Leadership Ladder

Welcome to another #3NoMoreThan5 in 5. And this is 3 part series! So for those of you who are subscribers, thank you for subscribing. I appreciate the support. And those that are not yet subscribers, I invite you to join the family so you can hear all three segments of this series as well as access all the blog posts that are on my Leadership Ladder website. 

So for this component of my 3 part series, we’re talking about SOS. Emergency! We need help! We’ve all been in those places where there’s a big challenge ahead and there’s a pressing need to address that challenge. So, Part 1, I’m going to call “Sending Out An SOS.” Part 2 is all about how we addressed, planned for and managed through what we needed to do. So that is executing on the SOS! And Part 3 is a discussion on the team that needed to come together to make sure everything happened. That’s Team SOS! Sending out an SOS, executing on the SOS and the team that made it all happen. 

Now “SOS” meaning what? Well for my HR colleagues, we’ve all heard about effective ways to train and teach our people how to do things and SOS is one of them! Show, Observe and Shape. When you show someone how to do something you allow them to do it while you observe, and then you shape and partner with them to improve what they’re doing. That’s a really effective way to teach folks how to evolve and grow their space.

This story is about Laura who was one of my teammates and was tasked with working the pretty sensitive segment of our IT organization at Boeing. Her job was to support the cybersecurity element of the organization. Those of you who may be in the space or near the space know, it’s tough to find talent in that segment of the organization. It’s very specialized. So finding the people with the skill, super challenging. It’s even more daunting when in our space, we needed to find folks with clearance, either secret or top secret, to be able to execute on the work of our clients. And when you put all that together as you’re trying to find the best value for the dollar or reasonably priced folks with those skill sets, this is almost unfathomable because there are so few people with the skills needed. And the market has such a high demand that the folks already doing that work it’s going to cost you an arm and a leg. So for Laura to partner with her team, we needed to find a way to find the talent. We needed to cut the time down that it took to bring that talent in the door. And we needed to make sure that the talent we brought in could not only do the work, but also had some of those qualifications, like secret or top secret clearance, so we could keep our operations moving forward. That’s what sent out the SOS!

The process ahead was all about Laura and I partnering to come up with a plan (which you’ll hear about in the next episode) executing on the SOS. And of course an analysis of what the team needed to do in part 3 of this series. So stay tuned or subscribe and participate in what our adventure looked like!

If you have questions or there are ways I can help you, reach out! mylene@leadership-ladder.com is my email. Again I invite you to subscribe or send a note to me directly, I’d love to be able to help you in your circumstances. Thanks for tuning in, we’ll be back, and I hope to see you then. Cheers!