By, Jason Fancher, Evan Pringle, Jake Groth, Jordan Millet, and Jenna Grant
Each year, the AIA Dallas Emerging Leaders Program has cultivated and mentored young leaders in three areas of leadership: the firm, the profession, and our community. As each class takes part in a series of sessions, they offer a synopsis of lessons learned.
The AIA Dallas Emerging Leaders Program recently wrapped up its 2024 class with a last session on the topic of bringing it all together and building relationships. The following are excerpts from the class that focuses on these topics as well as recapping all the previous classes.
Be influential. What does this mean? It means, be the power to cause change. It means, identify opportunities to move the room. Influence does not have to be large scale; it can be in small ways. While we should focus on influence as a positive, we need to acknowledge that it can also be used as a negative. Influence can become “manipulation” if it is not “mutually beneficial”. Some people may seem naturally influential; however, it can be taught / learned.
Build Relationships. We discussed the importance of building and also maintaining relationships. New to this year, each person was encouraged to participate in “walk & talks” between each session, which influenced us to build relationships with one another. The walk & talks were a predetermined pairing of two individuals in the class who scheduled a 15-minute conversation with one another. Our final class brought it all together by having our final check outs be to go around the room and say something interesting you learned about someone during a walk & talk.
The walk & talks guided the concept of connections and relationships. We began our talks as two strangers, looking for commonality in hopes of getting to know each other. By the end we typically walked away with a new-found friend and colleague – someone we could rely on if we ever needed anything. This influenced us to stick together through our class sessions, assignments and group projects. Finally, they allowed us to build relationships with each other, so that we may have someone to call upon further on during our careers.
Sweat the small stuff. Our speaker for this session, Clint Menefee – Vice President at Smith group, coined this term and spoke to us about the importance of considering all the small decision that go into a project, to make is successful. He taught us that each of these small decisions make up a larger moment that can either make or break a project. He also spoke about building and maintaining relationships throughout your career and gave us an example of how you never know where a connection will lead you in the future.
6 Universal Rules. We discussed techniques for using these rules to benefit us and the connections we make. We found “Reciprocation” to be very insightful – it is our belief that a favor must be repaid, and that we have a tough time saying “No”. We also learned that products and opportunities seem more valuable when the supply appears limited. For this reason, people often over-pay for things in times of crisis (gas, toilet paper, etc.) or something as trivial as a baseball because it is signed by our favorite player. This relates to the rule of “Scarcity”.
6 Universal Rules
- Reciprocation
- Scarcity
- Authority
- Consistency
- Consensus
- Liking
How to Create Change. We were introduced to 8 steps that can promote creating change. In “preparing” for change, the issue must be identified, and a sense of urgency must be established. Otherwise, it risks getting delayed or dismissed. A strategy / vision should be developed on how to implement the desired change.
To effectively “manage” the change, the strategy / vision must be communicated and made achievable through short-term wins or milestones. It is also important to approach your ideas early with the people being affected, so that unforeseen shortcomings can be avoided and buy-in can be established.
Once a new idea or change has been made, it should be “reinforced”. This can be done by congratulating and recognizing those who made the change happen. It can also be by discovering other ways positive change can occur. These small wins can add up and consolidate to product even more change to the point it influences an organization’s culture, leading to even larger improvements.
Suzanne ended the class with an end cap summary of all the ELP classes:
- The power of change.
- Go slow to go fast.
- Relationships happened at the speed of trust.
- Play the long game and everyone wins.
- Beginning, stick together, future relationships.
- Dallas runs on relationships.
- You cannot manage others unless you know how to manage yourself.
- If you cannot be a good follower, then you cannot be a good leader.
- You are the average of 5 habits of the 5 people you are around the most.
- Never confuse motion with action.
These principles will help guide us into the future as we being to take on leadership roles. We must be able to manage ourselves, others, and our connections to be an effective leader. We must know how to make changes in our environments and be able to trust the speed at which they happen. We also need to be mindful of the company we keep and must know the difference between motion and action. ELP is a liberating structure that teaches vertical and horizontal growth and provides us with principal, techniques, and relationships that we can take with us throughout our careers.
