Individual
Values
1Consciousness of Self: Being aware
of the beliefs, values, attitudes and emotions that motivate one to take
action. Key to being able to develop consciousness of others.
This value is the critical first
step for any leader. You have to know
what you stand for and why you stand for them before you can start leading
others based on those motivations. There
is no leader that is capable of accruing followers before they know themselves
intrinsically. I made a big leap in my
understanding of consciousness of self while I was taking a research methods
class. The teacher asked us, “How do you
know things?” Changing the question from
‘what’ to ‘how’ makes a big difference.
It doesn’t matter what you know if you don’t know how you know it. For example, you may know the Fox News puts a
conservative spin on the news cycle and MSNBC puts a liberal spin on the news
cycle. However, there is a big
difference if you know this because your parents told you that when you were young
versus doing some independent research to reach this conclusion. This got me thinking about my own consciousness
of self on a level beyond just news. I
was forced to start thinking that it didn’t only matter what I did, but rather how
I was motivated to choose to do those things.
As a leader, learning my own
motivations has helped me in two major ways.
First, you have to know yourself in order to be able to understand
yourself and then rule yourself. I am convinced
that every leader must start off with the same follower: him/herself. Once you understand yourself and your
motivations, you can feel confident in following through on those motivations
with actions. Only after that phase,
will you be a confident enough of a leader that other people will feel that
they can take actions based your motivations.
I will continue to apply this
insight into my life on a daily basis. I
have learned that it is more important to question myself before I question
others and that I must never stop doing either.
If I can’t answer the hard questions as to what is motivating me to take
certain actions then I know that I’m clearly not fit to lead in those
situations. On the other hand, I also
believe a good leader must be confident enough to know that on occasion the
best situation for him or her is to be a follower to another leader. The very first step in recognizing whether or
not someone else is a leader that you can follow is whether or not they have consciousness
of self, whether or not they have conceptualized it enough that they can
verbally explain it to you.
2
Congruence: Understanding and being consistent with one’s own values,
beliefs, strengths and limitations.
This is
one of the easiest leadership skills to define, and yet one of the hardest at
times to achieve. Congruence is
essentially asking you whether you walk the walk. Once you have gained an understanding of what
exactly you stand for as a person and a leader on an intellectual and
theoretical level, you will then be faced with real-life and practical
situations that will test those convictions.
At this point, I know what I think the correct thing to do is in this
scenario, but can I actually follow through on those convictions? Will I find it too difficult? I learned congruence through experiences
where I faced moral dilemmas and generally tough situations. For example, as a Resident Adviser, do I
write a student conduct referral on my favorite resident when she breaks a
rule? As a Student Conduct committee
member, do I impose punitive sanctions on a student for breaking a rule that I
disagree with, or that I myself have violated when I have taken an oath to
uphold those rules?
The most
important reason to fully develop congruence is to understand that there are no
black and white situations. You have to
realize that occasionally you will do something that you couldn’t have
predicted earlier based on mitigating circumstances you didn’t predict occurring. It was very significant for me to realize
when I shouldn’t feel bad about decisions that I made. I realized that it was better for me to have
values that I upheld rather than an ideology to guide me. For example, as an EMT on the rescue squad, I
couldn’t fathom watching someone go into cardiac arrest and refusing to give
him or her CPR. However, I have done so
on multiple occasions when the patient has an official Do Not Resuscitate form,
which is a form where a person states that they find the lifesaving methods
ensuing cardiac arrest to be too invasive and that they’d rather die peacefully.
I
related that back to general leadership in realizing that you can’t set a goal
as simple as doing everything in your power to save the life of someone that is
dying. If you can’t even do that in
every situation then there is nothing you can believe in that you could repeat
in every similar situation. Thus, you
have to stand for more universal values.
In this situation, I value the dignity of life. To me that means that I value life and I
value how we each choose to live it, I value what each of us has to do or not
to in order to feel dignified while living that life. With that belief, I know what kind of values
and beliefs I can realistically have and hold myself to. I know in the future what values I can
realistically focus on having and holding myself to accomplishing.
3Commitment: The psychic energy that motivates the individual to serve and
that drives the collective effort. Implies passion, intensity, and duration,
directed both towards group activity and intended outcomes. Requires knowledge
of self.
