Ken Blanchard once said, “Servant-leadership is all about making the goals clear and then rolling your sleeves up and doing whatever it takes to help people win. In that situation, they don’t work for you, you work for them.”
This quote perfectly encapsulates the type of leadership I want to embody. In my life I have always tried to help people wherever they are at. I want to take them by the hands and lead them in the dark to where they want to go. If I can do that as a leader, then I have been a successful leader. Recently I took a seat on the executive board of Western's National Residence Hall Honorary or NRHH in order to start acting upon my drive to help people. Our goal was to help student leaders in the dorms become connected to resources across campus and thrive in their challenges throughout their year. But I was too comfortable in this space I had created for myself. I knew what I was doing and exactly where I should be. I knew that that meant I wasn't pushing my boundaries learning how to be a better leader.
So, I found a place to be uncomfortable. As a member of NRHH, I had the opportunity to attend a regional conference. Not only that, but I had the potential to lead an educational leadership session in this conference. This was the chance to push my boundaries that I has been looking for and I took it. I decided to use a thought challenge framework to help bring hard ideas out into the air for my participants. In order to effectively lead this discussion, I believed I needed to have a handle on myself and how I felt about the issues I was about to unleash upon these leaders.
I went into this room already questioning my own authority to speak and tell these other leaders what I thought, and when I left the room, I felt worse, like I had shrunk as a person. The concepts that we had battled with in the discussion had left the room feeling very cold and small. Partially this was because no one was talking, but it was also because I wasn’t confident in myself and my authority to lead this discussion. I felt that I had taken a leap into open air and was hoping something would catch me, but instead I found that it was just a long drop to the bottom.
I am currently still picking myself up from that event. I have received a bit of feedback, but more importantly I recognized that I can give myself confirmation and feedback of my own if I step away from the situation for a moment. That day, we challenged a lot of hard and difficult subjects and the way in which I choose to present it may have been hard for the participants to respond to quickly. Looking back on this, I believe that I was looking for responses in the wrong places. They did respond to me and they did engage with the topics I placed in front of them. They just needed time to process the hard topics. After all, that's why I called them thought challenges in the first plac.
So maybe I didn't find a passion for speaking in front of others and maybe I hated traveling and the immediate non-feedback that I received. But I did learn from this experience and I can take this knowledge forward with me. I grew as a person and gained confidence in myself from this, and I can take that forward into rebuilding myself stronger for the future.
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