At the conclusion of each of our rotations we, the ITLPs as well as all the other Leadership Program members, must go through our end of rotation review with our Assignment Leader (AL, manager for that rotation). My AL was the Operations Leader for Transportation, Tony Ferretti. Tony is a great leader. I have learned the difference between a manager and a leader. A manager plans, organizes, and communicates. A leader inspires and motivates. A leader must also have the skills of a manager but a manager may not have the skills of a leader. Tony always pushed me to go outside my comfort zone and take risks. He led me to be a leader - inspiring and motivating my colleagues.
Throughout our final review session, we discussed how we can have continued success in the workplace.
- We need to be able to identify key market areas or stakeholders with gaps and challenges - and determine how IT can improve or fix the issues.
- Senior leadership mentoring is a vital way to learn leadership skills. Take the risk and engage with a senior leader and boldly ask if they will mentor you.
- For future rotations - take the big, scary rotations that go deep into pillar applications so you can really learn about the business.
- Learn from leaders and make notes about what you like and what you don't like. We need to develop our own leadership styles and just like when we were children, we imitate. But at this age we can do so with more choice and poise. We can select the traits of leaders we see that we like and add it to our repertoire.
It is with many thanks to Tony and the entire CTO team and my ITLP program manager Nate Arnold, that I had all these learnings and I can say my first rotation was such an amazing experience.
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