Category: Post 2.1

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?

 

This is the response to Health Care Team 2’s post：https://create.twu.ca/chiefanalyzerofthings/2018/10/09/servant-and-strategic-leadership-tools-hc2/

I was deeply touched by Samson’s story of visiting his grandmother and the sequentially triggered reflection “who will care for those who care for us”. I had the same feeling once this summer when talking with Sally in the course LDRS 503. I can still remember her passion towards each student and endless energy she invests in professional work. Also, I could sense her unpleasant mood of being controlled by the system and government and feeling hands are tied behind a chair (Sally Hinksman, personal communication, July 31, 2018 ). Obviously, the gratitude coming from students and patients could greatly comfort educators and health-care workers. Nonetheless, I guess the situation educators are facing is quite the same as health-care workers. I could not agree more with promoting Transformational Servant Leadership in the domains of both Education and Healthcare. The importance of voices being heard and recognized as you mentioned in the blog is emphasized in characteristics and conducts of Transformational Servant Leadership (Northouse, 2016). Although changes happen slowly and take time, transformational servant leaders could unconsciously make slight moves day by day combining with strategic leadership. The integration of strategic thinking, acting, and influencing in the service of direction, alignment, and commitment needs the effort of more people getting involved and investing in the strategic process (Hughes, Beatty, & Dinwoodie, 2014). The more people are engaged in making strategic changes, the more they understand the urgent needs to make an improvement and contribute more to creating a collective culture. Eventually, we could attain the desired future together and pass the spirit of strategically transformational servant leadership to the next generations.

References

Hughes, R. L., Beatty, C. K., & Dinwoodie, D. L. (2014). Becoming a strategic leader: Your role in your organization’s enduring success. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

This is a response to Sea Breeze’s post: https://create.twu.ca/seabreeze/2018/10/10/change-makers-thoughts-on-transformational-servant-leadership-and-strategic-leadership/

I really enjoy the visionary role brought by Sea as being visionary and getting an assessment is the first step of the strategic leader development (Hughes, Beatty, & Dinwoodie, 2014). Also, visionary leadership, incorporated in transformational servant leadership (Atha et al, 2018), focuses on setting directions, motivating and aligning people (Cameron & Green, 2015). In the education domain, I believe being visionary as an educator and helping students find their personal visions are vitally important. Furthermore, I suggest we could think of adding stewardship and empowering (Northouse, 2016) to this aspect. From my observation, educators have different preferences concerning the curriculums or the age of the students they are teaching. For instance, if the students are in the young ages, besides being visionary the educators also need to enact more stewardship to help students in the ways of thinking, learning and developing skills. When facing adult learners who are more independent in learning and rely more on personal experiences (Merriam, 2001), the educators will need to empower the learners and actively guide them to gain what makes sense to them (George, Page, & Willaume, 2018).

However, I can hardly agree with Sea’s words in the last part of the blog. I understand the hard situation for Christians working in the public school system as other teachers might not have a personal relationship with Jesus. Nonetheless, holding the negative thought of having no expectations on others should not be the attitude adopted by a transformational servant leadership with strategic thinking. It is not appropriate to try to control other people’s belief or actions. But we could strategically influence the others and aim to better them unconsciously as finding faith in work and making commitments to personal growth are at the core of result-based transformational servant leadership (Atha, 2018). Moreover, we could resort to the dual developmental approach to reach the desired result by continuously building talent and learning skills for ourselves and creating a collective culture among the educators at the same time (Hughes, Beatty, & Dinwoodie, 2014). Finally, I want to present my story as an example. I am a Christian and live in China where the main belief is Buddhism. This situation is much more complicated than Christians in the Western public education system. But I never give up to affect the people around me. Although they may not share my belief, my colleagues start to think and behave as servant leaders due to the effort I put into building the shared mental model and collective practices. The transformational servant leaders allow and help people fully develop their potential (Douglas Atha, classroom teaching, August 7, 2018), and the people influenced by them will see it eventually.

References

Atha, D. (2018, July 30). Transformational servant leadership for results – Day one: Introduction-Foundational faith, values and ethics [PDF document]. Retrieved from http://learn.twu.ca/pluginfile.php/130150/mod_resource/content/1/2018_Day_1_Powerpoint.pdf

Atha, D. L. (Ed.), Castellon, A., George, I., Laird, P., Mitchell, K., Page, D., Peregrym, D., Strong, H., Willaume, D., Wollf, R., Wu, T. (2018) MA leadership and MA in educational leadership monograph 2018. Unpublished manuscript. Trinity Western University: Langley BC.

Cameron, E., & Green, M. (2015, March 28). Making sense of change management: A complete guide to the models, tools, and techniques of organizational change. (4^thed.). Philadelphia, PA: Kogan Page.

Hughes, R. L., Beatty, C. K., & Dinwoodie, D. L. (2014). Becoming a strategic leader: Your role in your organization’s enduring success. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Merriam, S. B. (2001). Andragogy and self‐directed learning: Pillars of adult learning theory. New directions for adult and continuing education, 2001(89), 3-14.

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.