Light from Many Lamps~Wendell Willkie
Wendell Willkie was an American politician. He always he maintains integrity in his life. He was originally a Democrat (Columbian College of Arts & Sciences, n.d.). When he was against the New Deal and the government’s lack of military preparedness by Franklin D. Roosevelt, he joined the Republicans and ran for a nominee of President in 1940 even though he was not known publicly he nominated. His passion moved the public and finally he became the Republican nominee. However, Franklin D. Roosevelt turned his policy during the campaign, Wendell Willkie made an avowal of Roosevelt’s policy and Roosevelt was elected to be the president for his third term. Afterwards, during World War Ⅱ, Wendell Willkie corporated with Roosevelt and traveled around the world in the interest of global unity and peace (Watson, 1951). Through the travel to more than a dozen countries, “he got was not of distance from these people, but of nearness to them”(cited in Northouse, 1951). He wrote a book whose title was One World about his findings. His message through his book was ”Our thinking must be world-wide…. There can be no peace for any part of the world unless the foundations of peace are made secure throughout all parts of the world” (Watson, 1951).
When we see things, especially because we live in the busy life day-by-day, we tend to put priority only on our own interest and benefit and forget to see the whole picture as a person living in the world. His story reminds me of the importance of living with a big picture and make an action towards it. When we say world-wide, suddenly the issues become too big to empathize or think as our own interest. As a leader we should have a kind of idea we are one of the residents living together in this world sharing the Earth. With his attitude towards his country, the interest of global peace the first priority, he was a real ethical leader.
References
Columbian College of Arts & Sciences. (n.d.). Teaching Eleanor Roosevelt glossary. Retrieved from https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/glossary/willkie-wendell.cfm
Watson, L. E. (1951). Light from many lamps. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Learning Activity~Summary of 500
I cannot believe this is the last learning activity. This course was a big challenge for me. When I started, I even did not know the definition of leadership. Each topics every week were new and exciting to learn. If I could only pick two of them which attracted me the most , I would pick servant leadership and critical thinking.
Servant leadership studied by Greenleaf challenges the traditional leadership style and emphasizes the leaders serves followers the first(Northouse, 2019). I did not know any types of leadership before except transactional leadership and thought leadership came from personal traits and only certain charisma people who have special traits can be leaders and I was not one. However, studying servant leadership opened a door for me to the idea which everyone can be a leader. The ten traits which Spears developed following Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership also gave me some concrete vision of what are my strength and what are my weakness and how to pursue my leadership style, too.
Another impact for me from this course is critical thinking. Though I have already done post graduate education in medicine in Japan, it was very different from this course. In the science field, we have the same only one answer and when I research we pursue an absolute fact. Learning of the skill of critical thinking reminds me that we always have to think positively not passively awaring our own bias, even though we think it is our own idea. It is a big challenge for me every week that writing my idea based on my learning and backed up with other scholars’ ideas through scholastic articles.
Alongside this course, I am impressed with technology development and power of team learning. A lot of assignments and new environment sometimes worn me out. However, the existence of the professor and the classmates who even we did not meet each other support me and encourage me. I appreciate all the environment and support I was given.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
——————————-
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soulBy William Ernest Henley (Cited by Watson, 1951)
References
Northouse, P. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (8th ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications
Watson, L. E. (1951). Light from Many Lamps. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Learning Activity 2
According to John Smart(2015),the three technology including communication technology, computing technology and nano technology has accelerated to change our world. The uprise of the new communication technology with the internet has been bringing our life drastic change in many ways. The society is changing at an unprecedented speed and complicity that many companies face on the issue of how to adjust themselves.
The long strike of Canada Post union reveals their severe situations. Canada Post has been a monopoly corporation in charge of mail delivery. Decline of mail volume stuck their revenue from the postal monopoly and forced them to an acute countermeasure. Based of the situations, Canada Post developed Five-point Action Plan in 2013 including using transit to using community mailboxes instead of door-to-door delivery, introducing tiered pricing, reinforce of the retail network by opening more franchise postal outlets that cost less than corporate post offices, more efficient streamlining operations, and decrease the cost of labor(Government of Canada, 2016). While the size of letter mail business has become smaller, the demand of parcel business has been growing rapidly due to growing the popularity of online shopping among people. (Government of Canada, 2016) Canada Post is trying to shift their main business from letter mail to parcels. Despite their efforts, their innovation is slow and still they need to seek further fundamental and transformational changes to catch up the world changing at the accelerating speed. However, reformation seems not to be easy for Canada post because of their labour costs, a large pension obligation, and most of all, their culture which is slow to change(Bickis, 2018).
