Leadership Reflection - Knowing Yourself
Earlier this year I began a leadership journal during my Master’s Program at Brown University. Below is my reflection and analysis from personal experience combined with lessons learned from an article by Robert. J. Allio in January of 2022.
Throughout my years within the Cybersecurity industry I was able to learn from different leadership styles as my peers were at various levels within their career. This allowed me to reflect on attributes that make up a good leader based on the perceived performance of the teams. Being exposed to different team dynamics has given me more opportunities to lead others within specific projects.
In the article “learning how to be a leader” by Robert J. Allio (2006) I learned that my ideas of leadership required refinement. The leadership philosophy that I’ve fostered over the years are compromised by two elements, working diligently and being honest in all my communication. This has helped me get excellent recommendations and promotions, yet I realized that my leadership capabilities were limited to only operating from the perspective of an individual contributor and manager at times. My communication skills were developed prior to joining the corporate environment. Being a retail and food industry employee in a tech savvy community allowed me to understand and improve my presentation skills. The key competencies that have been noticed by leadership in my companies is the ability to have good judgment and stay up to date with new technology trends. These two traits have allowed me to co-lead over 5 teams where the strategy needed to be created to produce tangible results based on criteria set by stakeholders. An item that I noticed I was already doing from the readings was that I was always preparing myself to be a go-to person when a cybersecurity problem came up, I could show my strengths at my current level and even beyond expectations.
In times of peril, I notoriously proactively maximized those opportunities to showcase my expertise which enabled me to move forward in my career at a rapid pace. An example of that in the workplace is that in my last company I would be put on projects as the lead with more senior engineers because they could do the work and I could explain it in a way that matters to leadership. I would rate myself as a 5 in my current leadership because I’m exceptional at working with senior management and managers but my role has mainly been an individual contributor throughout my professional career. As a leader I need to improve on building my leadership persona, finance acumen, and acquire more practical experience having direct reports.
Sources:
- Robert J. Allio , (2016),”Learning to be a leader”, Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 44 Iss 4 pp. 3 – 9
- Illustration: Pexels, Anna Tarazevich