Leadership Laboratory

Leadership Lab: STI Degree Candidates' Leadership Essays

SANS Technology Institute's mission is to develop the leaders of the future for the information security industry. One of our admission requirements is that an applicant complete an essay describing leadership qualities they have demonstrated in the past.

Leadership Essay SANS Technology Institute

Feb 22nd, 2008
By Gregory D. Farnham
Although Leadership has many components, this essay sharply focuses on just two: vision and “making your own luck.”

One leadership component is defining and communicating a vision. The vision should define the desired end state. A vision provides a common goal for team members to coalesce around. Having a vision, however, is not enough. Once defined, the vision needs to be evangelized. Good leaders will continually repeat the vision. If staff members are saying that you sound like a broken record with the vision, then you are on the right track. If you hear staff members repeating the vision to others, then you know you are successfully evangelizing your vision.

I demonstrated leadership as a project manager for an enterprise wide engineering application. We had several independent design centers that functioned autonomously. The CTO's vision was for a Virtual Design center where a team could be assembled independent of physical location. The vision I derived from the CTO’s vision was that any Engineer would get the same engineering application environment (templates, macros, licenses) regardless of the physical location. I provided leadership towards this vision on two projects. The first converted from local licensing to enterprise wide licensing. Some sites were at first reluctant to buy-in to the change. They did not like losing control of their own licenses and having to rely on the WAN for licenses. By evangelizing the vision and presenting the overall benefit to the company, eventually I attained buy-in from all sites. The project was successful and saved the company money because of the reduced licensing cost. The second project was an effort to create a common set of templates and macros for the engineering application. Each site had independently developed their own templates and macros. I leveraged the vision to achieve consensus. This project required everyone to make changes and adopt new templates and macros. The negotiations were at times difficult, but a focus on the vision enabled the team to make the necessary compromises. The end result achieved the vision of a common engineering application environment across the enterprise.

How do you make your own luck? “Making your own luck” in leadership refers to the appearance that things just always work out for a leader. In his book, Life’s Little Instruction Book, H. Jackson Brown, Jr. said, “Luck marches with those who give their very best”. The luck I’m referring to is the sum of knowledge, experience and intuition. To the outsider it looks like luck. In reality it was all the things the leader had done right. Maybe the leader knew a piece of a project was high risk and therefore had a contingency plan. Maybe he had developed and empowered his staff making them highly motivated. Maybe he had developed a great human network and had a key contact to help things fall into place.

I made my own luck in a data center move project where I led my group’s activities. In this example, let’s start at the end of the project. The data center move was being executed. Several groups were moving equipment at the same time. My group finished early. A person from one of the other groups said, “Wow, you’re done already. Aren’t you guys lucky”. Let’s go back to the beginning now to explain how I made my own luck. As a manager of a server operations team, we had to move to a new data center. We were one of many groups that had equipment moving to the new data center. There was a big move date when the Internet connections and related equipment were moving. I defined a strategy where we would move as many servers as possible before the big move date. I directed my staff to define any dependencies for moving servers and come up with early dates to move non-dependent equipment. My staff resisted the idea because this meant additional after hours move events. After listening to complaints, I stuck to the strategy and we were able to move 75% of our equipment early. On the big move date the data center was very busy with many groups moving at once. Our activities were easily manageable because we had already moved most of our equipment. One of my staff commented that although he didn't agree with the “move early” strategy at first, he was glad we did it that way. By recognizing that the big move date would be hectic, having a good plan and executing the plan, we made our own luck.

These are just two of the many components of leadership. Leaders that have a vision, evangelize the vision and make their own luck will be positioned for success.