Lessons and Accomplishments
Since the initial SWOT analysis from summer 2018, it is has been a continuous developing experience to work with my colleagues to try and develop a more comprehensive leadership experience. We all knew and wanted to keep transitional leadership as a core focus of our approach, however gaining student feedback we quickly realized that organizational leadership would be an intengral intersecting component that we would need to incorporate.
Between myself and my three other coworkers, he are responsible for our own cohort of student clubs and organizations. My cohort consists of twenty-two clubs, which means I am also directly responsible for eighty-eight student club executive leaders. In the fall semester, my approach for my cohort was to allow the students to take charge in definiting their own narrative with their clubs. The hope was to allow students the space and capacity to define their own beliefs, identity, and social relations (Evans et al.,2010, p.184) within their clubs and amongs others on their respective student executive boards.
Within this framework, I found for some clubs they were able to take charge and set clear priorities and goals for club engagement, membership procurement and their own leadership development. For many other clubs, there were my own professional struggles in translating what I knew about theory to practice. In regularly bi-weekly meetings, some clubs reported struggingling with internal roles and responsibilities. There seemed to be continuous confusing around which executive was responsible for each task to run the club, and there were issues with communication and chemistry.
It was frustrating on my part because as the staff professional, my job is to know or at a minimum, work with the students to find clarity and a way forwards that is conducive to their club's mission and their outlined obejectives and goals. I felt that I had not done enough to additionally prepare my cohort of student clubs enough to navigate these conncers. The student survey feedback that was taken in December 2018, only helped to shine more of a light on these concerns of student executives.
From the fall semester experience and the end of the semester feedback from the student executives, I began finding ways to either make adjustments or offer ways to provide more learning opportunities that could help build understanding of roles and develop team chemistry. From these I was able to not just provide offersn, but to intentionally put learning opportunities together that were based off student's voice. This included a mid-year training workshop for student executives to review club processes, define each executives main roles and responsibilities with flexibility for each club to make adjustments as needed, and for me to set clear expectations that I had of the club executives and what they could expect of me. Going into Spring Semester, I was then able to follow up on bi-weekly meetings with a more intentional approach that continued to build on learning communication tactics and more development or adjustments of club engagement and goals, as well as opportunities for each executive to share updates within their different areas for clarity in roles and repsonsibilities and a way to engage in mutual accountability.
These developments helped me to see that I am a capabile of identify student issues and concerns post-SWOT analysis, but also finding ways to support the students in multiple ways to ensure that students had more than one way to learn and grasp information, as well as have opportunities grow their understanding of organizational leadership skills to compliment their transformation leadership abilities. I will continue to find a good mixture between transformational and organizational leadership skills building through the following:
- End of Spring Semester 2019 Student Survey
Between the end of fall semester and spring semester it will be good to see if there was any improvement in student understanding of their roles and the repsonsibilities each executive has and how that affected their abilities to work together to better carry out their clubs missions, goals and objectives. I also want to see how they felt individually with growing their skills around critical thinking, reflection, understanding of budgets, resource finding and overall logistics. One big questions to help students explore is how developing these transformational and organizational leadership abilties will be integral to their career development.
- Enhance Cohort Workshops
The January workshop to start off the spring semester was a soft roll out that work to touch on the basics. It was really more of a refresher training course to offer the student executives from the previous summer. However this workshops was more aimed to the specific areas that students voice concerns about. I would like to take future workshops to include spring semester survey feedback. Additionally, based off some feedback from this course, I can find additionall workshop opportunities that speak to organizational leadership either with another area on campus, at future student leadership conferences or within the New York area that might be accessible for students. Really appreciated this feedback too.
- Review Club Constitutions Regularly
One suggestion that I received from peer feedback that I really appreciated was adopting guidlines and proceedures for each club. This reminded me that each club is supposed to have their own constitutions that they follow and dictates how to carry out certain proceedures and is a place that details each club executive's position. Additionally, each club is directed by their own constitution, which act as their club's guidlines and policies. At the beginning of each semeter, I can include reviewing the club's constitution to ensure that each club executive is up to date with their own policies and procedures, roles and responsibilities and budget process. It will not be enough for me to iterate their constitution, so I will require that club executives review it together, but in my presence so that may facilitie the review and discussion.