John Smart states that “futures are blend of Possible, Probably, and Preferable. (2016). Possible contains knowledge management ideation and innovation in the organization on the evolutionary side. Probable contains foresight to deal with risk management to protect and prediction on the develop side. Then, leaders lead people to Preferable future using visioning and strategic planning. Finally, these three components blended each other to define the organization’s future (Smart, 2016). Therefore, when an organization has to change, leaders must have the ability of foresight as well as planning and visioning. Greenleaf also defined foresight is one of the ten abilities which leaders should foster as a servant leader(Northouse, 2018). Addition to it, certain framework is important to produce idea generation for organizations, especially small and medium size of business (Perkins, Lean, & Newbery, 2017).
I think the history of monopoly of Canada post for 200 years caused the deficient of framework of innovation prevent from their flexibility for changes. If I could add something for it is bringing the outside power to innovate because public organizations often hardly have the climate to bring innovation easily.
The change of modern society is so acute and revolutionary that we hardly predict and foresight to plan for the future but we should not forget to put the customer as the most priority following the lesson from Jack Ma (Cited by E-learnig, 2016, June 23) and be flexible to adjust the changes.
Reference
Bickis, I. (2018, November 21,). ‘Canada Post is dying before our eyes’: Strike exposes how postal service has changed in online era. Financial Post. Retrieved from https://business.financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/canada-post-strike-reveals-the-shifting-nature-of-the-postal-service
E-learnig. (2016, June 23). Keys to Success from Jack Ma | Self-Made Billionaire and CEO of Alibaba [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WjHZ5wLe6w
Government of Canada. (2016). Canada Post in the digital age: Discussion paper Retrieved from https://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/examendepostescanada-canadapostreview/rapport-report/consult-eng.html#a2
Northouse, P. G. (2010). Leadership: Theory and practice. (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications
Perkins, G., Lean, J., & Newbery, R. (2017). The Role of Organizational Vision in Guiding Idea Generation within SME Contexts. Creativity and Innovation Management. 26(1), 75-90
Smart, J. M. (2015, April 8). John Smart – Leadership of Tech Change – WFS2013 [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhdWqLNUJns
Women in Leadership-Interview of Lydia Drasic
I had a great opportunity to interview Lydia Drasic (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydia-drasic-482a4914/?originalSubdomain=ca) who was a former executive director at BC Centre for Disease Control. She had been working as a female leader in the public health care system of British Columbia since 2004. Originally she was a public health nurse and decided to go back to higher education when her daughter started to go to elementary school. That study opened her skills in management and working in organizations and how to apply the learning to Public Health services. After her graduation from MBA, she started to work for the Simon Fraser Health Region. At that time BC was moving from a local focused health system to a provincial regionalized system. She was one of the members dedicated to build a standard health care system for British Columbia.
1. What is the greatest challenge you have faced or are facing as a woman in leadership?
As a female leader, she always felt that she had to lead to do more, perform more, perform better than her male counterparts. There was more pressure for female leaders to do things more and better to provide an image of one step ahead gained, whereas male leaders seemed to be more relaxed to do things because female leaders often felt they did not have extra chances and would lose their reputation easily. She thought the biggest challenge for a female leader is “perfectionism”.
Perfectionism also affected her thinking of balancing the family and her career. It was another challenge and dilemma. Her husband was so supportive that she did not have a lot of issues in fact. However, the pressure came from herself having own expectations as a good wife, as a good mother who stays at home and spends more time to do a lot of things for family always made her feel guilty and torn.
Another challenge for her as a female leader was she needed to speak out for herself to be evaluated by the organization. She noticed at times female leaders got less pay and were not promoted as readily as male colleagues and that female leaders seemed not to be good at negotiating, showing their contribution properly. She said it was very important for female leaders to make the organization acknowledge their contribution.
2. What is something that you do that helps you to meet or deal with this challenge?
While she was working as a female leader, having mentors and life coaches helped her to get through her challenges. She had a female CEO who took good care of female leaders and became a good role model to show how to lead, speak out, and behave. When she was stuck in hard situations, she tried to talk to mentors or coaches to help ground her and help her out of the mess to think clearly and sort out her ideas to solve the situations. She mentioned it is very important to choose and have some people who you speak to. Mentors are people who she wanted to be in the future and coaches are people who helped her clear her mind.
