Leadership Development

I've been feeling really stagnant in work and life in general lately. I graduated with my Masters degree and had started a PhD program, but I was feeling stretched too thin and the program made the most sense as the thing to go.

But I've learned about myself that if I'm not learning I'm withering. So, while I can't do a rigorous PhD program right now, I can still be intentional about learning new things.

I've been in my current position at work for almost 4 years. I've been in supervisory positions before but this has been my first director position. And a dual director position at that. I'm currently recovering from an episode of pretty bad burnout and have been reflecting on what went wrong. What led to here?

I think a big part of it is I know how to be a doer and I know leadership in theory, but I've never learned how to be a director. It's one thing to know the various leadership models and an entirely different thing to apply them at 10am on a Tuesday.

So I decided to intentionally pursue leadership development after 4+ years of being a leader. In some ways, I feel like a brand new manager, realizing for the first time what it actually means to lead a team.

I took to ChatGPT, as one does these days, and asked it to create a reading list for me. I word dumped everything I could about my current situation and asked for recommendations. Here's the list it gave me:

• The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo

• The New One-Minute Manager

• Radical Candor

• Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

• First Break All the Rules

• The Culture Code

It gave brief descriptions and explanations for why these books and why this order. It sounded like as good a place as any to start. So I currently have The Making of a Manager in my hands and I'm beginning to read through it.

I also plan to look for a conference or online trainings in leadership development that I can participate in to learn more and hopefully find others in the same boat as me. My position is somewhat siloed and unique at my university, so it can get pretty lonely. I'd like to have others I can turn to to ask questions even if it's "am I crazy for feeling this way?"

I plan to treat this experience like my graduate courses and write reflections following each chapter or experience I participate in. The difference being I control the pace and not a professor. Think of it as a solely directed study in Leadership How-To.