Being a leader is a difficult task; despite having many years of leadership experience in school and the workplace, I struggled to effectively lead in my role at Omni Biotech. Omni has a small engineering team of my co-workers and myself, with Will providing oversight and acting more in a stakeholder role. Due to my experience as both a leader and the developer of the core application, I assumed the leadership role in the group, becoming responsible for the timeline to finish the application and the subject matter expert for any questions.
My biggest challenges were understanding my authority in the role, balancing my time to succeed in my work, managing my responsibilities, and mentoring my co-worker. During our leadership skills session on 29th of March, I had the opportunity to voice some of these concerns and reflect on my situation. My biggest takeaway was focusing on excelling in my role and asking for a clear definition from Will. I actioned this the following week, and it relieved a lot of my stress and allowed me to act more confidently in my role, as Will was eager to have me take charge.
During the reflection time in our leadership session, I thought about what being a leader meant to me and how I want to be remembered. I realised that the type of leader I admired and wanted to become was someone who enabled others—changing my mindset from seeing my co-worker’s requests as interruptions to opportunities to help him grow as a developer and improve our team environment and output. I’m still struggling to structure my day for these development sessions, but I believe the time invested will pay off in the long term. This experience is a good reminder that I still have skills to develop and grow, and it’s important to take time to reflect.
Artefact: Notes from the NPSC Leadership Session