Managing Up The Ladder

This week I’d like to talk about one of the leadership experiences I had this summer during my internship. I was given the honor to attend a workshop called “Managing Up the Ladder” which was run by the Midatlantic Employers Association. The workshop in particular gave me a lot of new insights into leadership, and set the platform with better interactions with my manager throughout the summer. I’d like to dive into some of the points from the workshop in this blog to hopefully share some of these insights.

The main goal of this workshop was to help improve manager-employee relations in the workplace, and the workshop itself was specifically targeted towards younger employees of the company, including interns. During the sessions, we were presented with different scenarios in which our managers may not have been making the right decisions in our eyes, and were asked how we would respond. It was certainly interesting to see the variety of responses around the room. While some employees of the company suggested a more passive response with a lot of these scenarios, a good number of employees also brought up ways to actively bring up these disagreements with a boss, and how to go about making sure that any conflict involved is resolved. While this was the main component of the workshop, we also went ahead and took part in other activities, including discussing our workplace habits and styles.

This workshop definitely gave me a new perspective on how leadership can be viewed. Often times, when a person in power or someone with experiences suggests a decision or plan of action to be taken, it can be easy to blindly listen and go with it. However, I think one thing that I definitely took away from the workshop was to always value your own opinion – just because it may differ from someone who’s considerably more experienced that you doesn’t make it automatically wrong. In fact, there are a lot of great learning experiences to be had from sharing ideas in this way. Almost every opinion is valuable and worth consideration, no matter the scenario, and I’m glad I was able to attend this workshop to truly understand this.