LEADERSHIP

Over the next five years I anticipate great growth in my leadership skills as I complete my graduate work and begin an administrative position. My personal goal for the next year is to strengthen my understanding of effective community college leadership in practice. I will have the opportunity to serve as an Executive Assistant to the Executive Leadership Team at Lethbridge Community College in Alberta, Canada during a semester long internship.

Throughout my career I have served in many leadership roles, both paid and volunteer. My leadership strengths include an ability to bring diverse stakeholders together to find common ground and move an agenda forward to achieve results. I have an inclusive leadership style and work hard to bring out the many skills of those I am leading. One of my strengths is the ability to discern inter-relationships at the system level within an organization or the community. This skill is effective for bringing groups to consensus and solving challenging problems.

The main area that I need to strengthen is my willingness to confront others when they are not meeting expectations. I have improved the skills to effectively hold others accountable, but need to continue work in this area. One area in which I am committed to focus my leadership skills is environmental stewardship. Community colleges have a major impact on the environmental quality of the community in which they are situated. By serving as a thoughtful, committed environmental steward, community colleges can educate the community and serve as a role model for best practices. As I move into administrative leadership roles, this will be a special area of focus and concern.

Another area of particular interest and passion is improving the quality of the workplace for faculty and staff. All individuals crave meaningful work and input into the decisions that affect them directly. Shared decision-making is an important way to engage faculty and staff in their work. As a leader, part of my leadership agenda will be to continuously improve shared governance.

A third area of focus is inclusion in all of its forms. Creating an environment where diverse individuals can thrive and learn is vitally important to me. This includes all kinds of diversity-ethnic, racial, gender, ability, sexual orientation, age and any other way we divide ourselves from one another. Figuring out how to do this is a part of my leadership agenda during the next few years while I am completing my doctoral work.

Some strategies I plan to use to further this leadership agenda are as follows:

  • Journaling and reflection during my internship
    • Measure of success: Journal entries at least three times a week during internship.
  • Writing a dissertation on shared governance to learn more about how to better actualize shared governance.
    • Measure of success: Completed dissertation.
  • Enroll in a course on diversity to learn successful strategies
    • Measure of success: Completed course
  • Research best practices on environment stewardship and sustainability
    • Measure of success: Notebook of best practices
  • Hold my employees and co-workers accountable for delivering quality work.
    • Measure of success: Documentation of specific instances of holding employees and co-workers accountable.
  • This leadership agenda is ambitious, yet can be accomplished with the resources that I have available to me through my doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin Community College Leadership Program and my work at Austin Community College. I have the benefit of great colleagues and mentors to guide and encourage me in this endeavor.