Leadership and Power

To describe the relationship between leadership and power, I decided to look at our dear friend Luma and how she makes “Leadership Everyone’s Business”.

Luma uses her power effectively. While she has legitimate, coercive, and reward power from being a coach, she also has expert power and reference power. Luma’s expert power stems from her knowledge of soccer, but also from her knowledge of American society, which helps her to be effective while helping the families of her players. She helps them cope with uncertainty. Her reference power is from being a role model for her players. Being the only soccer team for refugees in her area, the players and their families are dependent on Luma and there is no substitute.

Power depends on culture, and this is where Luma sets herself apart. With players from many different cultures, Luma is an effective leader by making leadership each of her players’ business. This means that each player is considered a role model for the others so each is held to high standards. Luma encourages her players, who are “all ages, backgrounds, and have different experiences to seize opportunities that lead to greatness.” To empower her players, Luma expresses confidence, encourages initiative and responsibility (players are responsible for being at practice), and practices collaboration.

Luma being a good role model

Studies show that a more equal distribution of power increases the performance of an organization. Empowerment such as letting employees monitor their own work and set their own deadlines helps distribute power, causing each person that is empowered to be a leader. This makes leadership everyone’s business.

The other side of power... Corruption!

Saddam Hussein

Adolf Hitler

Tiger Woods

Martha Stewart

Be the Change You Want to See

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”- Martin Luther King Jr.

Change. Billboards, internal thoughts, presidential slogans. Everywhere we turn we are bombarded by the need or want to change. But how many of us really take the initiative to “be the change we want to see in the world?”

One person who is the change she wants to see in the world is Luma Mufleh, a woman with a diverse past who created a soccer team for refugee children and changed her entire community. Luma’s story is documented in the book Outcasts United by Warren St John.

The social change that Luma has created can be based off of the Social Change Model of Leadership Development (SCM). The SCM is a framework for change through understanding one’s own personal values and working with others. Social change is the collaboration of three areas: community, group, and individual. The model identifies values that are the base of these areas. For example, group values are collaboration, common purpose, and controversy with civility.

The change Luma has been so successful in implementing can be observed under this model. She has specifically excelled in collaboration (group), citizenship (community), and congruency (individual).

Collaboration is capitalizing on different strengths and ideas of diverse groups. Luma capitalizes on the strengths of individuals when she creates her teams. Her formula for creating successful teams is selecting one-third of her players from stable environments in order to be good role models for the other players. Another third of her teams are made of players who only have occasional setbacks and the last third consists of individuals who are not very stable and who need more psychological help than the others. With this formula, Luma creates successful teams where players are successful in working together and interacting with one another as well as growing personally.

Luma’s collaborative leadership style is similar to the collaborative styles seen in the leaders featured at the end of the StrengthsFinder book () as they created teams with diverse members with different strengths. This collaborative approach helped these individuals maximize their successes in their companies and communities as well as helped Luma create a cohesive community.

Citizenship is defined as working towards change by benefiting others through care, service, social responsibility, and community involvement. Luma works hard to create a sense of community. This can be seen by the 120 individuals that includes the player’s families. At the beginning of the book, a sense of community was a huge problem. Statistics showed that as diversity increased, a sense of community decreased. Also, players at first tended to create cliques with players from the same country or area or who spoke the same languages. Luma made these players collaborate and mixed up the players for each drill by race and ethnicity in order to create a larger sense of community.

Congruency is consistently acting according to your values, or “walking the walk.” Luma’s very congruent with her coaching style. At the beginning when she was creating her first team she realized she had to set a good example for her team. She tried not to ostracize anyone by speaking Arabic so she always spoke English.

Personally, I have always had some of these ideas and this model establishes a framework for me to organize my thoughts and ideas. I always wanted a major that was meaningful and I have been trying to implement change. This has given me some ideas to better incorporate groups into some of the volunteering I am doing. I would like to encourage collaboration.

In this way, Luma has inspired me to be the change I want to see in the world. I hope to inspire others to do the same.

Cat on the Balcony...

The following is a record of my thoughts as I went to observe a student organization… from the balcony.

Who is supposed to be in charge? Is it the older guy in the side row? He looks like an advisor. Is it the older speaker with the powerpoint? He looks more like a professor. Is it that guy at the side of the room who can’t sit down? Wait, is he talking? Oops I guess he is.

When the members quiet down, I can hear a little of what he’s saying. I guess they have a couple of trips planned, one to the zoo and one to volunteer at the Wilds Wildlife Conservation. Neither has a date set; it is up to the members to decide. Well that’s a flexible way to run things. I assume this organization is pretty relaxed.

What’s the point of this organization? If I didn’t already know because it’s listed in the name, I would have no clue. Any group can go to the zoo or volunteer for wildlife. This group is meant to connect members with opportunities. However, it seems that the members all have more important groups and don’t take this one so seriously. I’m not sure the organization’s activities and mission are consistent with each other. Maybe next week, at the executive meeting, I will ask the side-of-the-room-guy what exactly the organization’s mission is.

Now that I think of past community events, I don’t really remember seeing this organization represented. I will have to ask around and see if members attend community events for this organization. If members don’t take this organization seriously, then who will?

