Leadership (LEAD)
Addresses the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required of a leader, with or without positional authority. Leadership involves both the individual role of a leader and the leadership process of individuals working together to envision, plan, and affect change in organizations and respond to broadbased constituencies and issues. This can include working with students, student affairs colleagues, faculty, and community members. This is organized by the leadership learning concepts of Education, construct knowledge and articulation; training, skill identification and enhancment; Development, personal reflection and growth; and Engagement, active participation and application.
Reflection
Leadership to me means many different things. Leadership to me means being able to carry a team successfully. It means being an advocate for your team and fighting for them to have the best possible environment and doing what you can to make them happy or as happy as your resources allow. As a leader you are a mentor, and that does mean so much to how you can form your students and co-workers. After, taking some time to reflect and using my autobiography to reflect my leadership style and skills, I certainly will always use transformational theory. The reason for this is our world is always changing, and we either need to change with it, or in my opinion we get left behind. This means that I will need to constantly enact change and making sure it is a smooth process for my students and colleagues. Other theories worth mentioning that I will continue to use is both persons centered, and relationship centered theories. I value both theories because a lot of my leadership skill are based around relationships and strengths. A lot of training I have done in the past is certainly on how someone learns best and going with that. Now I do the same thing but certainly put more of an importance on those strengths too.
This course has provided me a lot of insight as to how I conduct my leadership with students and coworkers. I had not known about these leadership theories prior to this course, so it has been very helpful with learning about these theories and realizing that this is something I already kind of do, but also how I as a leader can improve. With My CAB team, I have felt a difference in how I am looked at. I have stepped up to the plate more with being a leader instead of just sitting on the slide lines like I feel I have. There have been times where I have had to take action to calm the situation down or something. I feel more respected, and I also feel more like a part of the team. I have been able to use part of theories to handle my students in tough and easy situations. I have also been able to connect more dots when it comes to how things are done on campus. Knowing that this is a public institution it makes more sense after learning about institutional and bureaucratic theories to help guide my knowledge and ways of thinking when it comes to being a part of the Joint Planning and Budgeting committee and being able to fluid speak on that in the meetings and to my students.
The artifact I am using is my autobiography. One of the main reasons I am doing it is because it is more on the personal side. I want to really know who my leadership and I think this is a perfect example on how to show someone really who you are.
Final Reflection
The way I look at being a leader and leadership means different things to me. However, they both work together. I am the leader of CAB as their advisor, but leadership to me means that I work with the team to make sure it works smoothly. You will always find me with the CAB team helping them at all their events instead of just supervising. I have found this to be very fruitful. Because I help them before, during, and after their events, I believe it has created trust and dependency (in a good way) in me. My students know that they are able to come to me for help when they need it. I tell them this every time I meet with them as well. I always tell them I will help them and all they have to do is ask me. I feel as though this also helps them with getting their work done because they do not want to ask me for help so it helps them get their work done.
What I have come to realize is that change is not easy for the students. I will be graduating in May and moving on, UWL has hired an adviser to start at the end of May. The students have not taken well to this, but as their adviser I have been very serious and have had intentional conversations about this change. I obviously validate how they are feeling as some feel weary after the past couple of semesters we have had, in terms of drama on the team and I have so far been able to reign it in, and they fear that this will be a struggle again. I empower them to continue to use the same skills they are currently using to overcome some of the stress that came with the differences. I have tried to ease everyone into this change and will continue to do so until my time is done at UWL. I care about them and want this to go smoothly and easy for all.
I have just held semester check-in's with each student to get a feel for how they are doing with everything. We are all about to attend the regional conference for NACA. Last year at the conference is when the team dynamics really was shaken up so I wanted to talk with the team that went last year and how they were feeling as well as the new members to see how they also felt about going. I think that it was good to touch base to try to mediate any uncomfortable feelings one might be having. I am interested to see how it goes this year.
Artifact
