Insist on the Highest Standards: My father is quite the perfectionist, and he might have passed a bit of that personality trait on to me. I tend to have high expectations for myself, and I like when I’ve done work that I feel is high quality and complete. I often appreciate a good tracking spreadsheet that’s well-organized or creating a system for doing a job that works like clockwork. Another job that I held for a while was in HR at a very large organization, and when I started, I took the position of a person who had been let go because they were not staying on top of the work or keeping records organized. As a result, they’d mistakenly shared a lot of confidential information inappropriately and had lost information that should have been kept, which was very challenging for my team. I knew that I had to quickly do damage control and create systems that would prevent those problems and track a huge amount of minute tasks and details. I created color-coded spreadsheets, a standard process for different tasks, and did a lot of customer service to try to soften over past mistakes without laying blame on anyone. Once the basic systems were in place, I realized that we needed improvement in several areas such as understanding different nuances of privileged information (like QI at a hospital or attorney-client privileges), ways to track work that had been done in the past, and updating to new technology (much of the work was still being transferred by CD rom). I created trainings on different types of confidential information, set up a file structure and naming conventions so that past work would be searchable, and worked hard to get a cloud-based file share system in place. Once these elements were in place, I continued to work on more improvements such as in our communication to other departments about how our systems worked. In that position, there was continual room for improvement, so I did my best to continue moving the work forward towards a higher standard.
One leadership principle I think I might find challenging, especially as a beginning designer, is Are Right, A Lot. It sounds like a tall order, especially as a junior employee just learning about the business, to be frequently “right” when you are just learning about the company and the work. Don’t get me wrong, I like to have right answers as much as anyone, but in fact, in most real-life adult situations, it’s been my experience that there’s rarely a “right” answer, but rather several decent options, each with their own pros and cons. There’s almost never a single correct answer to a design problem, just many possible elegant solutions, and even in very litigious situations, attorneys almost never give straightforward advice because there’s not “right” way to handle a problem, just available options with varying degrees of risk and practicality. Also, I can’t think of ever deciding that I want to work with or for a person or be their friend because they’re always right about things; sometimes that can even be off-putting. Instead, I appreciate when someone can be a good listener and collaborator, when they are thoughtful about ethical decisions and care for humans, and when they learn together with you. My best supervisors have been honest and open with information and feedback and have been the kinds of folks to go to bat for what their programs and employees need to be successful. This has nothing to do with knowing all the answers or being able to say “I told you so” in the end. Sure, they want the final product to be high-quality in the end, but they trust their employees to have the expertise needed to do the job while simultaneously being there for support and big-picture vision. If I were at a high leadership level, that’s the kind of person I’d strive to be like, and I’d hope that I could let go of a need to be “right” all of the time in favor of being real and continuing to listen, learn, collaborate, and grow.