Personal Development Plan
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN
While my first career step will be finding work as a dental lab technician, that is not where I want my career arc to stay. I plan to open my own business providing dental lab analysis services to dental practices all over the world. Attaining that degree of success will require a great deal of leadership on my part. The purpose of this paper is to show how I plan to develop myself into the sort of business professional who can attain these results.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, is my source of inspiration when it comes to being a successful entrepreneur and leader. He was the one who devised the Macintosh computer, which opened up the idea of personal computing for the average user. Apple fired him for a time, but then he came back to revolutionize the way we view the telephone and the way that we access music, with the iPhone and the iPod (Kalla, 2012). He also founded Pixar, the company that transformed animated film – and he ultimately revolutionized the way we approach the computer a second time with the development of the iPad (Kalla, 2012).
Some people viewed Steve Jobs as being too hard on the people he worked with. When his biographer asked him about this tendency, Jobs replied, “Look at the results. These are all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were truly feeling brutalized. But they don’t. And we got some amazing things done” (Isaacson, 2012). Sometimes the change that comes with innovation is difficult for members of an organization to absorb. However, when that change ends up taking place for the right reasons and is backed by the right research, that organization can end up changing the world. Just take a look at the number of people who use products that Apple designed or inspired, whether it’s the tablet computer, the app-driven cell phone, or even a mouse as an interface for a computer. His leadership style was about bringing change and using that innovation to create results.
What leadership style does he or she have and how do they show this type of leadership style?
Steven Jobs’ leadership style was both competitive and collegial at the same time. When he came back to Apple in 1997, the Macintosh computer had morphed into more than 10 different versions. This drove Jobs batty, and so at a product session, he got up and went to a whiteboard with a marker, where he drew a grid with four squares (two by two). Over the two columns he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” The two rows took the labels “Desktop” and “Portable.” (Isaacson, 2012) Then he put the team to work to make four terrific products, rather than focusing on so many. It was this shift that would end up saving Apple.
Why did this work? He restored Apple to its focus, which had been splintered. This showed that his leadership style was bold, swift and disciplined. He saw a change that he believed to be necessary, and he made the change. He realized that, as the leader, it was his job to change a trend that was causing harm for the company. There were doubtless people in the company who had emotional investments in the many different versions of the Macintosh at that time, and there were people in the product design division who had their ideas trampled by this change, but in the final analysis it ended up helping the company. His is a style that puts the best of the company first. The collegial part comes into play when he asks his best performers what he thinks. He would invite his top 100 employees to a retreat and then ask them to bombard him with ideas, some of which would make it into the planning stage. This gave the top stakeholders ownership of the company’s direction – and it motivated people outside the top 100 to try and make it there.
What specific traits does he or she have that you would like to incorporate in your leadership approach and why?
Jobs used a variety of leadership styles in order to bring about his desired results. He was able to adapt his strategies for different situations and scenarios, while keeping his message the same. Whether he needed to utilize his own role as an authority on the topic, get in touch with the emotional side of the audience he was dealing with, or whether cold, hard facts were the best way to get his point across, he was able to communicate his message and create buy-in among the key stakeholders when he wanted to bring about change (Heracleous, 2015).
As a business leader, I realize that as my organization grows, I will have a number of different types of personalities of people working for me. This means that there will be some people who deal best in factual conversations, some people who deal best when their emotional needs are being met in a conversation, and still others who will only listen to a person whom they consider to have the requisite experience and expertise to gain their respect. In some situations, the stakeholder requires two or even all three of those components if they are going to listen with respect to the person trying to sell them on change. There will be times when I need the technicians who work for me to alter their process in order to bring about improvement; there will be times when I need to access their affective side in order to motivate them; there will be times when a table of facts will be the most persuasive exhibit I can bring into a presentation. I need to develop the skills to talk in all of those rhetorical channels.
Where do you see yourself in five years as a leader?
Within five years, I would like to see myself as an established lab technician within a reputable firm. I realize that it will take time to save the capital that I will need even to take out initial financing for my business, and I will also need to continue to develop my expertise in the field. It’s true that Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, opened Apple from a garage, but it’s one thing to make computers and ship them from a garage and another to operate a dental lab facility (Hom, 2013). However, the overhead that you need to start a dental lab business would be significantly more expensive.
