Today was my training day. We jumped around to many different topics. One of the focuses of the day was job searching, applying, and leadership. I really want to explore leading a small design team in a lead designer or art director capacity. I haven’t had much on the job leading experience so it’s new to me. I am not a natural leader, but I do enjoy mentoring and being a more silent lead. I enjoy taking charge of training and communication and graphic design decisions at my current job. I have been promoted to a creative lead position and hope to learn more leadership qualities from that. David talked to me about what kind of leader I could be.
There are two types of leaders, “the boss” and “the guide”. Guides assist in the growth of the team along with efficiency and productivity. Bosses simply give you a task and expect you to make it happen. More concerned with numbers and results. The way they make choices for the team is more logical, less emotion and care. I prefer to be more of a “guide”.
We further discussed some potential leadership situations I could run into. One was about salary, giving people raises based on merit or work ethic etc. The other was about efficiency and project management, giving the project loads equally to the team members but also being efficient in who you assign which project. Thus keeping in mind who is the most experienced and efficient in completing tasks while not forgetting about the slowest member as well. As a leader, you have to find fairness but also what is best for the company and your team.
I realized that leadership can be hard and you need to have the ability to make hard decisions sometimes that could make your people unhappy. There can also be a lot of math involved. haha