The Student Leader Blog

CVCC 3/16/09 - Better Get To Know a Student Leader

Karter, Rosana, and Kim of Central VA Community College's Student Government share their thoughts on kicking down doors, facebook addicts, and trying to remembering their position.

p.s. I should note my mic was not working very well so you may hear them yelling at times.

Transformational Leadership: Giving Goosebumps and Drinking Your Own Kool Aid

Memorable leaders make us sit up straighter when we’re listening to them, they make us laugh, make us cry, make our pulse skip a beat or two, and give us goosebumps.

Transformational (or inspirational) leadership is probably what most of us imagine when we think of leadership, but in reality, leaders are usually transactional (leading through rules, rewards, and punishment alone). Why is the former more desirable than the latter? Ask yourself what the difference is between Martin Luther King Jr. and your current supervisor. Ask yourself whom you would rather follow: someone who fills you with passion and determination or someone who simply tells you what to do?

So how do you go from compliance to respect? From guide to guru? Researchers say that you need to practice the following:

    - Get very good at the skills necessary in your leadership positions (know how to fill out those damn forms better than anyone).
    - Become a role model (practice what you preach at all times, no matter how tired you feel or how inconvenient it may be).   
    - Have a vision and get others to see it - people don’t want to just do stuff, we want to change stuff and make stuff too.
    - Take positive risks and get creative - do things in a new and unexplored way and encourage your team to do the same.
    - Demonstrate your passion (if you find yourself jumping up and down or trembling while you speak about your group’s vision, you’re on the right track).
    - Notice people - show your team members how much they matter and that you see their strengths.
    - Challenge members intellectually (give assignments and ask questions that make their brains feel tingly).

Inspiring a group also takes a boatload of confidence and enthusiasm (a former employer of mine calls it “the sparkle in the eye” - he actually hires people based on that sparkle). And I think the prerequisite to inspiring others is inspiring yourself first. My friend Kevin calls it “drinking your own Kool Aid” (i.e. being a true believe of your own claims, goals, organization, cult, whatever). It’s only when you can get yourself out of bed in the morning because of your passion, when you find your vision creeping into most of your conversations, and when you can't think of a better way to spend your time than working toward your goals, then you can start pouring the Kool Aid into other cups. Bottoms up!

 

Deciding How to Decide

There are different decisions to make and different ways to decide. So how do you choose? Decision-making researchers (yup, they exist) suggest the following techniques:

    - Make the decision alone without any group member input.
    - Get opinions from a few key members of the group, but decide alone.
    - Decide with a few key members.
    - Get input from entire group, but decide alone or with key members.
    - Make a decision together with the entire group.

Of course, you can also ask someone to make the decision without your involvement (e.g. ask an advisor or count daisy petals), but the decision-making researchers don’t find those options interesting.

As a student leader, I think the impulse is generally to decide things democratically (at least it was for me). This is the best approach if the result of the decision is going to affect your team members directly (e.g. time of your meeting). But there are many other decisions that other people don’t need to and don’t want to think about.

For example, my attempt at having all my group members decide on a banner was completely unsuccessful, and a waste of time because I ended up waiting weeks for input that never came and then made the decision by myself. Even my attempt at deciding together with two key members was unsuccessful when I tried to get us to pick out chairs for our new office. I got two nearly identical email responses from each of them saying something like, “Whatever you choose is fine. The curvy one looks weird, but whatever.” FYI: I went with the “curvy” chairs, and everyone seemed happy with them (great back support).

In short, some decisions need group consensus and some need one decider (and everything in between). I think it’s okay if that one decider is you as long as your team is comfortable with you making decisions and the other members have opportunities to decide independently as well. Please spare the daisies.

What Ender’s Game Knows About Student Leadership

I just finished rereading Orson Scott Card’s book, Ender’s Game, and aside from being a great read, it is practically a handbook on student leadership. So okay, the main character is a genius six year old with the fate of mankind resting on his teeny shoulders, but that’s kind of like being a student leader at college, right? Kind of?

I won’t give away any of the plot points (because you really should read it), but here is an overview of what the hero, Ender Wiggin learns about leadership.

