Posted by Matthew Bernardin in Questions for all candidates : Leadership
I would like to pose a question to my fellow candidates (I’ll answer this too)

I am a big believer in that while success is all well and good that some of the biggest and best lessons in life are learnt by failure.

Seeing as how we are seeking the highest position of leadership in stf I would like you to recount your greatest or most memorable failure within that area in stf and what you learnt from the experience.

– Matt B

Well first thank you for limiting this to just one time we failed. I think I dodged a bullet there. :)

I don’t really rank my experiences in that way. Everything to me is a learning experience even if you think you succeeded in all imaginable areas. However for this question I will recount a time, many years ago, where I was a Fcomm. I thought I would roll out a new thing for the Fleet and spoke to a few people and then put it out there. It was not received well by a few people and there was immediate backlash. In the end it caused some conflict between me and at least one CO but in fairness to this person others pointed out issues as well. Instead of stopping and saying how I could communicate this better I just put it out there and when there was backlash I hunkered down and tried to explain it “better”. I’m not putting everything on my shoulders because the issue had other issues but in the end I had an opportunity to stop and reset it all and I did not. So that came down to communication. If I had communicated the idea better, presented it better and brought in the stakeholders better then I imagine it might have been received better. A flipside is I might not have rolled the idea out at all.

So my takeaway from that was that, especially in a text based environment, you need to really take your time communicating what you want to do. When we take out the face to face aspects of communication a lot gets lost. You have to really make it clear where your going with your idea and be ready to explain it multile times if need be. All of which should be done way before you try and implement it. I learned that lesson and have applied it many times since to a better received effect. As the world gets less face to face and more virtual its a good lesson to learn.

Sidney