What opportunities for lateral leadership exist in your current Executive Administrative role? Consider how you would improve your approach to getting support for your initiatives in situations where you don’t have management authority.

PART A – PLEASE RESPOND TO CLASSMATE DISCUSSION WHETHER YOU AGREE OR NOT & A DETAILED WHY: In my current position, I am a member of two Regional groups, while performing my own duties as an Eligibility Specialist. Being a member of the Quality Assurance group, there are initiatives we discuss in our meetings and that we are to take back to our offices and share with other co-workers. I have implemented trivia games and knowledge based activities, and playing them throughout the day and during huddle. This is to increase the quality of the work performed by Eligibility Specialist. We have been placed on a CAPER (Correction Active Plan for Error Rates)due to the quality of work, which prevents us from getting performance bonuses as a State. I took on the responsibility without informing my supervisor of my plans to enhance quality work. I invited two other workers to help with the planning and development of activities. By giving workers, job aids and activities our office increased in the number of errors on cases processed the month before.

The case reading unit reads at least five of our cases each month for quality errors. The errors range from entering the wrong address to entering the incorrect income, which is payment error the biggest mistake in processing cases. The office that I am housed in, those in my PM (Program Manager) area and some other offices in the Region have improved in correctly entering and calculating Medical and Child Support Deduction. Our case reading made a drastic change in our quality work that performance based raises were given, some were given a day off. I did not go to my supervisor with my plans. I presented them in huddle on morning. My supervisor came to me and said that the ideas were great and if she could assist in anyway to let her know.

PART B – PLEASE RESPOND TO CLASSMATE DISCUSSION WHETHER YOU AGREE OR NOT & A DETAILED WHY: My current role requires a great deal of lateral leadership. I am involved in four cross-functional projects. For one of them, I am leading the project, and for another project, I am one of the three co-leads, for the rest of the projects, I have a defined responsibility, but I do not lead them

For the projects where I lead or co-lead, I depend on several members from different business units and some vendors to keep my projects moving towards the end goal. Since my DiSC style is “I”, collaborating comes naturally to me (DiSC, 1). As a result, I tend to excel at coalition building, which is one of the key capabilities for lateral leadership (JWMI510, 2). Although I can certainly look to use persuasion as another skill to have.

For one of the projects I am leading, we are working on creating a proof of concept. During this project, at times, I need to convince team members from other groups to my vision for this POC. At times, I am finding convincing my peers challenging. Not having any management authority over these team members makes it extra difficult. Also, the fact that these groups are geographically distributed makes it difficult to build rapport and relationships that would have made my life easier. Based on what I learned this week, going forward, I would use solid third party research as evidence, along with an explanation of mutual benefits to make my case (JWMI510, 2). The evidence I would provide will also show to my peers that what I am stating is not just my opinion, but it is based on facts and research. I expect that this approach would not only increase my credibility, but it could also go a long way in getting the necessary buy-in from my peers from the other groups.