Navigating Change Through Story Telling

The arts and what we can learn about transformational leadership from them.

From the time that I was very young I’ve always been really interested in playing dress up and make believe and pretending and acting out stories. And this lead me to pursue theatre in high school. And so there were so many great things about it but one of the great things I loved the most was the ability to transform myself into a completely different person every single day with just a change in physical appearance, some type of trait um uh and maybe a new accent or some clothes or makeup. And just with these really easy changes every day I could be something new. Whether it was a murdering nun, the love interest between two men and the tale of two cities, or a singing bird. All it took was a few changes and I transformed into something new. And today we are going to talk about transformation but a very different type of transformation. So our topic today is transformational leadership and to understand transformational leadership we need to be on the same page about what transformation is. If you were to google ‘transformation’ right now, you would find the definition “a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance.” With synonyms like “change,” “conversion,” and “metamorphosis.” So transformational leadership, in my experience in the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute, is all revolved around this idea of change. However, I think that a lot of people think of transformation or change in the sense of what I was talking about before - becoming something new. And in this case, it is very different. I believe that transformational leadership is all about transforming, strengths, attributes, and current things that you already have and making them into the best version they can be. So it’s not putting on a new costume, or makeup, or an outfit, and becoming something new - it's just enhancing your already uh the things that you already have inside of you. And I think that this real change that we are talking about in transformational leadership can be broken down into smaller processes. Starting with a shift in how we think. Then once we have changed how we think, this leads to a shift in behavior. And finally there will be a shift in results as a result of this shift in this way of thinking and behavior. So today i am going to focus on how the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute has fostered each of these shifts resulting in genuine personal change for me. So as I mentioned firstly this change or transformation starts with a shift in thinking.

One thing that we have learned in the institute are the 7 levels of consciousness. Moving from the bottom level of self interest up to the seventh level of doing things for the common good. And I think that this relates to the idea of a shift in thinking. We need to discover who we really are as an individual and change how we think about ourselves. Before we can move on to a shift in thinking about others and finally a shift in how we think about the world. So to start with the shift in thinking about ourselves.

During our 3 years in the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute we had the opportunity to complete and discuss a variety of different assessments to learn more about who we are and how that influences our thoughts and behaviors. For example, we completed the Myers-Briggs type indicator the well known personality inventory with the result of 4 letters. We also did the savators and sage powers assessment which is based on Shirzad Chamine’s best selling book Positive Intelligence in which saboteurs are the natural things in your mind which go against you and sage powers are those things that let you see problems as opportunities. So not only did we complete these assessments, we spent a lot of time analyzing and reflecting on our results through writing, um conversation with fellow people in our cohort, and just um revisiting these things over and over again so we didn't just do them and moved on we had a chance to really um get to know our results and see how that impacted us. We also did several more involved courses in development books that required us to really dig deep into things like crucibles our strengths, our purpose in life and more. Such as the Life Reimagined online course and the True North Field Book as well as True North groups. And um our first year in the program we did something called a Learning Journal where everyday we wrote down 3 things that we learned that day.

And so through these more involved courses, with a lot of discussion um in groups such as our true north groups again we were able to see how these assessments and these results how they affected us and how we thought about ourselves.

So once we had this foundation of shift and thinking of how we think about ourselves, that lead to a shift in thinking about others. Personally I have the natural tendency to think that my way of thinking or doing things is the right way and I often struggle to appreciate how different types of thinking in people are actually really helpful and important. One of the really helpful things of the leadership institute for me uh was being strategically placed in teams that required me to work with different types of people whether that be in a team with people that have a different major than me, or a different Myers Briggs type. Being placed in team with people that are different than me forced me to start looking at others in a different way and appreciate what they had to offer our team. Beyond working in teams in our cohort, we also learned about um interaction with people outside of the classroom. With ideas like positive intelligence and blindspots and biases. We took some online assessments about our blindspots and biases and things that we didn't even realize that we believed or thought of when we looked at certain people that maybe came from a different culture, religion, race, or even career. Um we had the opportunity to see what things we were believing even if we didn't know it. And that allowed us to change how we thought about others.

Finally this lead to a shift in thinking about the world. Um the final step of leadership development is transition from thinking about others to thinking organizationally and eventually globally. So as far as organizationally, we discussed things such as crucial conversations and read a book called The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. And um we also during our third year of the program, did a n extensive strategic analysis of a company of our choosing where we did things like a SWOT analysis, an external environmental analysis, and an internal analysis of the company. And so these things forces us to look at an organization and start thinking about it in a different way than just a company that sells a car.

We also got a global perspective through the leadership institute um with through our involvement with things like Global Rhythms at Miami University. Miami Meets India and uh we had speakers from places like India and we had a speaker from Rwanda a few weeks ago, Jean Paul, who um through those people we had a chance to see a culture and a global perspective that we wouldn’t have otherwise gotten um at Miami University in Ohio.

Next once we made this internal cognitive shift, our behavior began to change to align with our new thoughts. Um for example we talked about the difference between management and leadership where management is all about working to improve the present, maintain status quo, and just keep the organization running. Where as leadership is working towards the future with the clear vision um and really working towards improvement and growth. And so we learned about this and as a result of our change in thinking, we then were able to um change our behavior to act as leaders rather than managers

Another example of this would be the difference between acting as a group and acting as a team. Groups coordinate individual efforts um but teams share common purpose and goals and they really work together where each person is vital to the project and they bring what is important but they all rely on each other. And so again as a result of shifting thinking of how we think about other people or how organizations work we were able to level up from groups to teams and in what we were doing.

Finally this shift in behavior will eventually lead to a shift in results increasing success in day to day interactions and leading teams and promoting ideas in enabling organizational change and more. One good example of this that we got to see during our 3 years in the institute was um the second year of the program we started our own “company” which we called Listen4Insight um and the company included a website that hosted a variety of podcasts on the topics of Creativity & Innovation. And so we started from the very bottom with no information about how to conduct an interview, how to technically record a podcast, how do we code our own website to hosts the podcast and that kind of stuff, so we started from absolutely nothing and throughout the year as we worked in teams and worked as leaders we came up with the product that all of us are extremely proud of and again we were able to see this shift in results um as a result of the things that we had learned about shift in thinking and behavior. But that is such a small example compared to what we think we are going to see in the future um even beyond our first job, or maybe our first 2 jobs i think in 10-15 year we are still going to be looking back and saying “wow what I did during the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute completely set me up for success in this area.” And I don't think we could begin to imagine the impacts that it truly will have on us in the future.

So as the name implies, transformational leadership relates to transformation and change and as I talked about I believe that that starts with the shift in thinking and how you view yourself, others, and then the world so I encourage you to find a class an assessment a bug or simply a person who can help push you to learn something new about yourself or the world around you. Growing into the best possible leader and person you can be is a lifelong journey, there is always something new that you can learn that will lead new behaviors and eventually new results. This process of self-discovery and learning how to use that to change not only ourselves but to influence others is jump-started through the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute.

So I’ve had the opportunity to start my transformational journey at a really early age and I’m better prepared to enter the workforce and continue to learn and transform because of it.

Download