Leaders Can Make Things Happen:
“Power is the ability to get things done.” -Rosabeth Moss Kanter
The first topic that I felt was important is the idea that leaders are people that can always make things happen. The idea is that when you are looking for a leader or are looking to be a leader it’s important to have the ideas and the abilities to make projects happen. You can have the resources and the plans, but it takes leadership to get every aspect working.
Leaders must be able to get projects done not just by starting them and getting tasks moving but also by being able to keep progress moving when faced with tough situations. It’s important as a leader to be able to make accomplishments even when you might not enjoy what you must do because you know as a leader it must be done and you have the ability to do it.
This can apply well to TALONS on a bit of a smaller level than what John C. Maxwell was thinking about when he was talking about this part of potential leaders. As a grade 10, it’s important for me to help make tasks happen for planning like the leadership project and the adventure trips. I should be putting my ideas out there and helping problem-solve to make progress with what has to be done for these events. This can also apply to looking for potential leaders. If there are grade 9s that are working hard to make progress they might benefit from more responsibility or less support with the tasks they are working on.
The Tour Guide Mentor:
“A leader’s role is not to control people or stay on top of things, but rather to guide, energize and excite.” -Jack Welch
Another hugely important concept was the Tour Guide leader from the modelling part of session three. The idea here is that the best way to be a leader is to work with the people that you mentor, not send them off the do the work you don’t want to do.
This is important because it shows the people you mentor that you can be trusted to mentor them on the project and shows that you are there to support them all the way through. This applies to the modelling step because by going through the work with them they can pick up on the ways you do it and might learn from your example in the process. From the book, we learned that people learn the most from what we see, hear, say, and do and this process usually helps to include that kind of deeper learning.
This has big applications for how TALONS works because we are easily able to apply this when we work with the grade nines. As someone who should be modelling what is excepted of us, I want to focus on applying the idea to not just tell them the task when I am mentoring. This can be easy to accomplish when we are working together to share ideas for the task and solutions if we run into problems. It is a responsibility of mine to make sure that the process of going through the planning helps to make them ready for grade 10 by letting it be a collaborative activity that they will learn from and remember.
I Monitor:
“Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.”-John Crosby
This last concept is part of the steps to developing more leaders and it is the ‘I monitor’ step. The idea for this step is that once you have modelled the task and helped mentor them through a task, they will start to take responsibility. This step is about how you should still be there to support them after they have a better understanding if they need help with resources or guidance through the process.
This step is highly useful to make the transition from mentee to new leader feel less scary for people. Being thrown out into the deep end doesn’t work for everyone so having that check-in to make sure they are getting the hang of having more leadership responsibility can be a great help.
This concept has a lot of applications for the way we work as leaders in TALONS. When we are grade 9s we learn our way around the leadership tasks and processes so that we can be a class of mentors the next year. As we are going into the leadership project and the adventure trips the grade 9s have much more experience so that means they will be able to do a lot more of the work with less support because they have gained the knowledge to do the planning. This doesn’t mean that the grade 9s just work through everything on their own though. It is still as important as ever for me to be there as a mentor to offer my experience and ideas. Offering the help we can as grade 10s will hopefully help to make the grade 9s more confident and knowledgeable leaders for next year.
Sources:
Crosby, John. “Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.” QuoteHD. 2021, http://www.quotehd.com/quotes/john-crosby-quote-mentoring-is-a-brain-to-pick-an-ear-to-listen-and-a-push-in. November 26, 2021.
Kanter, Rosabeth. “Power is the ability to get things done” QuoteNova. May 1, 2018, https://www.quotenova.net/authors/rosabeth-moss-kanter/q2pp3k. November 26, 2021.
Maxwell, John. Developing the Leaders Around you. The John Maxwell Company, 2014.
Welch, Jack. “A leader’s role is not to control people or stay on top of things, but rather to guide, energize and excite.” QuoteFancy. 2021, https://quotefancy.com/quote/1463510/Jack-Welch-A-leader-s-role-is-not-to-control-people-or-stay-on-top-of-things-but-rather. November 26, 2021.