Change Leader
understands the need for making things different and energizes groups that will be implementing what they may or may not buy into, tolerating ambiguity while exhibiting a positive attitude
Leadership in Practice (Spring 2014)
My junior year I took the leadership in practice course in which we studied the components of adaptive leadership primarily through a text, in class case-in-points, and a service-learning component. Our community partner for service-learning was a woman who was a pastor of a church and director of a nonprofit in nearby Ogden. This partner visited our class early on in the semester to talk about the needs in Ogden as she perceived them and suggested that one possible means of engagement for our class would be to host a community dinner. When our professor gave us time in class to discuss our vision for engaging in Ogden, several of my peers jumped immediately to planning and talking about specific logistical details for putting on a community dinner. The premise of adaptive leadership is that there is a difference between technical and adaptive challenges. Technical challenges exist when there is an easily defined problem to which a clear solution can be determined and implemented. Adaptive challenges involve different factions who may have different interpretations of the problem and thus different ideas as to what should or should not change. Part of the process of exercising adaptive leadership is to spend ample time diagnosing the situation. That means before one even begins to suggest or strategize solutions, you spend time uncovering the different factions, the stakes that each holds, the loss they might experience if change were to occur, etc. After hearing from our community partner, my class was ready to jump into Ogden and host the best meal ever. My role as a change leader was to really put on the breaks and challenge my class to remain in diagnosis. We had heard from one engaged citizen, but I encouraged my peers to think about what other factions in the community might exist and how their perceptions of the community might be different. It would be a lot easier and more efficient to take what our partner said and to design and implement a meal based solely on that. It is a lot messier, more ambiguous, to plan a project and mobilize a group when you are committed to identifying and hearing from every faction and giving them ownership in the action, but it is a much more meaningful and sustainable form of change.
LIFE Group Leader (Fall 2013)
My sophomore year, my friend and I co-led a LIFE group (bible study) for freshmen girls. In order to understand the gospel and grow more like Jesus in character, a lot of what we did in life group was centered on studying the bible. Understanding the gospel and growing in character like Jesus not only determined what we studied, but how we studied it, the types of questions we asked, etc. That year, knowing that our freshmen girls were hungry for relationships and had a desire to be known, we allowed more time for community building (playing games, eating snacks, sharing about our weeks). The next year, my junior year, my co-leader and I decided to stay with the same group of girls. As much as might have wished for things to stay exactly as they were, we knew that change was going to and had occurred and we wanted to create space and vision for growth. Still, we knew we were not starting at ground zero. We invited our girls into the process of casting vision for the year by asking two simple questions, “Where are you coming from?” and “Where are you going?”. We spent one night first just reflecting on what we had seen God do in each others lives over the last year and how He had used this community to teach and grow each of us. Next, we talked about areas that we would like to grow in and developed a sort of catch phrase “real, rooted, relational” to capture the type of change we desired to see in our second year together.
Beautiful Things (Summer 2012)
Over the last four or five years I have grown to care deeply for pre-teen girls, their beliefs about themselves, and their dreams for the future and how these things impact their development and the choices that they make. After my freshmen year at K-State I returned to my hometown of Lincoln, Kansas and worked as a nanny. Lincoln is a really small town with a combined junior high and high school. Additionally, both of my parents teach at the elementary school so I spent a lot of time there. That summer when I returned home, I knew a lot of the girls who were headed into or were already in junior high and knew that most of them knew me. That summer I was just really burdened for these girls, the questions I felt they were beginning to ask about themselves, and the answers and messages they were getting from other people. I did not feel like I was qualified or had authority to speak into their lives, but at the same time was so convinced of the need for change, and so aware of my potential for influence, simply because I already had these girls’ attention. After talking through the idea with several of my friends and mentors, I decided that I would host a tea party at a community building in town and visit with the girls about identity. I sent invitations to all of the girls who had just finished sixth through eighth grade along with a letter to their parents explaining the event.
When the girls arrived, I had a large banner with the words “beautiful things” written across it. I invited the girls to cut out pictures from magazines and to use markers to add their own contributions to the banner of anything and everything that was beautiful. The girls sat down at tables and enjoyed some tea party refreshments while I spoke to them briefly about identity—about the messages we sometimes receive from the outside world about what is beautiful or valuable, about who God says we are and how He sees us, and about how we see ourselves and how that influences the decisions we make. As I was talking, I could see that a few girls seemed to be checking out, one girl pulled clown makeup out of her person and was painting her face. But I also saw others, a select two or three who were hanging on to every word that I said, and I knew that if one girl got it, then what I did that day would be so worth it. One tea party is not enough to change how a cohort thinks about themselves and their place in the world; these girls need older women and mentors fighting for them daily. But perhaps one tea party is enough to plant some seeds, to give one girl enough pause to recognize a lie about her worth and choose to believe and act differently, and that is the beginning of change.