Discover Top Posts Tagged with #allison garza

Discovering my Authentic Leadership

I believe I am who I am because I danced ballet growing up. When I was young, I competed in a competition five years in a row, and not once did I place. I trained year around for the annual competition, and each year I tried harder than the last. It was unfortunate that I never had the opportunity to attend finals, but what I did get was persistence unlike many twelve year-olds get to learn. I learned commitment and dedication and my senior year of high school that paid off when I walked away with the grand prize at another competition in Las Vegas. Looking back, failing so much made it easier to get up and today, I do not fear stepping up to a challenge. It is my ability to learn from my failures and take risks in order to pursue my passions that has made me the leader I am today.

A large part of what I believe makes an authentic leader is their ability to stay true to what they love rather than what would make them more recognized or rewarded. I believe that is what has made me authentic is that I lead only in endeavors in which I have a passion and people I work with see that in me. That passion for dance has now been transformed into a passion for engineering design. I have an easy time becoming involved with projects like building wind turbines or a solar car, because of a passion I have for sustainable design and that is what has made those projects successful. But what I struggle with is maintaining balance. I was successful in dance, but at the expense of spending time with my family and friends. In college, I have thrown myself into so many exciting projects, but at the expense of having time to dance or volunteer like I did before. I believe that my leadership style easily makes those sacrifices, but to be as authentic as I can be, I must focus on remaining grounded.

As I get ready to begin my internship next week, I think about how I will be an authentic leader in the company. Growing up I have found that the environment in which it is easiest to be myself is one where I am constantly being challenged. I have no doubt that I will be challenged as I immerse myself in this new professional environment and culture. I look forward to finding those challenges that leave a lasting impact at Virgo Engineers and performing through those challenges authentically. Over the course of the next nine weeks I plan to challenge myself to create a network and support system within the company that will enable us to be as successful as we can be. I also will strive to achieve a balance in my daily life by finding time to exercise, keep in touch with family and friends as well as dedicate myself to exceeding expectation in the company.

#Allison Garza

Setting myself up for success

What I have realized from reading this article is how little I know about myself. I made a list of all the questions that were asked and tried to answer each, and I found that there were several I didn’t know the answers to, or if I did, it took a lot of thought to get to the answer. Some on the other hand were more apparent to me. For example, I have always known that I learned more by doing and writing things down than any other method, and I believe myself to be more of a listened than a reader. I know I work well under stress and when it comes to producing results, I often assume the decision-making role. However, when it comes to describing my strengths or values or what I should contribute, I struggle.

It seems that people perform through their strengths and make decisions based on their values but do so subconsciously. We rarely complete a task and think back to the particular strength or value that made it so successful, but it is making those associations that will bring light to what we should contribute to other projects. I believe I am a task-oriented person and a strength of mine is understanding the scope of a long term project and having the ability to break it down into tangible milestones. I can then devise a strategy to execute the plan that will be most time and resource effective. I think this will be very useful over the course of my internship. Because we are given a lot of freedom, I will be able to take the project that is given to me and create my own tasks within the project and a time oriented plan that will help me effectively complete them to successfully complete the project.

On the other hand, I believe I perform at my best in teams where each one of us has similar values and work ethics. These teams are a great source of advice and creativity for ways to approach a particular problem or situation. It has been expressed to us that our mentor would like each of us to have our own project. Although I also like working individually on different projects, I am not performing at my best when I do which may cause a challenge over the course of the summer. I know that I will need to create that environment in which I am performing at my best and seek advice from those around me even if they aren’t necessarily working on the same project as I am, and in turn can help them create the environment in which they strive.

#Allison Garza

My Developmental Network

Our cohort mentor at Virgo is in neither of the departments I have projects in over the summer. As such, he has taken up the role of an outside superior. Despite not being in either department, he is very well connected, and a great source of exposure. Anytime we may come with a question that has arisen in our process, if he doesn’t know the answer he is always able to point us in the direction of someone who does. Also, because we are in a new environment culturally, he helps with many psychosocial functions. His counseling on personal issues that have arisen have created a trust and friendship between us.

Because our mentor is not departmentally involved with my projects, I have had to seek other forms of mentorship. I am currently working in the design and operational excellence departments within Virgo, and in each I have different types of mentors that have helped me build my developmental network. In the design department, my task is to help with the current redesign of one of the valves. However, with very little experience or knowledge in this field, I have sought a mentor that has kindly taken up teaching me the important aspects of the designs and the problems they face. It is by understanding these problems that I am able to work on my assignments.

In the operational excellence project, we are required to observe the process on the shop floor. I have found that having a mentor who sits in a desk upstairs has not been as beneficial as building relationships with different people on the floor. They are able to answer my questions with more updated information and a personal perspective. My two mentors on the shop floor have been able to give me the coaching and feedback necessary to perform the analysis required to make our project successful.

At the same time as I search for mentors, I find ways to make those relationships mutually beneficial. With our cohort mentor, I have found that he has implemented a very loose structure of what he expects from us. As such, I have worked to create a plan that will enable myself to be as productive as possible while finding ways to keep him posted with new developments and struggles we are facing. By taking a proactive approach, he has been more willing to find more challenging assignments and help in creating our developmental networks. With my design mentor, I have taken notes and requested additional reading material to help me learn more quickly. Because he has seen that I have thoroughly understood the material and am able to prove that understanding, he has trusted me to do the work he has taught me for a new set of valves. With my operational excellence mentors, their coaching and feedback has enabled me to also take their perspective of shop floor efficiency and find ways to make their suggestions a reality that will help them beyond my time here.

