Can you give me one incident where you demonstrate leadership?

Question

Can you give me one incident where you demonstrate leadership?

Answer 1

I told the lazy MFing employees to get to work!

Answer 2

I work as a secretary at a law office, and I have a pretty good nose for when to lead and when to follow at work.  We had a document production request where I had a good opportunity to show some leadership.  

This production required that about 15,000 pages be copied from a client's records, have special production page numbers added to them, and then be saved in PDF, and that absolutely nothing be missing from it.  The secretary who was responsible for this task made two good attempts, but basically failed to account for Murphy's law (getting the copier to scan that many pages without error is not as easy as it should be), so her attempts to do the task all at once kept failing her--she'd discover some pages were missing, and the task of going through that much paper to find and correct the error was too daunting--and the deadline was now tomorrow.  Clearly she needed the help of several people in the office.  And naturally, people weren't too happy about being pulled away from their jobs to do something she had weeks to put together, and now had to be done in a day.

When I showed up and saw everyone milling around, I told everyone the tasks that needed to happen and started passing them out.  It doesn't matter that I wasn't in charge--if you tell someone to do something, they will probably do it (and if they don't and they aren't your direct report--I'll just move on without them rather than fight it--their boss can hear about it later--you don't want a lazy person handling anything important anyway.)  So, put one person in charge of breaking the task down to 100-page sections.  Another person scans the sections to the email of yet a third person, who was waiting upstairs to put the page numbers on and save them to the network.  And so on.

You asked for an incident, so I gave it to you--but the lessons here were:  1) when good workers know there is a job to do, they need to quit whining and get started--don't tell them that--just get them started; 2) don't be afraid to tell people what to do just because you aren't "the boss"; 3) just because other people have worked there longer doesn't mean they know more than you--their work may have been focused on other areas--you may still be the expert; 4)  make your "orders" either friendly requests, or matter-of-fact statements like "this is what we need now"--the response is usually "I'm on that" and maybe accompanied by "does someone else have that other thing I'm worried about covered"--if you have the respect of good workers, they'll help you manage things; 5) start passing out the obvious tasks--you can shift things around as the job progresses, figure out a better plan, get input, and all that c**p while you are doing the job--if you are under the gun, don't waste too much time figuring out the entire game plan, when you could get started and think about what 'the best way' is as you go; and maybe most importantly, 6) work, or at least appear to work, as hard as everyone else--attitude is contagious--if you are serious, they are serious, if you're a jerk, they'll submarine you, if you are lazy, they'll be lazy--you need to do more than lead by example, but you also must lead by example.