    - Power does not come from fear but from respect.
    - A team empowered to think independently is stronger than a team that follows orders     perfectly.
    - Give each team member autonomy, responsibility, and a chance to shine.
    - Avoid talking down to team members and never make fun of them - it could make you the big shot for a few moments but will ultimately lead people to lose trust in you.
    - Give praise when praise is due.
    - Make time to work with team members privately, in small groups and one-on-one.
    - Stay in control of your emotions so that people can depend on you, but show your human side so that people can empathize with you.
    - Push your team members to be their best - they’ll get tired, but they’ll appreciate it.
    - If insect-like aliens come to take over your college, remember to have fun while you’re destroying them.

(A wonderfull www.xkcd.com comic that you'll get if you read the book)

What Randy Pausch has taught us about leadership and life.

On July 25, 2008, one of my favorite people in the world died, and I never even got a chance to meet him and let him know how much he inspired me. Randy Pausch was a professor, a Disney imagineer, a computer scientist, a motivational speaker, a husband, a father, and an extra in the latest Star Treck movie. In short, he was his own dream come true.

I VERY much encourage you to watch his two talks on Achieving Your Childhood Dreams and Time Management, particularly with someone you love and a box of tissues. His philosophy has to do with education, child care, friendship, work, fun, and leadership. Here are a few examples:

1. "The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something" - Student leaders see MANY walls, and often we just sigh and give up (aka burn out). It's important to remember that if there's a wall and there's a will, there is a ladder - and some of the most satisfying memories we have as student leaders are seeing those brick walls far in the distance when we look back.

2. "Find the best in everybody. Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you" - This is good to keep in mind when dealing with bureaucracies where people's best is tucked away beneath a stack of files somewhere. Getting to know the best in the administrators you have to work with as a student leader will make you and them happy, and they might even come to see the best in you.

3. "Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted -" Being a student leader is being a leader and a student. When things work out we're leaders; when things don't work out we get to learn a valuable lesson in leadership.

4. "If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let 'em do it" - I wrote a post about this a few months back.

And last but not least:

5. "Never underestimate the importance of having fun. I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day because there's no other way to play it." No explanation needed.

Leadership: An Endangered Species?

At one point or another, the administrative powers that be must have turned to one another and said, “Our student groups have simply got to take on the structure of a government. After all, the government is the most efficient and creative organization out there!” At least that’s what they’ve decided at schools like Hunter College in New York City, where official student groups (from the math club to Dumpledore’s Army) are required to adopt the structure of a miniature government, complete with a president, treasurer, and secretary. So inevitably, the students become frustrated about being forced to fit this mold, and the administrators become frustrated because the students are faking their meeting minutes.

My apologies to the powers that be, but this system simply isn’t working. In my experience, successful groups step away from it and develop their own structure. And though they may have a president on paper, more and more groups are sharing responsibilities and taking turns leading one another rather than following one leader. Collaborative web tools like Wikis are gaining adoption and information is just a Google away. The traditional view of top down leadership is starting to look a bit awkward before this digital backdrop.

Then is teamwork dissolving the very concept of leadership? I don’t think so. Leaders are still the folks organizing and motivating others: Wikipedia is the ultimate display of collaboration, but Larry Sanger was the one that nurtured the idea until it took on a life of its own. Increased access to information and increased ease of communication is leading to student groups with multiple or rotating leaders; it isn’t making leaders go the way of the dodo.

So if involvement in student groups is supposed to lead to personal growth, and personal growth is about building leadership and communication skills, and groups with no defined hierarchies are providing precisely these opportunities for their members, then why are we still concerned about official meeting minutes? Maybe instead of an election, student groups should be required to have a Wiki. Instead of minutes, a blog. And instead of a government-inspired chain of command, enough flexibility for any member to be a leader.

P.S. The image above is a Dodo bird. And very sadly, it is not endangered but very much extinct. For whatever reason, I have always been exceedingly fond of the Dodo, and until very recently was convinced that I had seen one at the Bronx zoo. 

It's not in my job description, and that's that.

I'm taking an Industrial Organizational Psychology course this summer, and recently, we covered the topic of job descriptions--a subject I've thought a lot about since development of job descriptions was added to my job description at my former job. (You may need to re-read that a few times before it starts making sense).

Anywho, during the class, my instructor was adamant about the fact that a worker must never say "it's not in my job description" to a superior. If your manager tells you to do it, then do it. Otherwise, you come across as unmotivated, lazy, arrogant, or all of the above. I can understand the merit of this advice, but in my experience (as leader and worker), this kind of ready-and-willing compliance also has a dark side.

