Are We Born With Leadership Traits?

I am reading a book called The Ladies Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer. It is about a group of women who, along with their children spend the summer of 1963 renting cottages along a lake in Canada. They spend the week reading, gossiping and wishing they lived the lives of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. While they drink gin and swap stories on the beach, their children plan and scheme and get into harmless trouble. I haven't finished the book yet but the children in the story got me thinking about something I have often wondered. Are leadership qualities something we are born with or something to cultivate as we get older?

In this book, as in life, there are certain children who take the lead in games, sports, music, school and well...everything. They are the ones who had the ideas to build the fort or climb the tree. They were the ones who, when going for the bike ride, would lead the group. They delegated the tasks when building the sandcastle. When the sandcastle was finished, and the waves took it away, they were the ones who lifted our spirits and told us that we'd always make another one tomorrow. I always thought that in the pecking order of children's games and lives, they were the "leaders".

Looking at their lives now, many have had successful careers. Some are doctors, some teachers; some own their own businesses and some are senior leaders in organizations.

In the training classes I give, I often ask the participants if they led the group on the bike ride or if they were in the pack. The responses I receive often reaffirm the characteristics I see from their behavior in the class. Those who "led the bike pack" are often more vocal and offer more suggestions and encouragement. Those "in the pack" are a bit more quiet yet insightful once they get going.

I'm not trained to study human behavior but I've been doing learning and development a long time and think that leadership is an inherent quality. We can train leadership skills but those "in the pack" may take a little longer to pick up and apply them.

Job Competencies, Transferable Job Skills and Other Tips

The other day I met with a recent college graduate. His Mom, one of my friends asked me to look at his resume and give him the feedback that only a stranger can give. He wants to go into advertising and while his resume noted that, the rest of it needed a tune-up. We did a couple of things. I asked him questions and took notes while he spoke. I wound up with 3 pages of notes and found that none of that good, solid experience was on his resume. This is what we did:
1. Job Competencies: I gave him a worksheet listing six common job competencies and the definitions of each. They are Communication, Organization, Analytical/Problem Solving, Leadership, Interpersonal and Technical skill sets. I asked him to go though the definitions and:
· Rate himself on how accomplished he is in the competency
· Check the competencies he enjoys doing
· Provide real life examples of how he used the competencies (especially the ones he likes and those where he excels.)

2. Transferable Job Skills: This is where it always gets interesting and fun. When he looked at the Job Competencies his face dropped and he said that he may have used one of them during a job as a summer intern at a corporation during his Sophomore Year in college. He couldn’t even imagine how these competencies would fit into his other summer jobs or even his college course work.
His other summer jobs included working at an ice cream parlor and being a camp counselor. Transferable Job Skills are those life and work skills that transfer to another job. For example, when he was a camp counselor, he ran a football league for 100 children who were between the ages of 8 and 12. When I asked him what running a league involved, he went through the list of organization skills, planning, follow through, time management, writing communication brochures, speaking with parents, recruiting coaches and referees, decision making, ordering uniforms and the like. The same holds true with the ice cream parlor job. He trained workers, was responsible for the money, handled customer complaints and so much more than making sundae’s.
Once these skills were out in the open and listed on the Job Competency worksheet we could move on.
3. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook http://www.bls.gov/oco/ or the Bureau of Labor Statistics Career Information for Kids: http://www.bls.gov/k12/index.htm . I asked him to go to these websites and look up the advertising industry. These sites list industry trends, salary and the needed training and education for hundreds of jobs. The career site for children is easier to navigate. He went to both and searched for key works to describe the jobs he is interested in. Those words will be strategically placed in his resume. I also asked him which of these advertising profession words matched the Job Competencies/Transferable Job Skills that he liked and was good at. There were matches!

The three steps that I used with this recent graduate can help anyone better prepare for writing their resume. Once the Job Competencies and Transferable Job Skills are identified, half the work is done. By the way, it is helpful to ask someone close to you to review your skill set and note if there are any other Job Competencies and Transferable Job Skills that you may have forgotten.

Discouraged to Encouraged - The Older Job Seeker

I had a woman in a job search skills class the other day who said that she received feedback after an interview that she wasn’t energetic. Energetic? Who, over the age of 12 is energetic? The problem is that the woman is about 50-ish, has been looking for a job for months and in the interview may have unintentionally fallen into the typical aging workforce stereotype – that older workers:
· Don’t like change
· Are harder to train and motivate
· Are slower
· Are forgetful
· Are just old

She was indignant at the comment and blamed the interviewer. These days more than ever, companies know who they are looking for and there is a line out the door for that one job. You have a limited window to show your stuff and if you are invited in for an interview, an organization must have been mighty impressed with your resume. But if you interview like financial celebrity Ben Stein from Win Ben Stein’s Money (i.e. no energy), you may not be invited back. What does energy have to do with the graying side of the unemployment line? Apparently a lot.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported:
} Of the 11.1 million unemployed men and women in December 2008, 1.4 million were at least age 55
} For those ages 55 and older, the unemployment rate was 6.2% in April 2009, compared with 3.3% a year earlier
} Once unemployed, it takes older workers longer to find a new job.
} The number of older persons classified as discouraged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics nearly tripled from December 2007 to December 2008, rising from 53,000 to 154,000.

I never knew that the word discouraged is a term used to describe unemployment statistics. It is a classification for people who have basically given up looking for a job. According to an April, 2009 article in the Office of Publications and Special studies, “These individuals—referred to as “marginally attached to the labor force”—wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not actively searched for work in the past 4 weeks.”

So basically, they started looking for a job but couldn’t find anything, they may think they are too old, they may lack confidence due to education or credentials, the media reporting the scary unemployment figures have them figuring that there is nothing out there for them, and other reasons. Whatever the reason, they stop or slow down in their search. They are frustrated, discouraged and may give up. (BTW, the same may hold true to the over age 40 crew.)

The question is how can the older job seeker get out of the discouraged mindset and project energy? The rules for job seeking have changed and so have resumes and interviews. Here is one step to take.

Prepare: Assess yourself. Looking over your career and life, what were the things you enjoyed doing? What were you good at? Write down examples of these. Pull out old appraisals and look for examples of these areas. Don’t just look at the specific task. Look at the skills you used to complete the task. Did you like writing something, organizing something, brainstorming, working with your customers or peers? What did you like about volunteering? In other words what were you proud of? What were those exciting actions that you talked about at the dinner table? What are you good at AND what do you like to do?

Go on-line and look at the free assessment tools. They can measure your motivators, career interests and work styles. AARP has a few good suggestions. Do the results of these capture those areas that excite you?

On future blogs we’ll talk in more detail about preparing your resume and interviewing tips but for now, just prepare. What about those positive areas that you like and you are good at? Do you feel yourself sitting up taller and straighter? Did you find yourself relaxing and feeling good about yourself?

That feeling? That’s energy and it is NOT discouraging.

Welcome to The Flap

Welcome to The Flap. I am Nancy Anderson and I own Blackbird Learning Associates, a learning and development company in Central NJ. I opened shop in January, 2009 after spending 21 years with a major pharmaceutical company in Human Resources and Training.

I design and present courses in several topics - Generational Diversity, DiSC® Classic,IDX® Collaborative Skills for Teams and Job Search Skills including Job Search Skills for the Age 50+ Worker. I also design training and have created a number of programs in consulting skills, performance management and employee development.