#Allison Garza

Ingredient for success: failure

Failure is a good friend of mine. I agree that school is not a conducive environment to learn from failing. I feel like I have studied at some wonderful schools, but I can’t think of any time that I failed in them. I got my grittiness from dancing. I entered a competition eight years in a row and eight years in a row I lost, but each year I decided I wouldn’t give up, I would train harder than I had the previous year, and in the end, I was a much better dancer than I would have ever been if I had given up. From this I took away that hard work and perseverance can take you anywhere you want to go in life, and I strive to implement that in every facet of my life. I am rarely ever discouraged, I thrive on challenges, and I believe I am where I am today because failure does not faze me.

This has been extremely helpful throughout the summer. When the internship started, my zesty side kicked into overdrive, as I was eager to start on a project that would add value to the company. We started out the summer with a tour of the factory and our mentor explained the types of projects were done in previous years. It was sad to hear that although last years project was by far their favorite, it had not been implemented in the end. In hearing this, I made a mental note that I would do what it took to assure that we implement something that will help Virgo long after we are gone.

Early in the summer, we set a plan for how we would execute the project they gave us. Since then, we have had several setbacks. When we made the plan we didn’t thoroughly understand the process, and as such we had to make modifications as the weeks progressed that lengthened the time before the project would be complete. At that point, I spent more time talking to different supervisors and operators on the shop floor that greatly helped me gain perspective on the new direction the project needed to be heading in. Also, a large part of our project is being able to identify possible Kaizen Bursts, possible places for improvement, and gaining the perspective of those I talked to helped me formulate better bursts.

The importance of doing this became clear in a meeting we had this week with the director of operational excellence. Our failed plan in the beginning enabled up to create a new path we devised ourselves which allowed us to be more creative and dig deeper into possible Kaizen Bursts. The director was so impressed, he told us we needed to start on the individual bursts we suggested right away and later that day I helped with the design of a new tool that will enable the assembly area to be more efficient and will work this week on its implementation.

#Allison Garza

Managing two sides of the boss-style spectrum

Because my two bosses have very different styles, understanding their styles has been vital to producing work that has the greatest impact.

Kiran, the Operational Excellence director, is very results driven. I found this out in our first meeting where we were defining our project within his department. During that meeting, he wasted no time in talking about possibilities for the summer, he defined what he envisioned we would be doing and told us to immediately create a plan to execute our project. Kiran quickly put us into contact with everyone we would need to talk to in order to make our project successful within the same day, and later that afternoon we had started. Understanding this has enabled me to prepare for meetings differently than I would have otherwise. Throughout our project, I have made it a point to not only identify where efficiency is lacking but also to propose two to three possible solutions and a tangible set of steps to address each problem. This has made recent meetings with Kiran very efficient. In the meeting we had last week to update him on our progress, I proposed what could be fixed in the assembly area with a plan, and later that day I met with someone on his team to begin the designs for a new tool that will decrease the cycle time for the assembly process. If I hadn’t provided that plan, we would have had to meet again to discuss it, wasting more time making it less likely that the action will be implemented before we leave.

Whereas we have very loose expectations from Kiran, Amit, my boss in the design department, laid out a plan to complete our project on the first day detailing the different aspects we would be covering over the course of the summer and tentative due dates for each part. I began taking meticulous notes over what he would teach me about the new soft-seated ball valve seat designs. This became invaluable in later meetings. He likes to teach by asking questions and not until I know and understand the answers will he continue. With the nature of what I was learning, there was a lot to remember so having studied my notes before meetings enabled me to be prepared making meetings as effective as possible. Unlike Kiran’s oral presentations, Amit likes for me to present my updates in a report format. These reports are comprehensive of what I have learned and include designs I have worked on.

What has enabled me to be successful in producing work for such different bosses is that part of each of their styles is similar to my own. I am the type of person that needs to write everything down, so my reports to Amit come out of my personal notes, whereas, being very results driven and strategy based, creating tangible plans for Kiran come from my wanting to implement and execute these plans to improve their efficiency before I leave this summer.

#Allison Garza

Adaptability and Collaboration is Key

Early in the summer while we were making a plan to complete our project, I pushed one particular strategy more than I should have considering the very limited knowledge I had about how the factory floor worked. Over time, we saw that we were not able to receive data fast enough with that strategy and that the majority of the data we were receiving was inconclusive and would require we extrapolate in order to be able to provide any useful information which was the opposite of what they wanted. The first time the Value Stream Map (VSM), a tool that is used to identify the associated cycle and lead times involved at every step of the process from receiving an order to sending out the final products, guesses were made about how much each step took which made their VSM’s times vary from what was actually happening as the valve was produced. Without more concrete data, we would never be able to suggest which areas in the manufacturing process are the most inefficient and need to be addressed.

Although it only set us back about a week and a half, that was time that pushed back the completion date of our project. After reading the article, I believe the principle we used to address this failure was more collaboration. We stopped our trips to the shop floor for a day and discussed what we had learned from our time there. We talked to the people who had made the VSM before and asked how they came to their numbers and what could be the best avenues to take to receive the most accurate data. In the end, we created a three fold plan that took everything Anand, Ariel, and I had learned and addressed our three parts of the manufacturing process uniquely. We each decided to adopt a means we thought was best for our division of the process while also incorporated each others strategies to maximize our data collection which in the end would enable us to make clearer judgments of the actions that would need to be suggested to cut the overall lead time of the manufacturing process.

By also creating a system where we talk about results on a daily basis, we are able to make incremental changes in our processes which has helped us create a new VSM that incorporates more parts in the process than the previous one had and back up our decision to add the new steps through the data we were receiving. In the end, we believe we will be turning in a more comprehensive document despite the fact that it strayed from the style that has used for years. Our close collaboration enabled us to bring some innovation to creating the VSM, and when we discussed our findings with Kiran, he was happy we had done so because we were able to identify several more kaizen bursts for parts of the process that were not depicted in the original VSM.

#Allison Garza