Alicia reflects on her leadership development experience in the 'Built to Lead' program, describing how it improved her people-management skills, self-understanding, and capacity for vulnerability and accountability. She credits the program and peers with clarifying her beliefs, improving hiring and nonverbal-reading skills, and shifting her mindset toward grace, responsibility, and training her team.
Chapters
Built to lead allowed me from a leadership people manager standpoint gave me so much better context into the people that I was managing. Like gave me this really good gauge that I'm really good at hiring people now. I'm really, really good at reading people and reading situations and understanding non verbal cues based on things that I learned in practice. You saw something in me from a leadership standpoint and I, when I look back, it's like I liked helping the people next to me, I liked making them better. I would looking back, I was at rock bottom as far as like understanding who I was, understanding the direction I wanted to go. Society as a whole is trained to shove rawness down. It's not appropriate to be super vulnerable and share your feelings. My beliefs became so much clearer because I worked with you and worked with peers, people who were going through the same process, just asking me questions. I was able to identify who I am, understand what's driving me inside. It was almost like peeling back an working on my worldview. I feel like I want the world to see what's inside, not just what's on the outside of the onion of Alicia, you trusted me with responsibility which allowed me to like grow and learn. Build to lead is empowering with teaching you how to understand and connect with people. There's a lot of blame in business, especially at the top. And it's easy to look at your boots on the ground people and poke, poke. It's their fault. They're not smart enough, they're not working hard enough. But that's my fault. I am not holding them accountable. I am not training them correctly. Your people are your people and they're the most important piece of your business. Everybody has issues and struggles and lack of clarity and things that are hard for them. And so it allows you to give grace, to remind yourself that we're doing this together.
