Key Event #3: Fox Hollow

The next event that influenced my leadership style did not actually occur at Virginia Tech, but when I was at home during the spring semester of 2020. Since I was home and doing classes online, I decided to look for a job and ended up finding one at a very small, local coffee shop in my hometown. It was small enough that there were only 2 employees and the owner working, so it was intimidating going into that job knowing how I would have to learn everything so quickly so that I could help as much as I could. My boss, the owner, was who trained me most days, and his leadership skills really helped me get into the rhythm of what I needed to learn. He was able to quickly catch on to the fact that I learn better with hands-on experience instead of spoken instructions, so he catered my training so I would learn more efficiently. His leadership influenced the way that I created my drinks and also largely influenced me when I started training new employees only a few weeks after starting there. From experiencing how helpful it was to have training altered to best fit how I would learn, I tried my very best to do that with the new employees also. I tried to be super flexible when one person learned best by hands-on experience, allowing them to make the drinks as I walked them through the steps. I also tried to be flexible when another person learned best by verbal explanations where I would run them through the steps while I made the drinks for them. This experience was super critical in my leadership path because it taught me so much about how to work with different types of people and how to lead to reach the largest number of people possible. Without my boss being so willing to adjust to my style of learning, I most likely would not have known how to properly train the new baristas and it would have been harder for them to catch on to the job. I hope that they now have the experience needed to take that type of leadership into whatever they do next just like I was able to!