My definition of leadership before college was skewed in a way where I excluded myself from personally identifying with leadership. Being raised in a small semi-rural conservative town, I think the culture and the way history was framed supported the idea of the Great Man Theory/ Trait Approach, without naming them. Somewhere from middle to high school, I started to develop a social and political consciousness and adopt more progressive ideas fostered through my friends and some teachers. But I didn’t think about how my broader environment also impacted me. So ultimately when I started at AU my association of leadership was similar to the Great Man Theory/ the Trait Approach or at least that leadership was synonymous with aggressiveness and masculinity. So I think one of my expectations of this program was that I would learn to adopt an assertive extroverted personality. Since we started discussing theories of leadership and leaders throughout history, I started to recognize this thinking and expand my understanding of leadership beyond specific traits. I’ve learned that leadership is better defined in terms of learning, situational adaptation, and service to others.
I think now I have a more complete picture of the different ways leadership scholarship has evolved over time to modern understandings of adaptive and transformational leadership. Another thing I learned was the importance of a relationship between leaders and followers. I don’t think previously I understood the importance of the contributions of followers. I now understand leadership as a collaborative effort. Additionally, I now recognize that leadership isn’t just who a person is or a position of authority, it’s about what a person does. As adaptive leadership suggests it’s about learning, making difficult decisions looking towards the future and continuously looking for ways to be inclusive and lift other people up.
As far as the leadership of others, I don’t think I judge the approach of others as harshly as I judge myself. But greater awareness of how leadership often fits with a person’s personality has helped me to gain a better understanding of why people make some of the choices they do in leadership. Previously I didn’t identify myself with the ability to be a leader. I thought leadership would be a tradeoff with my personality and that I had to adopt an aggressive and assertive persona that’s not natural to me. By gaining a broader understanding of leadership I learned that I could find a means of leading through my strengths. I think I also gained a greater self-awareness through trying to figure out my strengths because I was also more able to see my patterns and weaknesses. Through greater self-awareness, I also gained confidence and started to trust myself more. Ironically, as much as I am an introverted person, self-awareness also afforded me the confidence to be assertive and outgoing at times. I identified that one of my strengths in leadership is interpersonal relationships and directing collaboration to goals. But I think one of the most important things I took away from greater self-awareness was my weaknesses and an appreciation of learning and adaptability, which is helping me to balance out some of my perfectionist tendencies. I’m not there yet, but I can say that I recognize when it’s happening and react accordingly.
One of my biggest challenges with working collaboratively was learning to relinquish control and trust people. My K-12 education conditioned me to expect that group members in projects would always let me down. This expectation, combined with my achievement-oriented perfectionist tendencies is not a good combination. But it took me a while to see this as a problem since previously I did very well handling things on my own. I recognize now that this approach isn’t sustainable for me, and it’s not good for a group either. It makes people feel undervalued which perpetuates my perception that people in the group don’t care. There were definitely times in my history of group projects where nothing would have gotten engagement from group members, but I also think there were also times when a greater effort to understand the working style of people would have changed the outcome. But since coming to college I haven’t often defaulted to the controlling do-the-whole-project-mode. With maturity and meeting a lot of people I respect with different working styles, I’ve come to understand different approaches and have become more open to this as much as procrastination stresses me out. Ultimately, I’ve learned to manage my biases and expectations when working with others.
Some of the opportunities I’ve sought started with the leadership projects. From reaching out to DC nonprofits for project research, I learned how to engage in a professional setting. This led me to reach out to organizations where my interests were, and helped me to get several of my past internships. The adaptive leadership mentality I took into these internships helped me to gain projects where I could exercise leadership. By demonstrating interest and a desire to learn I got to lead phonebanks and trainings for a campaign, and I was given the opportunity to take on projects at Cumberland County Courthouse and in the legislative office of Representative Houlahan.
I also sought leadership experiences on campus, one of the first organizations I joined was AU Ambassadors. I learned how to give tours and help run events, but my favorite part always was talking to prospective students and engaging with their interests. It was always a great feeling when students would come up to me on campus and tell me I gave their campus tour. There were others I got to know because they would email me with follow up questions or just wanted to tell me that they decided to attend AU. One of the most moving things was a student who wrote and mailed me a handwritten thank you note saying that he was going to accept his AU admission and how much it meant to him that we talked after the tour about the symphonic band and opportunities to do music as a non-music major. I also got to mentor younger tour guides which was also rewarding.
Also early on in my time at AU, I was involved with DC Reads. I volunteered at an afterschool program. This was one of the more meaningful things I did during my time at AU. I led STEM activities with groups of students and did homework help with individual students. I remember that the student I worked with was so quiet when we met but eventually would run up to me so excited to tell me about his day. I was also an Explore DC group leader, which is actually how I first met some of the younger SPA Leadership class. I was proud of the volunteer work we did on those days at Urban Teachers, but I was also glad that by the end of the program my co-leader and I created an environment where they were comfortable with us and made friendships in the group.
One of the more recent leadership experiences that I’m proud of is the revival of the Leading Women of Tomorrow club at AU. Last summer I applied to be on the e-board when the national chapter reached out about restarting the club. I got the Director of Professional Development position. With eight other E-board members, we got to work to bring the club back over Zoom. I was tasked specifically with planning and hosting events like resume workshops, scheduling events, and information sessions about careers and graduate/ school, but we all worked together to promote the club and develop a plan for what we wanted it to be. I’m proud of what we did. In December we were recognized by AU for being one of the clubs on campus that held the most events and had the highest attendance and engagement. From the initial e-board, the club now has well over 50 members and we recently held our first election. I decided not to run again since I won’t be around, with going abroad and then graduating early, but this gave me the opportunity to talk to the people running for my former position. It was thrilling to hear their ideas, impart things I learned, and to understand through them how much the club meant to them and gave them a sense of connection to AU even with everything online. I knew how much this club meant to me as a nonpartisan supportive community where I’d made close friendships and started an LSAT study group, in addition to running the club. But it was so moving to see that the culture we tried to build came through even with the physical distance. I was happy to step down, it feels like the best form of transformational leadership, we’d inspired our members which was the goal in the first place. Personally, it’s nice to think that something good like this that I helped to build will live on past my time at AU. In some ways, the collaboration to create this club felt like the culmination of all of the things I’ve learned about leadership over the years.