Week 5: Relationship vs. task oriented leadership in the newsroom

I know I’ve criticized the general Newsday leadership structure in the past, but today I feel like taking some time to appreciate my main editor, Cindy Chin. Although I only work with Cindy from Tuesday to Friday, I’ve managed to get really close to her and analyze and appreciate her leadership style, especially through the lens of task vs. relationship leadership. I have come to the conclusion that Cindy is the perfect combination of task and relationship. She always keeps me on track, assigning me interesting, challenging stories and sending me reminders to stay on deadline and pressure me into finding more sources, or different angles, or improving sentence structure. Int hat aspect, her leadership style is highly task-oriented.

On the other hand, she is very attentive to the needs of her staff reporters, not just me. She’ll walk around doing frequent laps, popping by people’s cubicles to check up on how we’re doing. She’ll engage everybody in interesting small talk, letting us know about her life, goals and ambitions while giving us the chance to talk to her about ours. She’s also very clear about how she wants to be perceived as a leader. Yesterday she told me she was going to be out for a week because she was attending a seminar on leadership for minority journalists, and that she was most interested in finding out how to elevate her team through her leadership. I thought her drive and initiative were refreshing, since I’ve realized that the news industry has not really jumped on the “leadership buzzword” bandwagon that other industries have joined recently. So to hear her actively pursue this kind of activity is pretty great.

The amazing thing is that I can honestly tell that Cindy’s making an active effort to be a better leader. Compared to other editors in the newsroom, she is more attentive, more active and present than others. She assigns me a good amount of work, and I always see her reporters doing interesting pieces and their bylines are more high profile. So, maybe she’s just lucky and got a really great staff, but I’m pretty sure her active interest in leadership influences far more.

Other editors are highly task oriented. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not that they’re not nice, open and willing to help, but they’re so concerned about everything that’s happening in the newsroom (which is a lot on any given day) that I don’t think they have much time for individual reporters. In fact, one of the interns came in on Friday, her day off, because she wanted some side-by-side editing on her piece. Shocked, I asked her why she would ever give up her day off to come back in, and she said that there was no way editors would take the time to do that for a full-time reporter later on in life. It’s now as an intern, or never, she said.

I think that really demonstrates a large part of the industry’s culture — fast paced, with little time for individualization or personalized growth. Which is why I think Cindy’s mentorship throughout the internship has been truly amazing. She’s gone above and beyond to try to bond with me and try to check in on me, as well as leading me in the right direction with my stories. Instead of simply changing my sentences or ideas, she’ll write detailed comments about how I can improve and why something just doesn’t work that well. I think that’s going to be pivotal for my development as a journalist.