WEEK 7 (4): Weekly Reflection

 

Collaborative Leadership

Look at the headings in the white paper on Collaborative Leadership. (Definition  collaborative leadership, context, key dimensions, operative system, leading through conversation, core practices, practical tips for promoting high-quality collaboration, core competencies, common barriers and potential ways to address them, and places to start)

Choose 2-3 of these headings and write your own piece (it can be a list, it can be a paragraph) about that heading. You can write about the ideas that are in the paper and your response to them or how you interpret them. You can also write about your own ideas in your own approach to leadership for that particular heading. You choose!

 

- Collaborative leadership

One thing I’ve been meaning to do for a while is encouraging my country’s ELT market to improve. I’d always believed that you needed a position of power to promote this change. However, after some serious thought -and analysis and readings and discussion in this course- it all comes down to collaborative leadership. Big changes in life, in industries, in communities depend on our capacity to partner effectively. I don’t need to be in a position of authority but find the way to bring together the agents of the market and motivate them to use their full capacities and strengths to lead the change; change that can raise the standards of the market and cause a real impact. We need to see ourselves as Educators of second order who must provoke changes for better. 

Bringing the best of all the worlds, skills from the best teachers, the management from top institutions, the entrepreneurial spirit from small organizations, the innovation from those young teachers who really want to change the world, the ideas coming from the visionaries, the old teachers, the young teachers, the traditional ones, the post modern ones. 

I co-founded an ELT association for teachers some months ago and told my fellow founders I’d be in the background assisting, advising and connecting them with institutions so we could start training teachers. I believe now I should take a more active role here and not be in the shadow but actually take action and not only work on training teachers but bringing agents from the market together to propose changes and to propose that our English courses have a dose of social responsibility, a dose of empathy to start training our students to embrace diversity. We can do this if we all work together, if we all collaborate and create some synergy. 

This connects with..

- Leading through conversation

The fact that we all get together to improve our market involves a lot of listening, the idea is communicating effectively and taking personal responsibility for the message we get across. 

“Collaborative leaders cultivate the ability to communicate with presence and intention and use different modes of communication as required to support alignment, learning, or collective problem-solving and innovation.” (Oxford Leadership White Paper Collaborative Leadership)

The most important thing in embracing change is basically believing in the change to be possible. Innovation seems directly connected with it; no innovation is likely to happen if we do not believe any change is possible. However, it is important for this to happen, to center our communication in building solid relationships; and I quote: 

“Collaborative leaders invest in strong personal relationships at all levels while focusing on results at the same time, recognizing that the two reinforce one another.” (Oxford Leadership White Paper Collaborative Leadership)

Relational Intelligence

I believe this has been a skill I have developed through the years of experience dealing with lots of different kinds of people. A key aspect for us to grow professionally and personally. And definitely a key aspect for bringing people from different institutions and organizations together to work under the same objective with a sole purpose: to raise the standards of our ELT market by including a dose of leadership, empathy to embrace diversity and tolerance so we can have better citizens, better governments and a better society. 

 

4. Listening to and Learning from Students:

What did you learn from your students about leadership and about their learning about leadership?  What does this motivate or inspire you to do?

I’ve had the chance to talk to some former students from CHOP, one of the ACCESS courses I had the chance to share with them, and I felt glad to see their growth. I felt really glad to see them aiming at better jobs, at helping others. Almost everyone is working on voluntary social activities and giving the best out of their time and themselves for the well-being of other people. I see them do things I sometimes fear or feel ashamed to do. They seem to be natural leaders, they just need to cultivate certain social skills to reach further to expand their scope and keep transforming more lives than the ones they already have but maybe do not see. 

I know I may have contributed in a way with a little of what they do now; however, I feel I probably wasn’t giving my 100%. I feel they deserved to have gotten more from me and back then I didn’t give the best to them. This encourages me to make a plan which will certainly have to involve more social responsibility issues as well as ways to raise empathy awareness, working on ourselves first, developing our sense of belonging to later be able to be empathetic to everyone and everything else.