Kristen Smith
ORG300
March 28, 2014
Bursting the Leadership Bubble My mother once said to me during a difficult time in my life, “You can’t win any game unless you’re committed to winning”. She may have read that somewhere in Readers Digest or she came up with it herself. The fact was, she shared this with me when I was done playing the game of a dissolving marriage of sixteen years and felt like my lead role in life besides being a mother of two amazing son’s Joe and Jack was gone forever. The game had ended and I was not the leader of my life anymore. I was thrust into the work force after being out of it for over a decade while raising kids and being the one parent around while the other traveled the world building his Engineering career. What struck me most was the word “commitment” and that word has stayed with me in my various news jobs outside the home. I found that at one job especially my role as a student services representative was not only a leader but a good example of being committed to excellence. The company I worked for is a distance learning school and they offer Certificate programs and Associate Degrees. My role was student services and that meant taking calls all day long in a call center setting with a headset strapped to my head and small cubicle space which had no natural light from the outside world. The twenty five of us came in to work day in and day out and had to attain ten calls per hour and note the accounts accurately while collecting on past due accounts and retaining students from cancelling their enrollments. The leadership was lacking and very negative. There were no goals set for us and when I came into the department there was such a high turnover rate. I was very grateful to have found this job though, and even with the lack of leadership and no real idea of how well I would do, I jumped in with both feet and whole lot