Learning to Lead

Last Monday's class we finished studying the Five Practices of Exemplary Student Leadership by Kouzes and Posner. We discussed that Enabling Others to Act is the ability for leaders to foster collaboration through trust and empowering the people they are working with. That means creating an environment of cohesiveness and togetherness that allows the group to function better. The leader needs to strengthen others through encouraging, motivating, and engaging their constituents. Doing this allows followers to achieve above average status, maybe not the best - but better than before. It gives people the drive to strive for excellence and to approach the extraordinary when they otherwise wouldn't have tried without the encouragement of the leader. Leaders build a trust between the people involved to make everyone feel strong (mentally), capable, informed, and connected. The trust allows everyone more discretion to choose, gives them their own authority and more willingness to take risk. Without risk there can be no progress.

Encouraging the Heart is about recognizing everyone's contributions and creating an environment of celebration. During the climb to achieving goals there will be bumps along the way, people will get tired, frustrated and disenchanted. The leader always shows the followers care, carries an upbeat mentality, keeps the spirit of the group up, and keeps the group moving forward. I gave the example of a family story that is often told by my grandparents and dad about my great grandmother, Grandma DeGregorio (who I never had the chance to meet). During the Depression as a young women she told her family: "don't look back, just look forward." I thought this is a great example of encouraging the heart, in a time that really beats up the mind and soul, she had the convictions to let her family know that everything would be just fine as long as we did not hold on to the past.
I mentioned that leaders create a climate of celebration to congratulate jobs well done. My high school baseball coach, Mario Diez (who is one of my personal mentors), did things like this with Player of the Week t-shirts and he also started the Big Time Play Club, which notarized a big play of the game that influenced the outcome of a win. This built a climate of excellence that everyone fed off of, because everyone wanted to be the Player of the Week. This form of public celebration is great because he always said: "We're all in this together," or during a team breakdown he would say: "Stay together." It created a cohesiveness that I never experienced before, and it's one of the main reasons we were so successful year in and year out. We were celebrating the values and vision he set out for us: public celebration created a form of team spirit that sustained people's focus throughout the season.
I also talked about having a collective identity as a team and organization. Something that is sincere, thought out, and from the heart. I recently went on an interview to Suffolk Construction in Boston, MA and on the back of every employee's business card reads:

Passion

Integrity

Hard Work

Professionalism

On my first interview they actually asked about all four of their chief principles and what it meant to me. Organizations work very hard at developing business values that their employees work through and maybe that's why Suffolk produced $1.7 billion in revenue last year...

Another example I brought in was again from my high school baseball program. We were called the Hustlin' Warriors (see picture of the back of our hats at right). It became an identity for us that we bought into by running hard down the first baseline on a pop up or ground ball out, sprinting on and off the field, or hustling out of the batter's box after a strikeout. It gave us a sense of togetherness that other teams didn't have.

Three state championships later:

 We embodied the vision, believed in it, we won and succeeded just like Suffolk does.

Finally, we discussed the Learning to Lead section. In the first class I exclaimed that I was going to find everyone's inner leader, because in my opinion everyone is a leader. Kouzes and Posner would agree as they say leadership is not a gene but an observable and learnable set of practices. A couple of the students disagreed and compared certain hypothetical individuals that you can think of by yourself. Leading is hard to do and that's why not everyone is one - no doubt about it. Leadership is not a perfect science (something also Coach Diez used to say about baseball) and there are no clear answers. That's what makes this student forum so powerful and interesting - and liberal artsy (sooooo Wesleyan). We can only hypothesize and continue to develop rough answers to questions we pose and topics we consider. It's a form of critical thinking that the forum's discussion creates that allows our minds to run wild.

Often we go through these authors or look at leadership in the context of sports, politics, business, or personal experiences and we continually run over the same issues. The only differences are that it is said in a different way. No one trait makes great leaders. Not a certain personality. Not a certain experience. However, I do think that some of the best leaders are the people who are willing to learn certain traits, learn from positive and negative experiences, but be themselves (being yourself is the tricky part and is what makes leadership so hard!!). That is in no way a final thesis, just a thought, this is a blog after all.

Elvin Lim will be coming in and discussing Presidents as Kings and that will give us a whole different definition of what makes a great leader (in the context of political leadership). That leader is different from a coach, CEO, father, Priest or Rabbi - or is it? We will soon find out later in the semester..

Coach Mike Whalen - the head football coach at Wesleyan - will be visiting class on Monday night, our last class before Spring Break, and it's going to be another great learning experience for us all.

Stay up,

Joey G.