A former coworker of mine actually lost his job in part because he was constantly agreeing to do things outside his job description. He accepted random tasks as his main responsibilities sat waiting, and he eventually lost credibility in the eyes of his supervisor--all as a result of being too eager to please.

As a worker, to prevent this from happening, I've learned a handy managing up strategy: saying "Okay, sounds good, but here are the things that I am working on right now. Which of these items should I push down in order of priority so that I could take care of what you're asking me to do?" This reminds the leader of your role and its importance while showing your willingness to do what ever needs to be done--as long as it's really a priority.

As a leader, I've made the mistake of asking members of my group to do things outside of their roles and later kicked myself for doing it because (a) I had delegated the task to people who weren't the best fit for it and (b) they completed this task at the expense of their priorities (i.e. the stuff in their "job" descriptions). And I also risked (c) making them feel unappreciated or overworked. All very bad juju. A leader has to respect people's roles and only ask for them to step outside these roles if it really makes sense to do so and with an appropriate explanation of the request, and then adequate appreciation. And that's how you get good juju.

Making it by Faking it (PART II)

I got into some interesting discussions after my last post, which made me want to clarify what I meant and didn't mean when I said "faking it."

I am a follower of the "ready, fire, aim" philosophy. I tend to dive into situations that are over my head, and learn to swim in them later. However, I would not recommend this strategy to anyone whose rookie mistakes can lead to serious consequences for the others involved. In short: don't pretend to be a cardiologist.

What I do feel comfortable advocating is faking the confidence necessary to lead until you start feeling that confidence genuinely. But this gets us into another tricky area; if this is okay, then what else is it okay to fake?

I once worked with a company that had three employees pretending to be 10 (because their clients didn't trust a teeny new company); now they have 25 employees. They faked it but then lived up to it. Does that make it okay? Or how about decorating a resume with slight exaggerations if you feel qualified for the job? Or pretending your student group has more members than it does so that more people want to join?

My feeling is that it's better to find an attractive side of your truth rather than make up a new one. A small company can be "boutique style," you can find a company that wants people with little experience but lots of passion, and you can attract new group members to a small group by offering them deeper, more meaningful involvement.

But then again, maybe that's naive... What do you guys think?

Native Leader (or making it by faking it)

My mom is always asking me how and where I learned a particular word. I'll say something like "ambivalent" or "taciturn," and she expects me to be able to cite the origin of my knowledge. Sort of like parents on TV act when a kid uses a dirty word. But I never know what to tell her.

I started learning English when I was six, and it was a bumpy road, but I was driving fast. I'd try out a phrase I overheard, screw it up, then smooth it out. Playing fast and loose, as the Americans say. The competing flavor, of course, is slow and steady: buy a textbook, go to class, learn the difference between a noun and a verb. When I ask my mother where she learned a word, she gives me a page number.

For her, this style gets the job done, but English remains more of a subject than the stuff that thoughts are made of. Becoming a native speaker means being a scrappy, risky, and creative learner.

As far as I'm concerned, leadership is just another language; you can learn by the book, or you can dive into the deep end. Now, while I won't deny that I have hefty library of personal development books, I stand by the belief that nothing beats learning from your own awkward, terrifying, and eye-opening experiences. To me, learning to lead has meant pretending that I know how to lead, putting myself in a position of leadership, then figuring it out from there. This also means being able to do research as quickly as questions come up, being brave (and/or crazy) enough to try unusual approaches to a problem, and learning constantly from the people in my groups. It means messing up, laughing it off, and being confident that things will work out, come what may --and no, Mom, I don't remember where I picked up that expression.

The unexpected effects of unexpected praise

Okay, so first and foremost, I want to apologize for my blogging slothfulness lately. I've had a crazy two weeks, but things have balanced out once more, so I'm officially back in action.

One of the things that has been keeping me from blogging is the research I've been doing in the area of Flow State. A LOT of it applies to student leadership, but the first thing that jumped out at me is the data showing that unexpected positive praise or results lead to enhanced performance, motivation, enjoyment, and concentration. All pretty cool stuff to enhance, if you ask me.

So what does this mean for us? It means that an unanticipated thank you note, present, or surprise member appreciation bash will probably be a much better morale booster than an officially announced recognition ceremony. It also means that if we want to get the most out of this psychological effect, we should work our "unexpected praise" into our everyday routines rather than treating rewards and recognition as a separate category.

Oh, and by the way, you guys are really amazing readers and commenters. I really feel like we have the beginings of a supportive and inspiring community here :)