3. Do you have any other advice or encouragement for women in leadership?
As a female leader, maybe for all of the leaders, one of the things she thought that is so important is to see and say what are your values and what is your interest and what are your excitement to contribute and shine. Also knowing your strength and weakness of yourself is especially important for this modern complex society. You need to be very clear where you need help and a guide. Building your strength as well as knowing your weakness will let you know what you need to learn and you can shine and contribute more. She suggests we have mentors and coaches in order to know ourselves.
Secondly, be brave to set the time to shut down from work and figure out how to balance career and family life. Still most of women do the most part of house works. Being a woman means 24/7 working. Take care of yourself well, nurture yourself. Females tend to make things better for other people, family and organizations and easily put themselves second or third. Take care of yourself as a precious object, then you can do things perfectly the way you want.
You always have to be true to your heart. You have to follow your integrity. If you don’t do that, everything will mess up. As long as you are leading from your heart, and from your sense of kindness, your sense of passion, then it will work. And if there is not a fit, look for something else. Don’t fight to the point where you are so down. Before that, you should leave. Do not stick to the position for the reason you don’t want to change or you want money from that position. Be brave to walk out and find where you can give your passion. There is something waiting for you. For that, you should know your interest, passion, skills, and strength to prepare for your chance.
We talked for two hours and she gave me so many treasure phrases and encouragements from her experience. I would express my greatest gratitude to Lydia.
Response to Chris Vacher_Light from Many Lamps – James Gordon Gilkey – Unit 8
Hello Chris,
Thank you for sharing your view from the story of James Godron Gilkey. As I chose the same story of James Gordon Gilkey, I enjoyed reading the lesson you took from the story. It is interesting that you mentioned about the relationship between busyness and social status and questioned yourself your business is necessary to be or you make it on purpose to think yourself as an important person.
I notice if I have some problem which I do not want to think about, I tend to put many thing to do to keep busy. It is probably because I give myself a good excuse to avoid thinking.
For your question, recently I try to make certain time to use for exercise. I notice I tend to be think too much. So I try to use physical movement to stop my thinking.
I agree with when we step back some certain time to be away from our day-to-day busyness, it boost our efficiency and creativity.
Hiromi
Response to Erika’s Light from Many Lamps Assignment #1
https://create.twu.ca/walkinginmywhy/2018/10/07/light-from-many-lamps-assignment-1/
Hello Erika,
Thank you for your post about the first story of Light from many lamps.
It is very interesting for me to read that you connect your love for your job with your leadership style. Not as a leader as a occupation, but leadership coming from your passion and love for your job makes your leadership really authentic and strengthen your transformational leadership style for sure.
Learning Activity 2
Normally inclusive is invisible and hardly recognized, whereas exclusive is quickly recognized, hardly ignored (Nugent, Pollack and Travis, 2016). For this problem, I think unconscious bias is the important key. For gender equality, people thought it was normal to treat male and female differently for a long time in the past. The society has changed but still now the stereotype and the bias clearly exist. In my opinion, it is hard to diminish all the stereotypes and the bias from us because there is difference between male and female. We should not put our stereotype gender idea to a certain person to say something, however, surely we have some general idea about each gender has more certain traits.(For example, men are more aggressive, female are more empathic.) Secondly, although there are increase of female leaders in the society but still female leaders is not common. For us, female leaders are still new concept and have not got used to it. Naturally human being has a nature to exclude what they are uncertain or familiar. It is natural ability to protect ourselves from danger. My score of Implicit Association Test (IAT) shows I do not have bias but I guess that it is just because I AM the female leader and easily can connect leader = female.
Nugent et al. suggests leaders to make inclusion visible for improve this situation. However, I do not agree with this suggestion. For gender equality, I think we should focus only to reduce exclusion and not to focus visible inclusion because our ultimate goal is to make inclusion taken for granted or overlooked and also too much unnatural attention makes people feel exclusive or biased, too (Nugent, 2018). Northouse (2019) states promoting gender equality, we should make changes in organizational level, societal level, individual level and interpersonal level respectively (p. 413). With this changes, if more female leaders rise and people get use to female leader more in the society. Inclusion will become unconsciously.
Reference
Nugent, J., Pollack, A. & D. Travis, (2016). The Day to day experiences of workplace inclusion and exclusion. Retrieved from http://www.catalyst.org/system/files/the_day_to_day_experiences_of_workplace_inclusion_and_exclusion.pdf
Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice, seventh Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications
Light from many lamps~James Gordon Gilkey
When I read the story about James Gordon Gilkey in Light from many lamps (Watson,1951) , I feel the story just fit my present situation right now and it reminds me of the advise which my learning coach gave me.
