LLEP3

Elise, the guest speaker, shares her background in business and her passion for leadership. She talks about her involvement in a professional fraternity and her dream job as a Formula One team senior travel manager. Bella discusses the essential traits of a successful leader, including organization, self-awareness, and adaptability. The concept of adaptability is further explored, including its strengths and weaknesses. Elise shares a challenge she faced due to being directionless and how she learned from it. She also shares an example of a time when her adaptability was a strength as she embraced change on a dance team. Elise advises prospective college students to join organizations that allow them to develop leadership skills and learn from diverse perspectives. The podcast ends with thanking Elise for her insights and discussing the possibility of future episodes. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Leadership Ladies, Episode 3. My name is Emily, and today I will be hosting our podcast. I'm also here with Bella and Maddie, and today we have a special guest. So for today's podcast, we wanted to really dive into leadership and leadership qualities. And today we have Elise here, and she is going to be giving us a little background about herself. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. My name is Elise, and I'm from Hatties House in New Jersey. It's about 15 minutes outside of Philly. And what kind of got me into business was both my parents have been in business, my mom has her own business, and my dad has worked in the hospital system on the business side his whole life. So growing up around business, I kind of knew that that was the direction I would always want to go. And becoming older and really finding my own interests, it still aligns in the business world and will always play to my strengths. So coming out of campus, I knew I wanted to get involved in something that would continue to grow me as a leader. As in high school, I was very involved and had a lot of leadership roles. So I rushed and joined a professional fraternity called AK Psy. And over the past six weeks, I have learned a lot of professional development skills and how to work well with not only as a leader, but with other leaders in a group. And right now, my dream job would be to be a Formula One team senior travel manager. And that's just kind of a person who is in charge of all the traveling for the team for the 47 week long season. And traveling to all different countries, you're in charge of all the papers, all the visas, booking all the hotels and everything like that. And you're in charge of a whole team that helps you along with those duties. That's awesome. Thank you so much for introducing yourself. It's so great to hear about your leadership roles. And now we're going to pass the mic off to Bella. I think it's so important to understand how to become a successful leader, especially in college when you're trying to find your voice. Being surrounded by leaders in your frat, what traits do you think are essential to becoming a successful leader? I feel like the most important traits are definitely organization, self-awareness and adaptability. I feel like organization is really important because it shows confidence and time management definitely also falls under that, which is a big thing that I know a lot of people eventually have to learn. And being organized just makes people respect you because if you have a plan, even if it makes you appear like you have a plan, even if you don't, which is key in leading a room. Having self-awareness is really important because you need to know when you mess up and be able to take constructive criticism. You don't need to not play the victim, especially if you have other people working under you. You need to be able to hear other people's perspective and make them feel welcome. This will make them gain even more respect for you and want to work with you. But I feel like overall adaptability is the most important because you could have someone quit working for you or have any situation thrown at you and you need to be able to adapt and stay calm in those situations and control the room and make everybody else that is under you feel secure and in control as well in order to get the best result. So it's really interesting that you mentioned adaptability. Adaptability is one of the strengths recognized by CliftonStrengths that we talked about in our class. CliftonStrengths defines adaptability as someone who lives in the now and takes things as they come. These people tend to discover their futures one day at a time. An interesting part of CliftonStrengths is they also name the strengths and weaknesses of each strength. They call them balconies and basements. A balcony of adaptability is people are flexible, they're comfortable in times of change, easy to get along with, and they go with the flow. But some of the basements of adaptability are people tend to be directionless, can be indecisive, and inconclusive. So after hearing about balconies and basements, would you be able to tell us about a leadership challenge that you might have faced because of one of your basements in terms of adaptability, and how did you work to overcome that challenge? Although adaptability can be important, obviously it can have some downsides. I personally experienced the basement of being directionless in one of my past jobs. So I have been working there for two months, and my manager recognized how hard I've been working and how quickly I picked up on things. So he had to leave early one day, and they had a trainee coming in. So he asked me to take on the trainee as it was her third and final day of training, and just kind of watch over her and make sure that she has a full understanding of it. So since it was her third day, I kind of assumed that she already knew most things. So I didn't, I only explained things when she asked, but I probably should have given her more direction in the beginning of it. So because of this, an order got messed up, and there was an upset customer. And obviously this fell on me, because even though I wasn't the one who messed up the order, I was still in charge of the person who was still in training and needed more direction. So from this, I've learned that I definitely need to not assume what people know and kind of check in with what they know and ask them if they know all these things. And if they don't, then further elaborate, not just assume that they know everything. Thank you so much for being vulnerable with us and sharing a time in the past where your strength of adaptability appeared more as a basement than balcony. It's awesome to hear that you were able to work through a time of weakness and learn from that. Would you say that there's been a time where your leadership role reflected a balcony of adaptability? Yeah, I'd say I definitely experienced a lot of balconies. One that really sticks out to me is being comfortable in times of change. From my junior to senior year in high school, I was on the Dancing Mom High School, but junior to senior year, we had a switch of coaches, and a lot of the girls on the team were kind of uneasy by this. They didn't really know what was going to happen or where the direction of the team was going to go. But I am very comfortable in times of change, so I kind of was excited for the new change and to see what the different directions we could go in were and change the negative things but also keep the positive. So because of this, girls started looking to me for this, and then eventually I gained the role of captain after we voted because the new coach didn't feel like it was her place to pick a new captain, so she put it to the team to pick. And because I stepped up and took on being a leader in this time of change, people felt comfortable enough to vote for me and saw me as a leader. It's so cool to hear that you just naturally pick up leadership roles everywhere you go. So building off that, what guidance would you offer to a prospective college student seeking to cultivate their leadership skills during their time in college? For any students coming into college, I would say just join at least one organization that gives you the opportunity to lead people and grow your professional skills. Even if you're just a member in the beginning but you know that you can eventually gain a leadership position and that really interests you, I think it's important to do that. If you can join multiple organizations, that would be awesome, kind of highlighting all your different skills that you have and being surrounded by people who also have those skills but that are also different from you. I think you need to join at least one organization that's full of people who are different from you because you'll learn the most from them because they grew up differently, they have different backgrounds, and maybe even different beliefs. But at the end of the day, there will still be a connection, something you relate on, and that'll be being a natural leader and wanting to help people and wanting to do things. And learning different people's perspectives will overall make you a better leader because it will make you more adaptable. Thank you so much for joining us, Elise. You gave us so much wonderful advice and it was great to hear an outsider's perspective about what leadership means to you and how you've used your skills to prosper as a freshman in college. Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed my time today. Thank you guys again for tuning in. Unfortunately, this is our last episode but perhaps we will be back in the future. Thanks again and have a good one. Bye!