Wow what a great environment. I seriously have not laughed so much at a meeting in a really long time. A sense of humor is definitely valued in this organization. It seems like the members all have good relationships with one another and they have a wonderful group dynamic. The environment is very relaxed and makes me think of happy things. Instead of being distracting, the humor seems to add to the feelings of goodwill and to the points of the speaker, who is also a very funny man. (He is from Britain and has the most delightful accent. He actually referred to his daughter as “most dreadful.” I think I am in love.)

Well, after observing this student organization for the first time, I am excited to spend more time with these amusing people. I would like to understand this organization’s mission better and hopefully help them become more effective, so we will see how next week’s executive meeting goes. I feel as if I understand the context of this organization well after my view from the balcony.

Why Understand the Student Development Theory?

“One remembers best what one knows better than one remembers what one knows about.”

What is this? A tongue twister? Actually it is trying to explain the connection between Student Development Theory and experiential learning. Yes, I do agree that it could have been worded better, but the point that it is trying to make is student development is the base of experiential learning and it is rather catchy isn’t it? These Student Development skills can also be adapted into skilled facilitation and while building a shared vision.

One way of explaining Student Development Theory is Arthur Chickering’s psychosocial model in which he developed 7 vectors that students move through while in college.  I remember learning these vectors for another leadership class that I took and I remember it specifically mentioning that these vectors aren’t necessarily in order and they are vectors, not a pyramid. This means that students can revisit a vector and everyone moves through them differently. For example, I feel like I revisit the first vector, which is establishing communication skills, when I’m in awkward social situations and have problems communicating. As students move through these vectors, they develop and explore their identities. Experiential learning uses the idea of different identities to tailor learning to each individual student.

Perry’s Cognitive Theory of Student Development explains different types of learning, including Dualistic learners who tend to like more structure and Relativistic learners who tend to like less structure. So what does this have to do with experiential learning? Well, I think experiential learning is a tool that is used to help each type of learner learn on their own terms. This is where that great tongue twister above comes in. It means that with experiential learning, learners learn on their own terms by doing not by hearing. And because it is on their own terms, they can manipulate the amount of structure or anything else they need to learn best.

It is also important to understand the Student Development Theory while looking at the skilled facilitator approach. The skilled facilitator approach looks at behaviors in an organization’s ground rules to make the organization effective. In order to do this, the organization needs to establish ground rules, so students involved need to move through Chickering’s vectors in order to communicate (discuss/explain reasoning and intent) to establish ground rules. Not only does the members of the organization need to move through the vectors, but the facilitator needs to as well. The facilitator needs to take the “low-level” approach which I thought was a really interesting idea. This idea is that the facilitator needs to act as little as possible to increase effectiveness. Everything this person does has short and long term reactions, so the facilitator needs “emotional intelligence.” Coincidentally, Chickering’s fifth vector deals with understanding your emotions in interpersonal relationships. I like how once again, another approach is based on establishing identity, or the Student Development Theory.

The final article we had to read discussed building a shared vision. It stressed that “An organization must start the process of building a shared vision by encouraging others to create personal visions.” In order to create a personal vision, I think a person has to understand himself or have some sense of identity, which is back to the Student Development Theory. I think the Student Development Theory is all about students developing and understanding their own identities. Experiential learning is also on the student’s own terms and skilled facilitation and developing a shared vision requires the student to understand himself.

Leadership Lens

As soon as I heard the title of this activity, "Leadership Lens," I thought of one of the articles I had to read before traveling abroad in Ecuador in 2009. The article described how each person has a culture lens, just like green sunglasses that they wear everywhere they travel. This vivid description helped me realize that everyone's experiences are totally different and everything that they experience are viewed through their past experiences. With so many different people, it can be difficult for groups to come together and be totally effective. So in my experience, I think this is what defines a leader- the ability to bring people together.

My host family in Ecuador.

Where are you going? What are your past experiences? I wrote down these two questions because I believe the first is a question that every group needs to ask themselves and the second question is what helps get them there. A personal example of when I saw these two questions in action was when my group at LeaderShape had to develop a form of inspiration for the theme of the day, "Challenging what is and looking for what could be." We knew where we wanted to go- we had to develop a skit, song, or dance, but we had no clue how to get started. Our group spent hours trying to come up with any ideas for an inspiration. Eventually, we all started naming skits that we had performed at camps when we were younger. The final product was a mock competition: LeaderShape's Best Dance Crew, where two teams, THE Ohio State Buckeyes and the university of m!ch!g@n's wolverines competed for the title. The team up north had always performed the same dance with flawless accuracy and had brought home the gold for 10 years in a row. They executed their dance on stage with serious concentration... The Chicken Dance. The Buckeyes always challenged the wolverines at their same dance but this year, they decided to go out on a limb and perform a risky dance that could change the future of the competition forever. They executed their dance with roars of delight from the audience... The Stanky Leg. Somehow, we had all come together to create a cute skit by using ideas from our different experiences. I think the reason it took us so long to create this skit was because no one had stepped forward as a leader and helped bring our group together. So in my limited experience, I think that it is a leaders job to bring groups together to achieve a task.

The m!ch!g@n wolverines, LeaderShape's Best Dance Crew's announcers, and THE Ohio State Buckeyes.