Leaders Make the Difference

No matter how many times I reflect, it always amazes me how leadership styles can shape teams, departments, and companies.

Aggressive leaders. Passive leaders. Encouraging. Demeaning. Empowering. Micro-managing.

Let me preface that I am no expert on leadership styles or tactics (that’s my wife with the PhD in organizational psychology). I just know what I have seen and what works and doesn’t work for me.

For some perspective, I work best autonomously. I am an only child, worked as a reporter for years, and have had several jobs where I was the first person to fill a brand new role. I am used to doing things on my own. I am also a learn-by-doing person and need to be allowed to make mistakes.

While I have had many supervisors and mentors, and this in no way takes away from my others, these were two that stood out for me.

I was an aspiring sports journalist when I graduated college in 2008. It was the height of the recession and jobs were scarce.

My first job wasn’t what I had envisioned nor did it allow me to write. Not wanting to give up that dream, I looked for a way to still have my work published and came across an up-and-coming sports website called Bleacher Report. I wrote on a regular basis about Bay Area and college sports. I was even named an early editor for the San Francisco Giants content. I didn’t get paid but it gave me a portfolio of content.

That’s when I came a cross another small website called Patch.com that was looking for freelance sports reporters. I used my clips from Bleacher Report and I got hired. I was being paid anywhere between $40-60 per article.

This was my first real taste of professional journalism. My writing was okay but definitely needed work. My editor knew this as well and instead of ripping into everything I did wrong, he coached me and showed me how to improve.

And I did. Tweaks on my story structure, proper use of terms, and even tips on how to keep better stats.

To this day, he remains one of the more influential people on my professional career.

Another example of a good leader to me is one that leads by example. I had one of those when I was in grad school.

Being the “good soldier” can be a thankless job and I have been in a number of thankless jobs. That’s essentially the deal when you are a college sports information director.

In my brief stint as an SID, I wrote articles, recorded official statistics, created graphics, ran social media accounts for teams, acted as media relations, and everywhere in between. Most of it goes unnoticed unless something goes wrong then you hear about it.

I had a great example of how to handle it.

She was already a veteran SID and helped me learn the day-to-day without losing my mind (although there were days it happened anyway).

While I was there, she coordinated a volleyball tournament, a basketball game, and three soccer games within one weekend. She was creative graphically. She trained me well on all the programs we used for various projects.

She didn’t need to be a mentor to me but she was.

Supervisors should be there to support and develop the people in their employ so they can make a stronger team.