We have made it to Module 2, reaching your full leadership potential. This is a last in this series of setting you up from the perspective of your own unique personality and strengths and now choices that you are going to make in your career that lead you to a position of responsibility and accountability in a technical organization. I've created my own definition of what it would take or what it will take to reach your full leadership potential. I have to ask you, what did you think about that video reaching your leadership potential? The gentleman basically said there were three things in common of the many, many highly successful people that he has interviewed. He said the first was they thought about their career like a scavenger hunt. They were searching for the next opportunity, and it was usually within an arm's reach away. The fact that it wasn't a ladder, it wasn't a clear progression you do this, and then you do this, and then you do this, and you could lay it out from the first day you went to work until the last day when you retire and you are going to follow those steps. He said more it was scavenging from here to here to here to here. The second was it was incremental movements, not very large, significantly different changes from position to position. More contingent moves. When I do this, now I have the skills and the experiences which allow me to do this, and in that scavenger hunt mentality, I might have a couple of different opportunities that I can build upon what I already know. Then finally, what is inherent to you that makes you you, that moves with you regardless of the position you take. You know what? Those are your talents, those are your strengths. It's your personality type. It is those tasks that you know energize you. Those kinds of environments that energize you. You can learn skills for a new position. But there are things that are uniquely you that motivate you, as we've said, and inspire you and that allow you to excel. You need to see those things in your next several career moves. As we said, never take a position where you look at all of the things associated with that position and you find nothing that motivates and inspires you. You probably will not do a great job with it. In my vernacular, I think of it as a Trivial Pursuit Piece of Pie with pie pieces, and so many of these are the choices that you're going to make in your career. Again, this class is aspirational. I am working on the premise that you want to be a leader in a technical organization. You want to be a senior leader, and maybe a very, very senior leader in a technical organization. You are not that now, which means you have some runway ahead of you, which is brilliant for you taking this course and thinking about the choices that you have ahead of you and maybe putting into perspective those kinds of things, those kinds of experiences that you want to collect in your career bucket as you move around and hopefully up in an organization. There is the entire pie. Let's start with a solid professional reputation. That is by far, I would say, the most foundational element of reaching your leadership potential is building a reputation. It stands on its own. It is in the room when you're not there. It is what people talk about you when you are not there because your reputation is the story so far of your career, your successes, and some of your challenges. Think about what your reputation is now and think about what you want it to be. Are you known as delivering on your commitments? That you can be accountable and shape a culture of accountability? That you know who your stakeholders are, how to create value? Do you know how to manage pressure, stress? What is your one signature competency? It might be something that you've displayed maybe in the first two or three positions that you've held. It might have been an engineering competency, a science competency, a mathematical competency. Something that got you in the door and allowed you to take the next couple of steps. What is that? Are you known as honest and ethical, authentic, and people like working for you? You are building your reputation every day, every interaction, every relationship that you make. Just remember that because your reputation is it's incremental and it grows with you, and some backwards steps makes it a little bit more difficult to build this solid foundation. You might have to do some remediation if there was some big missteps here. But as I say, your reputation precedes you. Second, diverse career experiences. This is now a choice. You have choices as you're scavenger hunting of what you want to do. You can choose to continue to excel in that signature competence. There are many, many individuals that become the very best in their field by following that signature competence, and they become the best guidance, navigation, and control engineer analyst ever, or they become the best research engineer in a given area. On the other hand, leadership requires some experience across a diverse set of fields that allows you basically to walk in other's shoes. One way to think about it is the life cycle of a program in whatever industry you're in, have you experienced the frontend startup, or even before that, the creation of a new idea and bringing it to market, all the way through the development of it and then the operation of it? Have you worked in multiple geographic locations, multiple offices? Have you taken special assignments outside of your specific signature competence? Have you moved to be on the technical part and begun to understand and accept roles and responsibilities in cost and schedule and program management? Do you step in when mediation is required? In conflict, do you help negotiations happen? Again, these are choices. You don't necessarily have to do any one of these. Yet when you look at how organizations pick their leadership, and if you remember, we talked about the leadership traits in the United States and then Forbes top 11, you're going to see that diverse career experiences are important for the top leaders in an organization. So what's the next one? Enduring professional relationships. Can you build relationships and handle the diverse perspectives that come with interacting with your supply chain, with other functional elements within your organization? Are you a good networker? Are you a good mentor? Are you a good mentee? Are your relationships built both inside the organization and outside the organization with professional societies? Getting to know others in the same field, but not in the same organization. Looking at the entire realm of stakeholders, not just employees, but the community, and your supply chain, and your customers, and your shareholders, do you know who they are? Have you made relationships with them? Are they satisfied to both you and them? Again, as you move up in your career, think about the relationships that you build. It's very easy and very comfortable to just build relationships with people that look just like you, think just like you. This is not that. This is developing diverse and successful relationships with others that represent different elements and different schools of thought, which makes you a much more broader individual and a better leader. The next one, authentic personal characteristics. This is who you are. A lot of this is your natural talent. This is what drives you. This is your personality plus your strengths, plus how you were brought up and what inspires and motivates you. But there are a couple of things that organizations look for in their leadership: authenticity, a high degree of integrity, confidence, ability to make a decision, have a future view, be empathetic, and have a sense of humility, being able to be creative and innovative and manage those who are, a sense of enthusiasm without cynicism, be honest and have a high degree of ethics. This is really your internal compass that drives you. Yet some of these things you can work on and you can think about as you begin to build that reputation. Next one, foundational domain knowledge. Again, this is a choice. You can stay in that signature competence that which got you hired, that which probably made up the first several successful steps in your career. Yet, have you branched out? If you're a software engineer, have you gone in to and taken on a hardware engineering level? Have you taken on a system engineering role? Have you gone outside of your technical domain into other supporting domains and understood what the role of contract management, contract negotiation, finance, planning, supply chain management, and program management? This foundational domain knowledge is the choices of opportunities that you have to begin to fill out that experience base that organizations want in their leaders. They want to know that you've seen something different, you've seen, as we've said, other locations, and you've spent some time really exploring and understanding these other domains. Then finally, inclusive leadership competencies. We are going to look at many of these in this specialization. Communicating with clarity, whether it's orally or written. Being an inclusive leader and knowing what that means, engaging your employees, your teams. Having an executive or leadership presence, that competence and confidence that's required in leadership, such that there is a level of trust that as you make decisions and change course on strategy, that people will follow you. Are you a strategic thinker? Have you built teams, effective, high-performing teams? Do you know how to do that? How do you develop talent? How do you begin to develop the next set of leaders? Do you show it in what you do and what you say? When you put it all together, wow, it looks like a lot. But there are a lot of choices here. This entire piece of pie is made up of your unique talents, skills, experiences, personality type, and the choices you make in your career. You know what? Everyone is going to look different, as you can imagine, which makes it beautiful. It makes a nice choice of who to select for the next leadership opportunities. I want to put this in your hip pocket, as you begin to make choices on your next set of positions. Because again, as I said, as organizations look for their next leaders, they are looking for elements of all of these. Thanks. We'll see you in the next class.