This is a response to my team member Marcelo’s response: https://create.twu.ca/marcelowarkentin/2018/10/12/response-to-no-other-way-by-sally-hinksman/
Being international students, Marcelo and I tend to share the same feelings towards implementing transformational servant leadership in our culture. It seems the coercive leadership style in China is still in the primary role. The leaders, or managers, value their position so much and are obsessed with the power coming with the position. To be honest, I happened to witness the manager of the technical department publicly abused the staff of his department in the company-level meeting yesterday. Therefore, today I intentionally added the content of “discussing the benefit of exerting transformational servant leadership in your department” in this year’s training course. I still need to work on the details of this discussion next week, but implementing and preaching the spirit of transformational servant leadership is imperative. I had run into many barriers when I tried to re-design the courses with servant leadership and got mocked by other trainers. However, I never give up my intention and faith. And now I have gained strength from both Sally’s words “The transformational servant leadership model is necessary in our schools and in all levels of educational administration” and your experience.
In order to provide better practice, I have designed knowledge teaching, case studying, team discussions, and personal leadership story sharing in the programs. I believe these activities will help new employees intrinsically realize the virtues of servant leadership. Unlike teaching children, training adults with formed worldviews and personal experiences is hard to see the immediate effect. Therefore, I need to be strong enough to patiently believe there will be changes from the long-term perspective.
I am wondering if you have other practices which can help students understand the significance of being transformational servant leadership?
Hi Layla!
You are so right about what you said. Working with adults is difficult, more so than with students, I believe.
What we have started doing is adding a leadership class for students in freshman high school at this point where I teach Spears (2002) 10 characteristics of a servant leader. I have also done a workshop on servant leadership for adults. I am trying to give students more voice which means adding them to different planning activities and we have given older students the opportunity to mentor younger students. Actually these are all part of my LIP but hope to continue these practices after I finish my masters as well.
I also want to start a leaders roundtable training group. I will invite staff to come to a 30-45 min gathering every month where we will start to discuss what it means to be a TSL leader. It will be open to any staff member and will not just talk about education since not all staff members teach. I want people to be more TSL at home, at their churches, etc.
This is my plan so far.