Leadership and Friendship

As of the end of today, I'll have exactly 3 weeks, only 15 days, left working at ARL for the summer. Despite what I thought at the beginning, summer did actually manage to fly by pretty quickly. While I'm really excited to go back to Rice and stop working, I still feel like there will be some things about summer that I'll miss. The lack of stress and deadlines, weekends where I am free to do whatever I want, and my friends in Austin which will become harder and harder to see in the future as they are going off to college, or finishing college and moving to wherever jobs take them.

I also noticed today that I've actually grown pretty close to my boss at work, Anthony. Despite how strange he seemed at first, he's quickly become the best boss/ supervisor that I've had at a job. He does a good job of making sure I get work done and don't slack too much, but he's also an incredibly good teacher and takes time out of his work to teach me things that he thinks I will use for the rest of my engineering career. We also discuss our weekends, complain about annoying co-workers, and discuss ridiculous news stories from time to time. It almost feels like a jedi master/ apprentice relationship. I think relationships are really helpful to being a good leader.

I've had my share of good and bad leaders (this includes bosses at work, theater directors, coaches, etc), and I think there were two qualities that made a big difference in how much I liked and respected those in authority. The first is how much the leader knows about what they are supposed to be leading. My best coach in my opinion was Coach Rotich, who was a world class runner who had won marathons. If someone has proven that they are knowledgable and experienced, it is a lot easier to trust them to make the right decisions. On the opposite end of the spectrum, my worst boss was the program director when I was working at Camp Sol Mayer. She had never really worked at a summer camp, yet due to her position in the local boy scout council, had been put in charge of the camp. Even the youngest and most inexperienced staff had a better idea of what was going on than she did, and as a result she wasn't very well respected and most of us never felt very compelled to listen to her when she told us to do things. It was a nightmare.

The other important trait is how well a leader can relate to his or her followers. A leader who came from the same background as those that he is leading, or one who makes an effort to get to know his followers, is much more effective at understanding what motivates his followers and can be more effective at communicating. The underlings also will feel more relaxed if working for someone that they know and understand, and are more likely to work efficiently. The fact that Anthony has decades of experience in our field, and tries to get to know me as a person, has made me respect him quite a bit. Theater directors who have pushed me, but still had realistic expectations about the amount of time the cast and crew had to give to the show, were much more respected than those who sacrificed the morale of the cast and crew just to put on a good show.

There are definitely many other traits of good leaders, but these are two that stick out to me as I've been spending time working under Anthony, and two traits that I should keep in mind the next time I find myself in a leadership position.