I have been very fortunate to have served in many leadership roles.

Below is a picture of one of my crews, the welders, and myself on the left underneath the stern of CVN73.

My very first leadership role was president of my student association at The Apprentice School. https://www.as.edu/ 

Being president showed me how sensitive people were in public settings. Being the leader of a group is very different than being friends with someone. It taught me that just because you are cool with someone and can be great acquaintances doesn’t mean that they will be receptive to being corrected in a public forum.

At the time, my secretary repeatedly misspelled words in the minutes and agenda. There was one time where they misspelled a word that caused most of the the attendees in the meeting to chuckle and I asked them to please be sure to correct the inappropriate mistake for the next meeting.

I was pretty shocked when they pulled me to the side after the meeting and explained that they didn’t appreciate me calling them out in public on their downfall. It was then that I realized some lessons are better taught in private versus public because you never know if some people just don’t have a sense of humor, are shy, embarrassed easily, offended easily, etc.

Although that was a great lesson to be learned, one of the bigger lessons learned was how to work in a team structure. The example given above is just one piece of that. I learned that it is extremely important as a leader to set the tone and what will be accepted and not accepted. In that example I failed and that was how I learned.

This example relates to my future goals because as a lead general foreman it is very important to know your audience and base your response appropriately. If not, you may find yourself in an unfriendly predicament or in the HR office explaining yourself.