January 17, 2020

Building Your Leadership Toolbelt

How the IFSL Program Helps Level-Up Your Career with a Growth Mindset

It’s not a surprise that in order to succeed as a leader within the food system – or in most disciplines, for that matter – you must have solid technical skills. But this is often not enough.

Many professionals overlook the need to build their leadership toolbelt; a skill set essential to career advancement.

What is a leadership toolbelt exactly? What are the tough-to-define skills that support career growth? How does the IFSL program help hone these skills? We spoke with Dr. Jennifer van de Ligt, Director of the Integrated Food Systems Leadership (IFSL) program at the University of Minnesota to gain insight on competencies that will help leaders navigate their careers, especially for those innovators who will break boundaries to address challenges in our global food system.  

Q. Can you tell us how you define a leadership tool belt and why it’s important for professionals to focus on it?

A.  Think of your leadership toolbelt as the experiences, skills, and learnings you gain throughout your career that you can tap into as you face new challenges.

Much like construction workers or craftsmen bring their toolbelts with them to each project, not knowing the surprises that may occur or the specific tools needed, think of your leadership toolbelt in the same way. Depending on your projects and challenges, you may not always need your data analytics knowledge or your active listening skills, but because you’ve taken inventory of these skills in your leadership toolbelt, you know they are available to you when needed.

The technical skills in your leadership toolbelt are critical, but they can only take you so far. Focusing only on traditional on-the-job approaches will not be enough to move your career forward. Collaboration and multi-disciplinary approaches will be required.

When working across disciplines and in new and novel ways, the development of a growth-mindset, which will help breakdown your personal and professional barriers, is required and embracing this growth will be needed for individuals to grow in their career. When you focus on this personal growth of honing and recognizing your non-technical skills, you become aware of the existing tools you’ve already earned and are open to adding new skills to your leadership toolbelt.

Q. What’s the first step the IFSL program students take in building their awareness of tools needed to grow as leaders supporting their roles and success in the global food system?

A.  Within the program, students gain knowledge and practical experience through their various assignments to develop both their technical tools and leadership skills for their leadership toolbelt.

In general, as people develop skills, they move through a series of awareness progression:

1. Unconsciously unskilled: When someone is unconsciously unskilled this means they’re unaware they lack knowledge about areas that are impacted by their current siloed thinking and approaches. This is the classic ‘you don’t know what you don’t know.’ Within the IFSL program, we expose students to many facets of the global food system, challenging the students to think broadly and expand their awareness. As they learn, they recognize that there are many aspects of the food system where they lack knowledge. This awareness moves them to the next category of skill development.
2. Consciously unskilled: With this expanded awareness, people move to an acknowledgement that their current capabilities are not enough to make change. For example, a food safety professional will expand their mindset to consider other aspects like production flow, financial impacts, etc. This is the awareness of ‘if I make this change, what else will it impact?’
3. Consciously skilled: Now that someone is aware of the implications their work has within the food system, they’re now conscious of the impact within the greater system. However, at this level, it still takes effort to ask the questions, ‘what am I missing,’ ‘how will this change impact others,’ etc. It’s not yet a natural way to operate. Within the IFSL program, the students have weekly, open dialogue discussions that require peers to ask these types of question, to broaden their perceptions and knowledge of issues, and to grow their consciousness and skill in thinking more holistically about issues.
4. Unconsciously skilled: This is where true integrated thinking happens. As professionals enter the IFSL program, they often have a siloed-thinking approach. They are used to functioning as technical resources in a single area. As they progress through the program and broaden their knowledge, they finally gain the practice and skill to become unconsciously skilled in adopting an integrated thinking approach. That is, it becomes natural for them to consider and think through the impacts and secondary effects of their work. Leaders with this mindset have skills and experience to develop, implement, and champion actions needed to make the change required to feed the growing world population in a sustainable way while considering impacts from the global to local level.

The examples above focus more on the technical side of the leadership toolbelt. However, developing soft skills for the leadership toolbelt follow the same pattern of awareness. For example, most of us can remember the first time we either received or provided constructive feedback. It was likely highly uncomfortable, and we may not have known how to start or what was happening – unconsciously unskilled. As a career progresses and more feedback opportunities occur, we likely have both positive and negative experiences and can recognize them – consciously unskilled.

As leadership opportunities increase, either through supervisory roles or project team participation, the need to provide feedback increases. At this stage, a conscious effort is needed to prepare and deliver feedback in a way that encourages positive change and improves the team – consciously skilled. Then as experience providing feedback grows, it eventually becomes an unconscious skill much like learning to ride a bicycle or drive. It’s really hard at first and then, with practice, it becomes a tool that be used seamlessly.

Q: Can you share an example of how students practice and work through scenarios that help build their leadership skill growth?

A. In order to expand your leadership mindset, it’s important to break boundaries and work across roles and departments. The IFSL program has assignments designed specifically for this purpose so students are actively looking for connections outside their areas to practice and leverage their technical and soft skills.

One example is the Adopt-a-Product assignment where groups of students pick a commercially available product and dive deep into how all aspects of the food system affect the product. They explore concepts including where and how a product is manufactured and sourced; how climate affects the product; how is the product labeled and marketed; what food safety concerns are most associated with the product; how supply chain disruption may affect the product; and how marketing and consumer preference influence the product.

To build leadership skills while they learn the technical skills, we layer communication and writing skills, specifically an assignment where students are challenged to draft communication for audiences that are outside of their wheelhouse, into the technical projects. Their soft communication skills are expanded and improved by drafting policy briefs, explaining regulatory issues, or communicating to stakeholders from a CEO’s point of view. In addition, these projects require the practice of many other leadership skills such as active listening, constructive feedback, leading peers, project management, and others.

These assignments also illustrate for participants that innovation requires understanding and seeking solutions outside of one’s field.

Outside of the IFSL program, we encourage students, or anyone for that matter, to engage in industry or professional associations, attend conferences, and look for opportunities in your professional roles to work across the boundaries and teams in your workplace. This expands your knowledge and opens you up to new approaches that are needed to improve the food system and grow your career.

To put it simply, you don’t know what you don’t know. The IFSL program is designed to expose students to different and new approaches of thinking to spark their curiosity and growth.

Q: How might the IFSL students be challenged to practice and grow their leadership skills in the their workplaces to put these skills into real-life practice?

A. A portion of the program is designed for students to focus on their leadership and communication skills within their current profession.

One of the core courses allows students to learn how leading is different than managing, and how they can take servant leadership approaches and growth of emotional intelligence with them into their workplace. This course provides tips and assignments on providing constructive feedback, asking advice for improvement as leaders, active listening, and mentoring.

Students practice the skills and write about their experiences when using these skills at work. This is followed by a group dialogue where the students coach each other based on their collective learnings.

Q: As you’ve grown in your career, what strengths have you placed in your leadership toolbelt?

A. For me, I’ve learned a strength is my ability to translate complex projects in a simple way using analogies. Because I’ve taken inventory of my leadership toolbelt, I’m aware of the effectiveness of this skill and I’ve taken time to understand when it’s appropriate to use.

I like to think of the challenges you face in your career as a puzzle. Throughout your journey to complete this giant, complex puzzle, you’re figuring out how the pieces fit together and what the end result might look like by learning as you go, using your own leadership toolbelt to approach challenges through a holistic lens.

I believe a continuous state of curiosity is what will propel your personal and professional growth and will ensure you’re continuously adding to your leadership toolbelt to help complete this complex puzzle.