For G.R.E.A.T. day I attended the Key Note speaker who was Mrs. Barbara Kellerman. She is a very talented woman who has 19 of her own books pertaining to the topic of leadership. She discussed how she believes that leadership positions should be treated as an occupation rather than a vocation. She believes that every leader before they come into a position of power must complete three steps: education, training and development. An occupation such as a doctor or a lawyer requires years of training before they can enter their field. She then questioned why leadership positions were so different. Without making this too political, the current leader of our country entered the office with no previous knowledge of how any type of government works. This lack of experience becomes obvious in some of his policies and just in the overarching way that he presents himself and speaks to others.
Both her speech and her life work can be related back to what we talked about in our INTD course. The course is titled “Risks and Rewards of Academic Partnership”. And with every partnership there are leaders and followers, even if we don’t know it. With our current class project, we are all working together in a partnership and a few students have designated themselves as the leaders. These students did not do this with a declaration of words, but with their actions. Other students that are not the “leaders” did not do this on purpose rather just not knowing what to say or felt out of place. I am one of the students who doesn’t know what to say.
Outside of the classroom, I have always been a leader. I was a captain of most of my sports teams in high school, I am the oldest of three, and even in the classroom topics that I’m comfortable with I become a leader. This project has hidden that leadership quality that know that I possess. Personally, I think that it’s because this topic is out of my comfort zone. In my past blog posts, I wrote about how I thought I was gaining confidence, I was speaking up more about the ideas and not how we could write them. I don’t have trouble with coming up with ideas as much as I do with formulating them into words. So, when it came to the revisions part of the process my confidence dropped about fifteen levels. In my previous blog posts, I mentioned my lack of “training” and that I might as well be useless when it comes to the mechanics of revising. This lack of training has set me back in the revision process of papers and caused me not to speak up as much as I did when we originally started.
I found Kellermans speech to be very interesting and very relevant. One thing that stood out to me however In Kellermans eyes, I would not be a viable option for a leader because of the lack training that I have received. However, she does mention that it doesn’t take much to be a good leader. She said during her speech that all you have to be is “good”. By “good” I infer that she meant good at heart and have good intentions for the greater public. This made me realize that by following her recommended the steps of education, training and development, I too could become as confident as some people in my class in their writing abilities. Although I recognize that it takes hard work to become a leader and it is in fact a process, I also believe that it is possible for me.