Greg Gagne - Leadership Orientation

First off, congratulations to each and every one of you on your roles this coming year and more importantly, thank you for saying "yes" to taking on the role that you're doing.

So I've got a few things I want to talk about today, so the first one is what I call talk first, speak last. Talk first, speak last, and what I mean by that is in our role in leadership now, we need to be quite careful that we don't come out of the gate, like in a committee meeting, voicing our opinions immediately because we have influence and it may affect the direction of our committee meetings. So start off with the pleasantries and get to know each other, but then let's start getting the data that we need from each of the team members in the committee itself.

And this is where a little bit of the art needs to meet the science. Sometimes, and perhaps you've had this experience, where there'll be a person on the committee that talks and talks and talks. As a leader, we need to figure out artistically how to kind of taper that off when it's necessary, and sometimes we have somebody on our committee who is not voicing much of any thoughts, although I'm sure they're thinking of things. We need to extract that. That's what we've got to do, we have to ask. So once we get all the data from the committee that we think we need to make a decision, then as a leader, it's our responsibility to kind of synthesize everything we just heard and at that time, weigh in with our knowledge and leadership. That's why I call it talk first, speak last.

Another thing, along the way in my leadership journey personally is that learned that the more we know, the more we need to know that we do not know all there is to know. It's amazing. The more we learn, the more we don't know and we keep learning more, and Peggy hit this on the head, I'll just mention it. In our leadership journey, humility, come at this from a humble perspective. In our roles as leaders, it's not a position of power. What we now have is a position of service over the members that we are so fortunate to serve.

And I'll kind of wrap up my segment with just a couple of my core values, like Ian had mentioned in his remarks, there's four of them. The first one is do what you say you're going to do. So if you commit to something, whether it be personally, professionally, or for MDRT, follow through, get it done. Sometimes, sometimes we need to slow down, that's number two, to speed up. So if we're going too fast down the tracks and we're about to veer off the tracks, hit the pause button, slow down, and it's like a rubber band, you'll launch forward. Number three, already mentioned, talk first, speak last. And number four, and I think the most important one for all of us to always keep in perspective along our journey this next year is have some fun. That's what we're doing this for.