Blog 9 Leadership

My mind has been reeling from the discussions, reading and my connections regarding leadership. Leadership has always been sort of an enigmatic word for me. I vaguely grasped the concepts, but had little connection to the idea that it was simply a matter of honing my existing skills.  With the awareness of these functions, I am finding myself invigorated by the chance to use and cultivate these skills. Leadership allows me space to effectively utilize my creativity, flexibility, energy and knowledge. From the beginning of the semester, I had made leadership and collaboration my goals- again somewhat enigmatically. I see my process now. 

As I mentioned in blog 5, leadership training would be beneficial as a more embedded component in our program (Mason and McMahon, 2009). However, the exercises that we have been conducting have been very useful and enlightening to me. My lower scores in the leadership quality quiz were in my attention to detail, part of Bolman and Deal’s structural leadership. Through the years, I have learned that research or organized knowledge is one of my skeleton keys. Being prepared and organized offers me security. Using vision to create goals allows me to organize the steps necessary for task completion. I most often live creatively and in the moment. I am skilled at having a broad mission and adapting the path and my end goal to suit the steps to get there. For example, I can teach a children’s yoga class with the mission of teaching self soothing tools (broad mission). I keep many activities and props at my ready. I can sense the energy of the class and teach to that or to a prescribed lesson plan.  I feel that this adaptability can either be constructive or produce meager results. It is important for me to recognize the benefits and limitations of this strength.  There are times that a conventional approach is much more effective.

I was pleased to read the variety of roles of advocacy in the text. Advocacy is too often associated with confrontation. The text frames it as change through action, interaction, goals of higher causes, empowerment and voice (Dollarhide and Saginak, 2012). Being an advocate then must involve awareness. We must be keenly aware of the “political system within the students, among the faculty and administration as well as the demographic area. These systems will lead us to the principal deficits and strengths from which to create change. This is also an area that quality data collection can be very valuable.

Coordination appears to be the bulk of the indirect services we will perform at the schools. Though not passion inducing, they are skills I will need to embrace in order to be effective. It will be advantageous for me to ask counselors I shadow and during practicum their best practices. This will allow me to understand what information will need to coordinate, in order to start these collection processes from the beginning. We may or may not walk into a position with organized resources and systems to simply plug into.

Dollarhide, C.T., & Saginak, K.A. (2012). Comprehensive school counseling programs (2nd Ed.). New York: Pearson, Inc.

Mason, E. C., & McMahon, H. G. (2009). Leadership Practices Of School Counselors. Professional School Counseling, 13(2), 107-115.