Sipping on Sweet Tea

I'm sitting in the hotel restaurant sipping on sweet tea and like any good student affairs professional, reflecting on the last few days of activity. As you know from previous posts, I has spent the last three days at the Leadership Educators Institute in Tampa, Florida. Although Tampa welcomed me with temperatures in the 40s and one hell of a Gulf breeze, it has been an absolutely incredible experience that has brought up a lot of thoughts for me about leadership both within the field and at LMU.

While this may be a little self-serving, I'm going to do a session-by-session re-cap, mainly for the sake of my own recollection while it's still fresh, but also for those of you with Input (Carmen) who would like a little second-hand conference info. However, before we get to that, let's talk about the fabulousness of this field, shall we? When I found out that the University of South Tampa was hosting the conference, I immediately Facebooked (I know...I'm such a Millennial) Roxy who worked in Student Leadership and Development with me this summer as an intern. She is in her second year of the Student Affairs program at USF and lives 10 minutes to campus. She happened to be free so she picked me up from the airport on Saturday night, I spent the night in her apartment and then we explored Tampa, had brunch, and she took me on tours of both the University of Tampa (her undergrad) and USF. It...was...wonderful! I absolutely love being a tour guide when people visit LA and I actually picked Roxy up from the airport, got her settled and then did a tour of LA (with brunch!) on her second day! It was so full circle! This meant that I missed the opening session of the conference, but it was totally worth it. Plus, I saved more than $100 on a hotel room for Saturday night!

The first session I went to was about emotionally intelligent leadership which was great! The two presenters do this full-time and present all over the place so it was a really well-crafted session. Their assertions were that leadership is "influence through relationships" and that if we can't have healthy relationships, then leadership is impossible. There was also a distinction between leadership and management. Leadership was relationship-based and management was simply "doing stuff." Our students are really skilled at doing a lot of stuff, but not so good at the relationship part. The keystones of being emotionally intelligent were being able to diagnose and recognize emotions in both yourself and others, intentionally regulate those emotions by choosing appropriate responses and also respond to those emotional cues. The way that you get to this place was illustrated through a balcony metaphor. They stated that sometimes you need to be on the balcony to see what's happening with the people and groups below and sometimes you need to be in the mix. The distance and reflection is just important as being in the mix so leadership is both active and reflective.

The next session was on how to assess student learning in a co-curricular context by people from Texas A&M. Honestly, if it wasn't a giant school, hot as hell, or a conservative state, I would TOTALLY work there! They are doing some really cool things with leadership and leadership assessment in particular. They started a Divisional work group to assess their learning outcomes in a variety of ways. They developed 14 competencies with associated rubrics that can be used with student orgs. and groups or with personalized coaching/advisement with students. They also had some more qualitative or non-traditional methods of assessment. A few of them included a first-year student photo project where students were asked to document their first-year and then at the end of the year compile the pictures and reflect on where their moments of leadership development emerged. Another one (which I LOVE) was "Leadership Moments." They started it in their leadership classes as an opening icebreaker/check-in. They would just ask students to share a moment in the week where they saw leadership in action (for better or worse) in either themselves or others that they observed. This data was then compiled on a share drive for the Division and served as way to continue tracking when, where, and how students were learning and growing.

The next one was from two people at Texas Christian University who again, if it wasn't in Texas and one of the most conservative colleges out there, I would work there in a heartbeat! They do leadership through a four-year cohort model so the same group of 40 students who start the second semester of their first-year take non-credited seminars through their senior year. The session was particularly focused on how to incorporate Strengths-based concepts throughout a leadership curriculum. Now you're talking my language! They use Strengths-based advising and then research the code of ethics of major corporations, then create their own code of ethics. The capstone experience is called The Legacy Project where they are charged with leaving their legacy on campus. One student created a University-specific coloring book that was given to local students to not only encourage creativity, but educate them about their local college (I'm totally stealing this idea and bringing it to LMU!) Another Legacy Project was "Can-struction" where orgs gathered canned food items, created a sculpture that was displayed on campus for a week before being donated to the winning orgs' favorite charity (also stealing this one!).

Perhaps my favorite session actually came from Canadians! Who knew? Two women from McGill University in Montreal presented on their student leader facilitator training program. McGill is a really large university (36,000+ students!) and their leadership office was one person. ONE PERSON! Crazy! They were being overwhelmed by requests for leadership training so they created and trained a team of 20-30 students who could do it on their own. They did a three-day retreat to teach the students how to facilitate trainings for the various offices on campus. They then sent them out in new/returner pairs and did the trainings! It gave the students an additional set of leadership skills and opportunities and completely freed up the office to look big picture instead of the day to day minutia of weekly training requests.

The next day I went to a session entitled "Moving Beyond Awareness with Strengths Quest" which by the title looked really, really cool. It ended up being really entertaining, but not really useful which was disappointing. It was from Texas A&M-Commerce (I just realized I went to three presentation from schools in Texas! Carmen, are you working some Texas mojo on me???). They have a huge agricultural program so they used Strengths based activities in their equine studies program. It was a really cool approach and I would never think to incorporate work with horses and group development, but they did. Too bad it would never work in LA!