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This topic area, chosen by our mentor, discussed mainly how skills development within leadership and communication topics, besides technical training, will be relevant in building your career path.

He shared his own experience along his career in mining and emphasized on the organizational advancement and higher helicopter theories for high level management.

1. Develop your listening skills:

- It is one of the most important skills to develop as a leader. Listen and understand what people is telling us. Sometimes we do not truly listen, but reformulate what someone says instead to provide an answer we want to.

2. Be Accountable:

- Being responsible for a group of people imply accountability.

- Developing trust and making people easier to talk to you, will allow them to tell you difficult things, before things become a bigger problem.

- If you provide that trust, people will come and talk to you in whatever the issues are, because you do listen and care.

3. Seek out/provide feedback:

- It is very critical to provide an appropriate response when feedback is given.

- Explain why you would appreciate him or her to take an specific action for you or the company and make them participants on this.

- Be thankful when they share inquiries with you.

- Let them know what you can do to change that in the future.

- Make it encouraging for people and it will be easier for them to approach you.

4. Trust your subordinates:

- Good leaders trust their team

- Give the trust in day 1 and avoid micro managing. You may spot check or verify instead.

5. Encourage your team: Be a sort of Cheerleader

- Provide feedback right away, in a sooner and continuous manner.

- Do not wait until things bet burned out.

- The organization advances with feedback in person, not in front of a group. Positive feedback in public is good and healthy, but for some people can be uncomfortable.

- Get to know your people and the leadership style you need to apply with each of them.

6. Ask for suggestions and comments:

- Truly embrace suggestions that hasn’t been resolved and follow up.

7. Force yourself to work in difficult issues:

- Learn to prioritize what it is the more urgent and important to get done.

- Avoid spending too much time on the email, when you have to get something done.

- As you work on leadership roles you learn to have things in more appropriate proportions, spending more time in strategic topics than in technical related topics.

8. Have a humble approach to everything:

- We do not know everything, even if you think are bright and capable.

9. Have the big picture of things:

- Do not get distracted in details.

- Make a transition regarding skills set from a supervisory role into management.

10. Build good relationships

11. Challenge status quo:

- If everything is static, is not good.

- Constantly look for how to improve what you are doing today.

- Encourage the challenge.

12. Know the difference between communication and education:

- If you explain something once, it doesn’t mean that they understood the idea.

- Approach a topic from different directions.

- Pursue continues education on ways to address this communication topic.

13. Give credit deliberately

- Recognize group teams.

14. Take personal responsibility

- Do not blame other people for you own mistakes.

- Love to work with others.

15. Accept criticism

- Take responsibility for the performance of their own team.

16. Look for higher levels of performance

- It is a quality that many good leaders have

Red closed out taking about the importance of organizational structure, either in crews, engineering, administration, etc. that should be well establishes.

He stated that placing your human resources in boxes where they fit will get the most of it for themselves and the organization.

Be perfectly structured to get the results you want to get. Not having a good organizational structure may cost a lot for the sustainable development of the organization.

Organizational advancement theory:

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To obtain an important organizational change, more than one stage is needed in the performance curve.

Along the time the organization advances until certain breakeven point where the performance decline. In order to continue growing there is a lay down period of time where cultural change need to be made to go back and change the results we are getting.

Some key points:

- Diagnose where you are in the performance curve.

- Make the change before start declining.

- During the declining stage, encourage you team to pursue the new transition curve to get the results you want to. They may feel they are doing better than they really are, but show them the performance results are declining.

Higher helicopter theory:

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The fundamentals of this theory talks about an intermediate person that can visualize other promising verizon than the other workers cannot. His/her role is to show the developing workers there is other verizon within the organization, some other expectations/opportunities across the hill.

From the chart below, there are 3 groups of people:

- The green ones are the high performance - motivated workers

- The gray ones are the low performance - developing workers

- The black one is the intermediate person, who may see other verizon and could inform the gray guys something else is approaching.

The intermediate person may help low performance workers to develop their skills and grow within the organization, because this person is in a strategic position to visualize this other verizon, in this case an helicopter that is coming to rescue them from where they are at.

If you are in a stage where you have minimum or null leadership experience:

- Ask questions

- Go under the assumption that most people is willing to teach you

Red shared with us that he always wanted to do the job he is now doing and help develop other people’s skills.