I learned about commitment from
day one at Virginia Tech. Our motto of
Ut Prosim pervaded the campus. The
concept of service was ingrained in me as a student in the RLC. I learned that commitment is truly the most
powerful method to develop your leadership. Through thick and thin, even when
they can’t put their finger on it or verbalize it, people recognize commitment in
others and it drives them to follow that person. I think it is significant because if you look
at the most successful organizations on campus they will be the organizations
that are led by people that have a commitment to the cause of that
organization. Going into the future, due
to learning about commitment, I know that in any given organization it isn’t
the smartest or strongest or most popular person that would make the best
leader, it is the person that is most committed. If I want to be a good leader in the future,
the first step is finding an area where I am committed enough to be able to be
a good leader.
Group Values
4Collaboration: Leadership
as a group process, relational. Encourages group to transcend individual goals,
interests, and behaviors. Vital that group members explore differences in
individual values, ideas, affiliations, visions and identities.
I think the best example of when
I learned about collaboration would be when I took the Team Leadership course
as one of the classes towards the Leadership & Social Change minor. I worked with a team of other students and
achieving an A in the class would have been incredibly difficult without
working well with the other students in the group. The most vital thing that we did in that
group was talking to each other and figuring out what our individual strengths were. In the past, I had always divided up work
evenly among group members. This time,
however, we divided less equally, but based on our strengths. For example, if someone had strong grammar
skills they may not have done as much at the beginning of the project but spent
a lot of time at the end of the project reading through and correcting any
grammatical mistakes.
Collaboration taught me that
egalitarianism is an infinitely better practice than equality. Instead of trying to get everyone in a group
to do an equal part of everything, I have found it is better for everyone to
work in the areas in which they can best contribute to the group. Everyone has certain skills, values, ideas,
affiliations, visions, or identities that make them better suited for certain
tasks. In this manner the group
benefits, however, the hardest part is having the leadership to convince the
individuals that make up the group that they must look past what is ‘fair’ and
past our incessant need to make sure everyone does the same amount of work.
In the future, collaboration will
lead me to teach individuals of a group that we must do what is best for the
group, which inherently is what’s best to reach the group’s goals, and ignore
what is best or fair for us as individuals.
5Common
Purpose: To work with
shared aims and values. Enables the group to engage in collective analysis of
the issues at hand and the task to be undertaken. Best achieved when all
members of the group share in the vision and participate actively in
articulating the purpose and goals of the activity.
I also learned about common
purpose while taking Team Leadership class.
The best example of that would be at the beginning of that class when we
as a class had to decide what percentage of the overall grade each assignment
we had to do that semester was worth. It
became apparent that there were multiple goals at hand. Some people wanted different things to be
worth more or less points depending on their strengths. A few students were sent up to the front of
the room to lead the negotiations for the class. I was one of those students. Another student at the front and I quickly
realized that trying to placate everyone’s individual skill sets would lead to
a very long discussion at the end of which everyone would leave at least a
little upset about something. However,
we did realize that everyone in the class wanted to set up the percentage
points in a way that increased their odds of receiving an A in the class, the
disagreement was on how to do that. We
ended up coming up with a few ways of adjusting the percentage points in a way
that everyone could agree would make their road to an A easier, even if it wasn’t
the easiest for them specifically.
It is significant to understand a
common purpose if you ever wish to lead a group. A group can only begin to move forward if
they can agree on a common purpose. Any
group can be given a task, and one of the easiest ways for a group to falter is
if they fail to take the task given to them and form a common purpose around it
before attempting to accomplish that task.
Leaders must recognize when their
group lacks a common purpose. In the
future, I know for a fact that I will never allow a group I am a part of to
take off or start working before we have a common purpose. I will work to convince my teammates to take
a step back and see where we have our disagreements and where we have our
common grounds. I will make sure that any
group I am a part of is working with the common ground as our starting off
point and not our disagreements. If we
focus on our disagreements we will never accomplish our goals.
Everyone can find a common purpose.
Even Batman and Bane can find some common ground.
6Controversy with Civility: Difference
will exist in the group; the differences can be accepted and resolved through
open and honest dialogue. Require trust amongst the group members. Conflicts
need to be resolved but also integrated into the common purpose.
I learned about controversy with
civility when I was in leadership in the G.E.R.M.A.N. Club of VPI. All of the members of the organization share
a common bond in the 6 values that the letters in G.E.R.M.A.N. stand for. Through those values we know and trust that
everyone else in the organization holds those same values. However, besides those intrinsic values, the
organization is about as diverse in experience, beliefs, purposes, and outlooks
on life as I have ever seen. Every
single meeting we spend hours disagreeing with each other on everything from
constitutional amendments, membership decisions, punitive decisions, long-term
and short-term goals of the organization.