In addition to gaining experience working as a dental lab technician, I would also use the five years to gain expertise about leadership. I have had some examples already, on the basis of people I have worked for, people in my family, and people I have read about when studying leadership, but there is a big difference between reading about leadership and living it – both as an entry-level member of an organization and then as you move up the ladder to take on greater levels of responsibility. My plan would be to absorb as many lessons as possible from the people I work for, seeking out mentors in the profession, both with the dental lab industry and in the entrepreneur community, so that I would have as much quality advice as possible as I move toward opening my own lab.
How do you plan on accomplishing this?
It is important to acknowledge that not all of the lessons from Steve Jobs’ management style are worth emulating. After all, he did have a dark side to his personality. When the competitive side of his nature won out over his collegial side, he would humiliate his employees publicly without a single shred of remorse. He would take credit for projects that he had not completed and ideas he had not devised. There was a period of time when he fought the finding of paternity for his daughter so that he would not have to pay child support and the mother and daughter would have to live on welfare (McNichol, 2011). Yes, this was the same person whose ideas had revolutionized so much of technology – but was it necessary to treat people this way?
A lot of times, when a leader has to make decisions, he has to do it in a way that will rub people the wrong way. Inertia can be a powerful force in organizations, and when a leader initiates change, the people who are not on board with it end up resisting that change, tooth and nail, sometimes, because of the force of that inertia. In the case of Steve Jobs, the abrasive way that he treated his employees was often cited by other leaders as evidence that they should also behave that way, because being abrasive and mean to your employees was a part of Jobs’ strategy – and the strategy worked, as a whole (McNichol, 2011).
However, I don’t buy the fact that you have to be mean and put down your employees if you want to get ahead at a company. There are so many parts of Jobs’ legacy that are overwhelmingly positive – the collegial nature of his strategic retreats, the creative leaps that helped him bridge the gaps between what was and what was possible, bringing about a whole new generation of devices that change the way we live – that it is tempting to let the negative parts slide. The argument is similar when you think about coaches who are successful in the world of sports despite their awful personalities. One example is Bob Knight, who coached the Indiana Hoosiers to national championships (and even an undefeated season) but finally found himself drummed out by the university. Over the years, he had choked a player (who happened to be his son) and thrown a chair during a game (earning an ejection). Because his teams had won so reliably, though, he had become an institution at Indiana University. If he had kept taking teams to the Final Four, it’s likely that he would never have been fired, but his successes tailed off to where he was “just” qualifying his teams for the NCAA tournament each year, and so the university felt a little more freedom in eventually getting rid of him.
I would say that you don’t have to humiliate your employees to get the best out of them. So I would work on developing my creative side so that I could come up with optimal solutions for the different situations that might come up as I was operating my company. I would also develop my communication skills so that I could use any rhetorical mode in order to get people to “buy in” to what I was trying to get them to do. However, I would also work to keep employee morale high through a variety of creative strategies. You can’t keep people happy with you all the time, and there are some people who won’t be happy whatever you do, but I would develop hiring and retention strategies that would weed out people who weren’t ready to work in an innovative and creative environment so that we would have as vibrant a workforce in the business as possible. Through all of these strategies I have mentioned, I have a plan in place to emerge in five years as a member of a leadership team for a successful dental lab services company – and within ten years as the owner of my own business in this field.
References
Heracleous, L. (2015). Why Steve Jobs was such a charismatic leader. WBS in the News.
http://www.wbs.ac.uk/news/why-steve-jobs-was-such-a-charismatic-leader1/
Hom, E. (2013). Steve Jobs Biography. Business News Daily 21 March 2013.
http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4195-business-profile-steve-jobs.html
Isaacson, W. (2012). The real leadership lessons of Steve Jobs. Harvard Business Review April
2012. https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve-jobs
Kalla, S. (2012). 10 leadership tips from Steve Jobs. Forbes 2 April 2012.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susankalla/2012/04/02/10-leadership-tips-from-steve-jobs/#8e8e0145a02c
McNichol, T. (2011). Be a jerk: The worst business lesson from the Steve Jobs biography. The
Atlantic 28 November 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/be-a-jerk-the-worst-business-lesson-from-the-steve-jobs-biography/249136/
