Sometimes leadership means cleaning up the mess you created

Several months ago, my manager put me in charge of organizing a Critical Design Review or CDR. This was not just any CDR. During this CDR, high school students from five robotics teams that my company supports would visit us and present their designs to company managers and their school administrators. As you could imagine, the CDR involved much planning over a period of several months. Some might say it was like organizing five weddings simultaneously.

To give you some background, robotics volunteering is a requirement of a Leadership Development Program (LDP) that I am in. This involved both mentoring high school students and planning the CDR. As the Director of the CDR, you might think I had it together. Quite the opposite: I over relied on email as my preferred means of conversation, and this naturally caused much confusion. To make matters worse, I shied away from delegating tasks to my LDP peers. Don’t get me wrong. I eventually made the CDR a success but not without creating a royal mess of things along the way.

How did I create a mess? After meeting with my LDP manager, she strongly suggested I delegate tasks. On the surface, this presented no difficulties, as I maintained an accurate task list. I even decided how to assign responsibilities. The mess, however, spilled out when I underestimated the effort needed to complete one such task: contact facilities to put them name signs on the auditorium row ends indicating where each robotics team would sit. I thought to myself, “that’s just an email to the facilities manager. I can do that myself.”

Oh, how wrong I was. It turned out that it did not fall under facilities’ roles and responsibilities to place seating markers. By putting out that request, I rubbed the facilities manager the wrong way. Word reached out events coordinator who promptly called me and yelled at me: everyone involved had no clue what they needed to do, I didn’t use services of administrators who offered their help, and the event is a week away.

At her advice, I organized a meeting with all of the people involved. I made a chart of the things that needed to be done and those responsible: lunches ordered, tables and chairs setup, audio visual systems setup, name badges to be ordered and put out, and so forth. By speaking with everyone on the phone, I left no confusion remaining. I double checked we had everything covered. The events coordinator who told me earlier that day later told me I was doing a great job.

In the end, the high school robotics CDR came and went with great success. What did I learn from this experience?

• Rely on your team and delegate. If you ask them nicely, they will gladly help you. After all, no one wants to fail.
• Get on the phone! In this age of email and IMs, it’s easy to forget in person communication. Of course, that doesn’t mean to not follow up with email. It means that you should speak to people directly instead of sending mass emails that could cause confusion.
• Focus on the positive. It was so easy to see all that I did wrong, yet I remembered to focus on what was going right. This prevented me from being too hard on myself when I need to push forward with the project.

What would I do differently if I was asked to organize a similar event in the future? Given that I discussed lessons learned with my team, I would include them all in the first planning meeting for the next event. This way, I would clearly communicate all the tasks required to make the next event successful and not create any messes along the way.