After spending a semester in the undergraduate in the other university, I transferred to start this leadership course in Trinity Western University from this September. My life totally changed. Studying master degree is totally different from studying in the undergraduate especially as an non-English speaker international student. I am embarrassed with a new online study environment with demanding online skills and, burden of more reading and more writing. Addition to it, my family got a severe car accident right before and I had to deal with lots of things by myself along with taking care of my children as a single mom. Originally I am good at multi-tasking situations. However in this new foreign environment without any family support, my condition seemed to be the same as”The burden became too great and they became mentally and emotionally upset. Often they require the help of a psychiatrist to straighten them out again”(Watson, 1951, p.219). I couldn’t sleep at all with my stress and got depression. When I went to a doctor and a counselor, I was suggested to stop studying. I almost decided to stop studying. At that time, my learning coach advice saved me. That advice is James Gordon Gilkey’s lesson. “The crowded hours come to you always one moment at a time”(Watson, 1951, p. 219). Even though so many task pile up and seemed that I couldn’t finish everything, focus one by one. Also when I do something, don’t worry about the other thing and just focus the task in front of me. You would not believe but it is very simple but powerful.
Afterwards, I knew this lesson was proved by some scientific researches. The research group of Stanford university revealed multitasking is less effective and productive than focusing a single task at a time (Bradberry, 2018). Also, another research conducted by Sussex university found that people who often do multitask had less density in anterior cingulate cortex where is related to empathy, cognitive, and emotional control (Bradberry, 2018). Multitask is possible to damage our brain irreversibly. From daily life, we would better to focus one by one and avoid doing multitask at the same time.
Reference
Bradberry, T. (2018). Multitasking Damages Your Brain and Your Career, New Studies Suggest, November 17, 2018 Retrieved from http://www.talentsmart.com/articles/Multitasking-Damages-Your-Brain-and-Your-Career,-New-Studies-Suggest-2102500909-p-1.html
Watson, L. E. (1951). Light from many lamps. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Reference
Watson, L. E. (1951). Light from Many Lamps. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Learning Activity 1~Respond to Case Study 15.3
Case study 15.3
In spite of uprising of movement of gender equality, there is still the existence of general gender difference. Although “the glass ceiling” is often used for a metaphor for the barrier of women leadership, the situations around female leadership is more complicated and rather use “the leadership labyrinth” (Northouse, 2019) . The barrier does not only happen when female leaders are going beyond certain higher-level positions but starts already from the very beginning of the steps.
Nowadays social situations have improved to actualize the gender equality more and more, even the term “gender” seems to just indicate the biological genetical sex categories (female and male) and the definition of gender itself does not mean psychological gender, the things related to marriage and pregnancy will be the last issue to be solved because biologically our role for reproduction never will be equal and only women can be pregnant and give birth.
Case study 15.3 reminds me of my own experience of marriage and pregnancy on the path of becoming a plastic surgeon. When I finished 2-year doctor residency and few months after I started to train for plastic surgery, my husband and I decided to get married. At that time, there were few female surgeons in Japan, most female doctors didn’t marry. I was the first person to get married during the training of becoming a specialist in my university hospital. The first words I could never forget or even I did not imagine when I reported to my professor about my decision were, “That will be a big trouble unless you make a contract not to have a child until you finish training.” As male doctors had no problem to celebrate their marriage. There was no celebration for me at all. The training of plastic surgeon was so tough that it was common that female surgeons in the past who discovered their pregnancy gave up their career. Plastic surgery is normally a very small department in the general hospitals and normally they foster only two positions in each hospital. In Japan, we do not have the system to hire a substitute doctor to cover the absence during someone’s maternity leave. It means each doctor’s responsibility is quite high. Also, Professors were not happy that they trained and taught female doctors to be a specialist, then they were pregnant female doctors quit and their teaching became nothing. I myself did not want to get behind the training and give up my pursuing the career, I promised not to have a child until I passed the exam of specialist with my boss. In fact, I kept a promise with them. It happened 15 years ago in Japan and the situations has been changing and is not as bad as 15 years ago.
I am impressed that Canada has a good system which both men and women can take maternity leave and ensure the salary too. For the barrier of pregnancy, first having a system which ensure that work will be covered with a substitute during absence and maternity leave will not influence the career. Furthermore, changing our mindset of not only men but women is important. The news that New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern took maternity leave became a big news this summer. She is not the first woman to take maternity leave while a prime minister. The incident become news means still this incident is unusual for people. We should construct the society where female leaders can take maternity leave without it being news. For prosperity of humanity, it is necessary for women to be comfortable to surely have the environment to be pregnant and raise children with support and without any barriers.
References
Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (8th Ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.