DISCUSSION 3: Leadership

(Referencing ORGL-503, ORGL-505, & ORGL-532)

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For our third discussion, I decided to further relate to the idea of leadership and talk about how each of the athletes could tie leadership back to their own actions and find ways to further apply leadership in their athletic endeavors as well as their daily life. I held a very open and candid discussion about my own path of leadership and explained my background to them. I started this way to fully explain the importance of relating to each athlete, while being open and vulnerable. I related this to the idea of servant leadership and what it means to serve those that you lead. To my surprise, not one athlete was familiar with the philosophies behind servant leadership. This provided a good discussion on "what it means to be a leader." While all admitted that they had previously viewed leadership as an opportunity to be in charge and take the reigns, not many had thought about the ideas of humility and transparency as a leader. This discussion was an important one because it allowed each of the group members to get to know the backgrounds of others more and understand different perspectives of leadership and how individuals might approach this differently. In addition, we touched on famous past leaders and what made their legacy memorable or important. I had Theodore Roosevelt in mind, as he led in many unconventional ways and is certainly one of the most important leaders that has progressed the United States of America. I shared a Theodore Roosevelt quote with the group so that we could discuss the ideas behind it and the boldness of his words, showing meaning in his leadership:

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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory not defeat."

- Theodore Roosevelt

 

We further discussed the ideas of courage, commitment, trust, and how this related back to the ideas of leadership. Lastly, we talked about how Theodore Roosevelt mentioned the idea of failing, but ultimately looked at it more as the willingness to try, rather than the act of failure. Through group discussion we discussed what this meant and gave personal examples on how this was related to each of us.

 

We then talked about the ideas of how we want to use our own leadership in the future and what opportunities we might currently have that we hadn't explored quite yet. I asked the group what it meant to a be a personal leader versus a group leader, and how this played in to creating a sense of community with a group and promoting a sense of trust. We discussed the themes of being genuine and authentic, being able to properly communicate, and use different perspectives to talk about leadership. We discussed the importance of a present leader and how this helped create a stronger group. I based our final discussion point off of Margaret B. Smith's The Ten-Minute Leadership Challenge. The text and question prompts are detailed below in the link, accessible with the button below.