Experience and Growth from The Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute

Brandon Free, member of cohort 4 of the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute, discusses his experience through transformational leadership during his time at Miami.

Imagine that you are working on a really difficult project and that you have done everything that you can to make sure that you are prepared for a major event. The particular project you are on involves interviewing people with years more experience than you and producing a podcast based on what they have to say.
You get to the recording room and do everything you can to make sure that you will be all ready to record when the phone call comes. You test the whole system on a couple of your friends to make sure that it will be working. Then you get the phone call. But for whatever reason, you cannot seem to get to a point where you are able to hear her and she is able to hear you.
You and your partners scramble to get figure out the problem. Thankfully you had a plan of systems to check and backup devices for such a situation. In just a few minutes, after a little bit of troubleshooting you are able to isolate the issue and continue on with what turned out to be a great interview. Over the course of this project you have learned a few very crucial lessons about preparing for situations and having a plan for when things go wrong.
This is exactly the situation that me and some of my friends found ourselves in last year. You might be surprised to know that this was part of a class that we were taking here at Miami University. But as you might have put together this is not any ordinary class. The projects are on not a calculated attempt at doing the least amount of effort possible. We are not working toward another good mark on some transcript. We were on a journey toward transformational leadership. This is the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute.
At this point you might be wondering what the Leadership Institute looks like practically. It is a 3 year certificate program in the College of Engineering and Computing at Miami University. The application process starts out at the end of the freshmen year and is open to engineering students who are willing to see what it might look like to spend the rest of their college years intentionally investing in transformational leadership.
But this is not just some advertisement to talk about the institute at a small college in Ohio. I truly believe that what the institute does is valuable, and something that more universities and more companies should get behind. The principle idea of the institute is transformational leadership.
So what exactly is transformational leadership? It is an idea that I think I am finally starting to understand after a little more than two years in the institute. It is a style of leadership that is very different than your classic management techniques. It focuses on identifying what changes need to be made and working with a team to accomplish those. The leader is wholly invested in the team and responds to the needs of the team.
So how exactly does the leadership institute do this in real life? I think that the best way to show this would be to talk about how I think it has changed my life and the way that I view leadership.
The first year of the leadership institute mostly focuses on personal leadership. It strives to give its members a good idea of what it means to be self aware and how we can utilize our strengths and work on our weaknesses.
One of the most valuable tools that we started out with was a Myers Briggs assessment. While it is easy to treat personality tests as if they are some sort of BuzzFeed poll, this one is a lot different. It can perfectly describe your personality and your tendencies. It brought to the surface all sorts of things that I knew about myself on a surface level, but did not completely understand. As an INTP, I learned about trouble with over-committing, procrastination, and other things that have drastically changed how I worked in college.
These lessons really started to impact me as I began to take on more and more workloads. Understanding how I extend energy as an introvert and how I can recover it, allowed me to be much more productive, and to have the time and the energy required to be an effective leader.
Where those lessons really started to come in handy is during the second year. The focus on the second year is leading in teams so a large year long project is created to allow everyone to get practical experience working on teams. This is where the story at the beginning comes in.
The leadership institute is unique in that it allows you to have an environment where you can fail and where you can fail fast. The challenges of the project push you and stress you. In this kind of environment, any problems that you might have quickly rise to the surface, and you have a great opportunity to learn from them in a space where failure is an option, that way you won’t fail when it is not an option.
As a result of these projects, you also start to get an understanding about the difference between a group and a team. You start to understand what it looks like to work together toward a common goal. You are responding to the needs of the group and working toward your common vision.
In addition to these practical projects, there has been a lot of opportunities to hear amazing guest speakers from prestigious companies. One experience that really stood out was a winter term trip to the Lockheed Martin Global Vision Center in Prestor Virginia where we learned from so many wonderful speakers. These speakers focused on a lot of practical topics from public speaking to setting goals. From these events, I think I have learned a lot about what goals to set long term, and where I want to go with my life after college.
I have already started to see some of the payoff from learning about transformational leadership in student organizations on the campus. The biggest organization I am a part of is engineers without borders, a service organization that partners with developing communities in other countries to solve engineering related problems. I have served in several different leadership positions, and am currently the VP of projects. As such I oversee three different project managers.
All of these learnings have allowed me to get really good at setting vision and directions for our chapter and empower the PM’s to accomplish them. I think that we have all demonstrated that we are on the same team and can accomplish those goals. I have learned how to listen to them at a deeper level, how to be patient when progress is slow, how to have empathy for the 50-60 people helping us work on these projects. Those lessons I would not have learned without an intentional focus on learning transformational leadership. Because we were able to unite together we have had successful programs in four different countries during my time and have helped so many community members make dramatic changes in their lives.
I hope that now you see the importance of a program like this, and how this is so different than the 1 credit hour semester long management class that might be offered at a university. Leadership is not something that can be learned in a semester or even in a 3 year program. It is an investment that you have to start making as soon as you can, and continue to study in for the rest of your life. I know for me, I have feel like I now have the tools to do just that.

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