Center for Leadership
Studies

As head of a construction management company in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Francisco Arteaga is well versed in closely inspecting a project and finding ways to make it more efficient as he guides it to completion. MAOL gave Arteaga the tools and the opportunity to peer more deeply into his own organization’s processes and initiatives and find ways in which to improve while becoming a better leader himself.

Through MAOL Arteaga was exposed to fresh ways of thinking about his organization and given a new lexicon that at first, he says, proved unsettling. Discomfited by the new linguistic framework, Arteaga asked for a glossary of terms, only to be kindly stalled or refused. It wasn’t until later that he realized that being denied hard definitions was the best gift he could have been given.

“It was digging and finding the true meaning of the terms that shed a lot of light as to what I could do with them, rather than what they meant,” Arteaga explains. “This is not a program of getting tools placed in front of you. It’s a program of people and things and the challenges around what you can do with the tools you have and what’s in front of you.”

Arteaga came out of the program a more confident leader, his colleagues detecting a more structured, creatively organized approach to business challenges. He found that he was better equipped to ground his ideas and create a path for their development, and that he had a much more disciplined approach to creation, to organizational evolution and to change.

“I understand and consider more options and look at all angles without rushing into a decision,” Arteaga says. “I’ve become more aware of the nuances of what’s an opinion and what’s a fact, or when I’m expressing an opinion versus a fact. The clarity of the message has improved.”

Clarity of message and communication was Arteaga’s primary goal when he decided to sponsor Mark Cummings, financial executive to his company, through MAOL. He explains that he wished to share a common language with whomever he had helming the financial side of his company and knew right away that MAOL was the common bridge for which he was searching. As a result of Mark’s pursuing the MAOL degree, Arteaga feels a greater sense of directed unity and purpose within his organization. He has seen Mark’s communication skills improve, and watched him expand as a leader in some of the ways Arteaga himself remembers experiencing during his own MAOL education.

“I can genuinely feel an extension of the direction that I’m embarked on with his actions and his conversation,” Arteaga says, “and on certain occasions, Mark has come back from MAOL sessions and mentored me in a couple of areas. We are advancing and learning as a company because of what he is learning.”