In my 20 + years in the Army, I was afforded multiple opportunities for higher learning but I never took advantage and committed because no program really spoke to me. Essentially I felt that I would just get a degree, to get a degree. For me to commit I wanted a program I truly wanted to be in. The Organizational Leadership Masters of Arts Program at Gonzaga, felt like a good fit. It provided me a check on myself as a leader – outside the Army, it provided tools focused on learning organizations, it is proving applicable in daily business operations and strategic planning.
Below are the classes I took and reflections of the tools they provided me. For more info visit: Gonzaga Organizational Leadership
Foundations of Leadership ORGL 600
Reflection: This course introduced foundational concepts that I have referred to throughout the program. This course helped me identify dysfunctional leadership and gave me the tools to action to protect those exposed. It also gave me concepts for building empowered, dynamic, and adaptive teams. I completed a Leadership Practice Inventory which provided feedback from trusted colleagues, identifying personal strengths, and areas for concentration and improvement. I also began a personal leadership development plan. The idea to “embracing conflict” resonated deeply with my personal leadership style.
Imagine, Create, Lead ORGL 605
Reflection: Mindfulness, seeing and seeing again, harnessing creativity to bring positive change, image, and constructive development are some of the concepts that were covered in this course which included a 3-day immersion on the Gonzaga Campus. The course served as a great opportunity to explore and grow as a leader, learning the tools of mindfulness and discovering different methods to harness inner-creativity. Uniquely, this class was my only opportunity to physically connect with other students and the Gonzaga faculty bringing the experiences of learning more life. It also served as a reminder that dialog, listening, sharing, and learning from others are the key to understanding and developing self. There was a less intense physical work-load assigned, but the balance gave me the greatest intensity for self-reflection of all the courses.
Communication and Leadership Ethics ORGL 610
Reflection: All leaders will face moral and ethical dilemmas. This course presented multiple case studies with moral dilemmas for study and inquiry and deep-dived into current global ethical issues such as refugee migration. I learned that dialogic communication is key to analyzing and finding answers to creating, applying, and implementing ethical decisions to tough problems. Any chance I can whole-heartedly listen and give someone a stage to present an idea, will at least guarantees that multiple ideas will be present. It is fair and it gives a voice a chance to change. I believe violence is the result of people not being heard or having the perception of not being heard. The chance to be understood. This course presenting how ethics is related to communication and without communication, understanding each other is an impossibility. I use this philosophy, believe in the importance of diversity, and that we should celebrate differences. These concepts have progressed my understanding of listening, and seeking understanding.
Organizational Theory and Behavior ORGL 615
When Senge (2006) explains “Metanoia” he refers to a “shift of mind” (p. 13). He explains that “real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human” and that “through learning we recreate ourselves” (p. 13). Even more enlightening he continues to explain that “through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it” (p. 13). Finishing his thoughts that a learning organization with “adaptive learning” is also “joined by generative learning” which is learning that enhances our ability to create”.
Reflection: Probably the most intense and demanding course throughout the leadership program, not because of the heavy assignment load, but more that I had not yet discovered basic systems thinking (including systems graphing, diagramming systems, systems relationships, leveraging, and an introduction to complex systems). System thinking boils down to the idea of seeing the world as a group of functions, that are interrelated and interact with one another to form a complex whole. In this way, everything with a change will affect something else, some positive and some negative. This course forced me to re-look things around me with an eye toward systems and how variables affect each other. It forced me to consider visualization of diagrams to gain a better understanding of reality and use them to serve as a check for understanding those relationships. It challenges me and gives me a method to identify hidden things about a system which I may not have been able to see before.
Leadership Seminar ORGL 620
Reflection: As my final course the Seminar served as a time for me to reflect on the depth and breadth of lessons I had discovered throughout the program, and to reconnect with all the artifacts that I had created. Most importantly the seminar gave me pause to reflect on who I am and have always been as a person, and to measure how close that is to the vision I want to be. What I continually re-discover is that leadership always and simply comes back to caring for people and finding ways to elevate them to succeed.
Leadership and Diversity ORGL 506
“Who we are, and who others think you are…decide how [people] treat you.” Earl Babbie
Reflection: Our identity is puzzled together by what we do, where we came from, our social class, our race and gender, the social roles we have and have inherited, and how society sees us in those roles. This course forced me to visit the difficult concepts of white privilege, classism, racism and ethnic diversity, and explore best practices in intercultural communication. As a result, I reflected deeply on the make-up of me as a person, where I came from, and how I was looked at by other people based on my social role, white race, and middle-class background. It forced me to question how I looked at others and based on their social-identity make-up, if I modified in any way my treatment of them. This class underlying themes are: respecting others for who they are, embracing diversity, and learning to learn from those differences.
Transforming Leadership ORGL 518
Reflection: This was the first course of my leadership program, and introduced me to James Burns who wrote “Transforming Leadership” and to the teachings of Parker Palmer on discovering my hidden “inner-self and inner-voice”. Palmer’s belief is that by deepening awareness of our own self, we release truths about who we are that gives us confidence to make critical life changing decisions. It showed me that transformation, whether personal or organizational is a journey and that that journey is not traveled alone. It takes transforming leaders, ones that are committed to elevating others, that allows others the opportunity to experience transformation. I learned and gained so much from this first course which inspired me to yearn for more throughout the program.
Leadership and Human Resources ORGL 524
Reflection: This course introduced me to several concepts of human resources, and provided me inspiration and motivation to explore how these HR concepts are being used effectively in my current organization and how I could effect change with regards to policy and practice. Topics include policy and practice within organizations; selecting, training, motivating, evaluating, and compensating employees, and labor/management relationships. My exposure to this course was perfectly timed as our organization is threatened with a reduction in force and leadership is considering avenues of change to ensure our district remains viable while continuing to take care of people. I studied the workforce and workload for the district and made a strategic plan that is now greatly assisting the division plans group with presenting viable options to the leadership. Understanding the course study helped me with my current position specifically with interviewing, hiring, and labor/management relations.
Negotiation and Conflict Resolution ORGL 520
Reflection: Centered themes developed from this course were identifying and understanding diverse perspectives, listening, facilitating discussion and dialog, and decision making. Most of the conflicts that require negotiation can ultimately be solved through the act of listening, dissecting what root causes are, and then understanding perspectives. This course highlights through several case studies how rapid conflicts become violent, and it gives the tools to transform the conflict into understanding. A large endeavor of this course was studying the Arizona copper mine strike of 1983 and using a conflict map to understand all layers of the conflict.
Servant Leadership ORGL 530
Reflection: I had never heard Robert Greenleaf’s term Servant-Leader before committing to the Organization Leadership Program, but it seemed a natural fit being in the Army, and it intrigued me to learn. “Choosing to serve first” and caring for others is a leadership principle I have always honored. The course was an incredibly valuable tool in self evaluating my leadership philosophy and served as a check on what was meant to be a leader. By being a servant leader I choose to develop myself and develop those around me.
Finding Pfalz (life in Rheinland-Pfalz) 