Yet at the end of the day, we remain united as brothers in a bond far
stronger than mere civility. In fact,
after this experience, remaining civil is easy when compared to continuing to
love a brother during controversy.
I learned that simply voting on a
resolution to a conflict isn’t good for a group. Majority rule can be effective in a group
setting, but only if the minority is given a fair ability to have discourse on
the conflict and express their concerns on the conflict, and only if even when
an individual falls in the minority they can still trust in the system and
trust in the majority. Even when you
know the majority of the group agrees with you, it is unwise to simply pressure
that decision on the group, instead I learned through trial and error that the
most significantly advantageous thing I could do is to always know the opinion
of as many group members as I could and to always make sure those group members
get a full ability to voice those opinions to the entire group. If you do this, it makes it easier for
individuals to accept a resolution counter to their opinion on the instances
where the group decides to move in another direction. This is absolutely critical in getting buy-in
from the group, reducing the chances that a minority will seek to undermine a
group decision, and ensuring that no individual is so jaded by the one decision
that the group makes that it then affects a future decision that the group
makes.
Going into the future, I now know
that understanding controversy with civility is the best way to ensure that
factions within a group aren’t created.
And if they are, they won’t be factions that are incapable of working
well together. It is clear to see even
at the national level, how lacking the ability to grasp controversy with civility
can have adverse effects. For years,
moderate republicans were the majority in their party and they ignored their
more conservative party members during conflicts, and abandoned and humiliated
them when they had public political missteps.
Eventually the trust was broken and now we see the rise of the Tea Party
that no longer has a common purpose with the Republican Party; they are simply
seeking to replace the Republican Party.
It is absolutely pivotal for any leader to understand why that
happened. I will make sure that the
groups I lead face our conflicts head-on with open dialogue and that conflict
is never swept under the rug. When
conflict is ignored, and trust is broken, there is an inability for a group to
effectively maintain and work towards a common purpose; when a conflict is
addressed with civility, it strengthens a group’s ability to effectively maintain
and work towards a common purpose. As a
leader in the future, I will do my best to remember and practice this.
Community
Values
7Citizenship: Not simply
membership, but active engagement in community. Civic responsibility which works
towards social change. The practice of good citizenship should and needs to
happen at every level of the model.
I learned about citizenship in the
most natural way possible, by gaining my citizenship in the U.S. I already had, and continue to have, Dutch
citizenship. However, for a long time I
was also a resident of the United States.
Just recently I gained my dual citizenship in the U.S. When I was only a resident of the U.S., I did
not feel that I was bound into a social contract with the U.S. I had a right to abandon the U.S. and go live
within any other society for any reason. However, when I became a citizen, the
biggest change is that I will be a member of the society rather than a resident
of the society; I have a stake in the state.
As a non-citizen I was bound to accept the laws or leave. As a citizen, the choice is no longer to
accept or abandon; I will be bound to ensure that positive laws are being
derived from the legislative power in this society; it will be my duty that the
commonwealth I live in is a good one.
That practice of citizenship can be
applied universally in any situation or community. You can either be a part of the group, or you
can be a citizen of the group. The
difference is always how big of a stake you have. Anyone can just be a part of a group and be
ride along for the ride. However, if you’re
willing to bail at the first sign of trouble you can never truly effect
change. You must first show commitment to
your cause, and then you must commitment to your community. Citizenship taught me that once you are
embraced into a community you must treat that community not simply as a means
to accomplish a common purpose, but rather you must treat the individuals of
that group or community as you would treat yourself. Citizenship is the difference between a true
leader and pseudo-leader. A
pseudo-leader such as Hitler, could, for a time, use the first 6 social change
values to affect social change. However,
without citizenship, eventually the followers will realize that you are not
interested in them or their well-being and that you are only manipulating those
first 6 values to use your followers as a means to an end. True leaders value citizenship, and the group
or community in which they are working equally if not more than they value the
outcome that they as a leader can produce from their followers.
I can apply this in almost any
situation in the future. In my opinion,
citizenship has taught me to never be a leader that only cares about his
goals. Instead, be a leader that cares
about his followers and the community we share.
For example, if I have a career where I am tasked to lead a group
towards finding ways to cut costs at a company, citizenship is the value that
leads me to engage the entire community on how different areas of cost cutting
will affect them as individuals in the company, citizenship will be what leads
me to first ponder whether or not it is even responsible to cut costs at the
company. Accomplishing goals means is
meaningless if you discard the members of your community in the process.
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