Another Option

What happens when a better option, previously considered unavailable, opens up?

I received a packet in the mail yesterday welcoming me to Stern's Langone program, NYU's part-time MBA program.

I was late getting my transcripts in, and Stern was my reach school. The day after I applied, I was accepted by CUNY into their program at Baruch, so the past three months have been focused on getting set up with Baruch.

But now, Stern. Is it worth the additional cost? I'm sure it is. Can I bear that cost? That, I'm not so certain about.

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Leadership

I had an interesting object lesson in leadership today. I volunteer with a group that promotes kayaking on the Hudson river, and today I helped lead a public group across the river and down to Liberty State Park. The public, as we refer to them, are people who do not necessarily kayak regularly, and in a sense are our customers even though our services are free. We want to encourage the public to go out on the water and enjoy a natural resource, hoping this will encourage them to protect it.

Our leader was a guy I'll refer to as D. One of the first obstacles that D faced was that a completely different expedition was being assembled at the same time as ours. The other expedition was not for the public; D's was. Members of the public were showing up and not being told where to go, so it took a while to identify them. After that, the public had to be told which boats were theres, where to assemble, and how to get in the boat. Throw in a last minute re-organization of boats, and the setup process alone was already very confusing to the public.

Seeing how D was overwhelmed, I stepped forward to help out. I offered to get the public in to boats and arranged. D said OK, and I started talking about safety and basic paddling skills - on a long trip, proper technique is important. We got everyone out on boats and I got to know the people we were taking across the river.

As we proceeded out, I pointed to D and said he was our leader. Leading a public trip is a serious charge; while it is safe, there are potential safety issues, and the leader is, in a sense, responsible for other peoples' lives. There is river traffic to contend with, changing weather and river conditions, and the ability of inexperienced people to keep up.

D pointed to me and said, "follow Julie". I had no idea where we were going. I had no idea what direction the tide was flowing. I also don't know the riverfront of the Hudson on the Jersey side very well. I resented being put in a leadership position that I was unprepared for. That said, I did my best.

An overcast day on the Hudson river is not a good place for a closed-door conference to talk about leadership issues. You can't schedule a meeting and write up talking points. You' on the water. In this instance, we were also in front of the public, and open dissension between the expedition leaders can be disastrous. I've seen it happen. It lowers morale and leaves a sour taste in the mouths of everyone.

So, we pressed on. I got us across the river, after making a course correction advised by another volunteer. M was invaluable. He is more experienced and could see what was happening. While D stayed in the very end of our flotilla, M and I talked, coordinated our plans, and kept everyone moving. There was almost no ownership of the trip on D's part on the way down. We managed the regular river hazards - the tide, the weather, and water taxis crossing in front and behind us. It was a safe trip.

We did land successfully and got out for about twenty minutes. On the way back, suddenly D was in front. It was as if he could not wait to get home. He did do one thing that we appreciated - he took a very poor paddler out of a single boat and paired him with his son in a double boat. Other than that, though, he mostly raced ahead with two members of the public who did exceptionally well. The rest of us just tried to keep the public together.

What to do in a situation such as this? The dynamics were not specific to kayaking. We had a nominal leader who, when given additional leadership assistance, basically locked himself in a room and said for us to run things. There was no briefing or formal transfer of responsibility. It wasn't clear if M and I were supposed to be making decisions, as we did on the way down, or not, as was the case on the way up. there was no clear communication.

I myself tend to come from a 'respect the office' approach. The systems in place for managing anything - money, government, inexperienced kayakers - really only work if the role of an office is respected. Once that is gone, the affair can easily become a free-for-all. On the water, that can be disastrous.

I won't lead a mutiny, and would rather not be party to one, but this even tested me. I think I came out well in terms of task management. I was only thrown by being given a level of responsibility I was unprepared for (in real terms, i.e. not having charts or tide tables or even a destination, let alone psychological terms).

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Lingo

I've received my first-term schedule and on it is a class in Business Communication. I know better than to take business communication for granted, but I still think it's funny that such a class is required.

I've always done well with language. I do admit my own shortcomings, which are the shortcomings I see the most in the business world. We are so set on firing out the answer, hitting send on the email to respond to the issue at hand, that we just spew verbiage onto the screen and scan for auto-grammar and spell-check flags. We don't always re-read what we're saying for logic, tone, and nuance. We don't stop to consider what assumptions we are making in our thinking process and take in to account that others may not make those same assumptions.

There's also a tendency to throw in words for effect. I've been around long enough to see certain phrases come and go. These are words that serve mostly as filler, and are used by some more than others, generally to pad out conversations and sound more authoritative and convincing. One of my co-workers is currently fond of saying "X, Y, things of that nature" where X and Y may be two totally unrelated concepts, or may in fact be the only two concepts relevant to a particular conversation. In fact, I've seen at least one meeting where someone asked what else might apply besides X and Y, forcing my co-worker to stammer and backpedal, admitting that indeed, X and Y were the only two relevant items.

Some people go for alliteration and repetition. In my line of work, the phrase 'rack and stack' gets used a lot to refer to installing servers in a data center. Half the people I work with can only say 'racked and stacked' instead of 'installed'. It makes for a sense of working with refugees from a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Or, they like to say 'whack-whack' instead of 'slash-slash' when giving out URLs. It's confusing to non-techies.

Good communication requires using words with standardized definitions, and applying the correct word to the correct concept. It also requires constructing simple sentences that are easy to follow. Most importantly, however, it requires applying critical analysis to eliminate redundant or unnecessary clauses. Even for those who are experienced and know how to write well, Business Communication is a practice that must be maintained on a regular basis. It cannot simply be set aside and taken for granted.