This week, I’ve been challenged to reflect on my top skills. What specific abilities do I bring to a team or role, and how have I exercised/demonstrated/leveraged those skills in the past? Three of the first things that came to mind were organizing, adapting, and staying calm under pressure.
Organizing.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved to organize things. When I was young, organizing my Legos was one of my favorite pastimes—sorting by type, size, color. I constantly refined my system for greater efficiency and ease of building.
As I grew older, I expanded from organizing the tangible to also organizing the intangible. In one of my previous roles, I was in charge of running a residential training program for teenagers. For two weeks in January, the home was bursting at the seams with several different teams. One team produced dozens of media projects; another team wrote curriculum and workshops; yet another team wrote and rehearsed tens of short speeches and presentations; and one last team worked behind the scenes of it all, cooking, cleaning, and ensuring the house ran smoothly. All of this activity culminated in a national winter retreat for the organization I worked for.
Not only did I specifically lead one of these teams, but I was in charge of organizing the overall schedule for each day. With nearly 30 people across multiple teams working on projects simultaneously—often in the same space and competing for the same resources—creating a house-wide schedule that worked was a vital but complicated task! Each evening, I checked in with the team leads for each team to see what progress had been made and what they needed for the following day, and created a schedule to accommodate everyone. This challenged me to think not just about the needs of my team, but to consider the big picture. In the end, each team had both the time and resources to succeed, and together we hosted a fantastic retreat.
Whether it’s organizing the physical space around me (knowing exactly where to find the paper clips is important!) or organizing time, schedules, and teams, I bring these experiences with me into any situation or environment.
Adapting.
In addition to being a linear, logical thinker who loves organizing and creating systems, I’m also a very adaptive problem solver and creative thinker. Once, I was part of a team that hosted a series of communication conferences for students K-12. We’d just finished running the largest event in the history of the organization (over 300 participants) when we were told that our next conference—only three days away—had only ten students registered.
With such a small group, very little of our previously prepared material would work. Despite the fact that we’d been looking forward to a few days off between conferences, a teammate and I took on the challenge of creating an entirely new event, designed around the specific needs of these ten students.
In less than 24 hours, my teammate and I had the new event ready to go. We’d changed the schedule, written new workshops, designed new presentations, sought feedback from mentors, and prepped our teammates for their roles. This project challenged me to think outside the box and consider possibilities, not obstacles.
What could have been an incredibly difficult event for my team turned out to be an enormous success. We made individual connections with the students, something that was impossible at our larger conferences, and pioneered an entirely new type of event for the organization. Later, my teammate and I adapted the new model even further, and pitched the organization’s executive team on how we could incorporate many of the most successful elements from this small, intimate event into future, larger conferences.
Calm Under Pressure.
Even as I write, this strikes me as an interesting choice for one of my top three skills. But I sincerely believe it is a skill, a strength I bring to teams and workplaces. When crises happen and things go wrong—or simply don’t go as expected—I choose to focus on what can be done to make the situation better.
For the last three years, I’ve worked as a 911 call taker and police dispatcher for my local police department. I handle life-and-death situations on a daily basis, talking people through the worst moments of their lives. Remaining calm when callers are not helps de-escalate situations, allowing me to obtain essential information quickly.
While working on the dispatch side, I often worked with 15-25 officers at a time, dispatching calls for service according to priority. But whether it’s a low-priority call or a call that requires a lights-and-sirens response, any situation can become volatile in a split-second. Choosing to respond calmly and deliberately in these moments, rather than making a knee-jerk reaction, lets the officers know I have their back as the situation unfolds.
Whether it’s working a dispatch radio or making unexpected, last-minute adjustments to a project, staying calm in the middle of the storm enables me to work efficiently and prioritize tasks, rather than getting sidetracked and losing sight of the goal.
Organizing. Adapting. Staying calm under pressure. I can’t wait to find new opportunities in which to practice these skills!