Importance of Leadership Skills

One mistake I learnt from was supporting the candidacy of the top-student for the class career representative position during student union elections.

Despite being the perfect student, after she was elected to the position, her poor leadership skills almost caused a complete failure of the class job placement process – ultimately forcing me to intervene to rescue the placement process.

It was fall 2006, the final year of my engineering Master’s degree at Georgia Tech.

It was also the year of campus recruitment for full-time positions.

To manage this recruitment process, every department wanted a student career representative elected for their class.

The responsibility of the campus career representative was to negotiate with the companies about both GPA-based interview screening criteria and pay scales on behalf of the students, as well as coordinate these efforts by talking to faculty and students.

It was a position with a lot of responsibility and challenge, and I was considered the unanimous choice for this election.

However, I was also the favorite for several equally meaningful elected leadership positions on campus.

So I decided to turn down this role so that I could focus on only a few positions, and therefore be more effective.

Since, I was not going to run, I decided to support the candidacy of a classmate of mine, Suman, who seemed highly accomplished and was also highly regarded by several potential employers already because of her perfect GPA.

I assumed that since she was very diligent, hardworking and smart, she would be equally good with people.

I conceded my nomination to her without thoroughly investigating her track record of performance in team-oriented situations, level of emotional intelligence, or communication skills.

This ended up being a costly mistake.

After Suman was elected, I realized that while she was exceptional with the functional aspects of this position (like creating a spreadsheet of jobs ranked by salary), she was not equally good at the more interactive aspects of the position (such as facilitating communication between students and employers to promote the understanding of the non-quantitative aspects of various jobs such as career progression and working conditions).

Things became critical when one week to the end of the recruiting season, less than 70% of graduating students were satisfied with their job offers.

I realized then that I had made a serious mistake, and stepped in to save the day.

While I did not have formal authority to run the process, I used my popularity among my peers and my relationship with Suman to influence how things were done.

And, through more rigorous communication between all stakeholders, I was able to rectify the problem and help students better secure their ideal jobs.

This increased the job offer satisfaction rate to over 92%. However, the lesson learnt was clear – high intelligence quotient does not equate to high emotional intelligence.