On Servant Leadership...

Ok, I'm officially buried by homework for the first time since the beginning of this year. I am not planning to complete my homework on time seeing that it is already 12am. I might as well blog instead cause there's a few thing that I want to talk about before the end of the council...

If you all had been following my blog very closely, you would know that there was a flame war over the last post in the comments section. The flames was personal attacks and are not in anyway related to the topic in question. I'll get back to this flaming issue when I get the time and I'll be addressing some issues that are particularly relevant to those flames.

In case you all do not know what is going on in the council now, allow me to enlighten you. Firstly, we are now currently waiting for AGM for the sec4s to step down and for the new batch of councillors to take over our job. As usual, lots of controversial decisions seems to always have to take place around this point in time. This year was no exception.

I feel that because of the introduction of the Peer Support Programme (which I had talked about in an earlier post which you can view here) this years council exco selection has been totally changed by the teachers. For one thing, some excos in some comm. (including disco) have sec 2 excos that immediately become excos the moment they get into council. Lots of people aren't really happy about it, and I thought I want to post some of my own thoughts here.

Lets remind ourselves (again). When we stepped into council and had one of our first leadership talks, what were we talking about? What? What did you say? Hang on, I think it start with an "S"... erm...
Oh ya, its "Servant Leadership"...

Q: So what is servant leadership?
A: Servant leadership is something like you do not become the leader because you want to be one but because you work hard first to be one.
There are a lot of advantages to servant leadership.

Firstly, the leader in the end usually knows what he/she needs to do and needs to know. I mean, if you were part of the service last time, you would know likely what to expect and thus you'll be able to allocate the jobs for your group of people correctly and accordingly

Secondly, because the leader has been with the group of people for some time, the person would most likely have been able to build up some sort of communications with his/her fellow members. This thus allows the members to accept the leadership of the leader easily and also respect and give full support to the leader since you know the leaders already.

There are a few others, but this are the slightly more important ones. As you can see above, the advantages are that:
1) You know what to do.
2) You have support.

Lets look at what teachers are doing now:
They are destroying this servant leadership idea in the council. How? Lets see,
1) Disco has a sec 2 exco that has no experience whatsoever in the council. Anyway, she is in PSP.
2) I think PB also suffered a similar fate with disco
3)Lots of sec 2s whom belonged to the PSP but has no experience at all in the council were sent for exco interview.

All these are indeed small actions, but it is really destroying the idea of servant leadership. For one thing, PSP does not equate to SC without rings. What they do and what we do is almost totally different (as I already pointed out quite some time ago) and I even questioned the need for this group of people, aside from the manpower issue (Which I still do not think is a good reason).

So lets continue shall we?
Firstly, by allowing sec 2s with no previous experience to become excos of certain committees, the teacher have done quite a lot of damage, not just to the committee itself, but also to the new exco.
The first point is that you let the committee feel unhappy. This isn't a unnatural feeling. How would you feel if someone whom you never knew before, never heard of, never ever helped you or even communicated with you in anyway, suddenly became your leader and you're supposed to listen to him/her? Obviously you would doubt the ability of that person, and if you doubt the person, would you respect and follow that person?
This might be a small thing you might think, but in a small committee of only about 17 people, this can be a big thing...

Which leads to the second point...
How would the exco in this situation feel? Obviously, if the person never wanted this, that person would be quite unhappy about it since that person will have a hard time coping in the first few months. Of course, I hope that my ears were wrong when I heard the exco said something like:" I was expecting to be the exco of PB" cause that would be.......

Anyhow, I had quite enough of teachers throwing out those sink or swim situations to disco. Yes, you could say that this is a chance for us to test our leadership potential, to lead the committee when we have leaders that do not know what needs to be done, and then hopefully a efficient transfer of power when the exco has gained enough experience. I just went through one of this, and I'm not exactly too excited to repeat it.

Lets look and compare the difference, and I'll be able to tell you why last year this sort of situations were better. For one thing, last year, most of disco was "kicked". If you all are confused, we had 2 sec 3s left and 4 sec 2s left from the previous council. By having lots of members out of disco, there wouldn't be as much pressure on the excos since he/she would be able to work with a group of people whom has never really worked with disco. This means that there would be more acceptance than now.

Secondly, the exco that got posted in has at least been in the council for one year. Most of disco had a bit of interaction with the exco before she even got in into disco and personally, I had worked with her before. What this means is that, you at least know something about her and it isn't all a question mark. This can be really important as you'll at least have a group of people that knows the leader and will support the leader. This however, is not apparent in the current disco. For one thing, the sec 2s don't sound exactly excited about this new exco, and hardly any of the sec 3/4 know her at all.

Thirdly, teachers always had to choose a really "apt" time for this changes to happen. Lets face it, the teachers likes to make us to be unable to react quickly enough to the situation at hand so that they "win". Add on to the fact that disco is dominating central again, and you know that having a new exco now that does not have support of the committee is not exactly a good idea.

Remind me again, what is servant leadership for? Now then, look at the above and think...

Servant leadership, to many people out there, especially the sec4s currently, have a lot of meaning. Most of the sec4s in council would remember one of the most important teaching we had, and that was on servant leadership, to serve before to lead. We all realised the importance of it and many of us are living proof of this "philosophy" (if you can call it one). Sure, we need to change from time to time, but when we change, we shouldn't change for the sake of changing, especially when the change is heavily criticised (Excos aren't exactly too happy about the changes)...

Oh ya, sink or swim. Disco last year, as all of you out there should know by now, had a very huge sink or swim situation. We had two new excos with no experience in leading disco. One had 1 year experience in disco. Disco was nearly kicked out totally, leaving only two sec 3s and most of the sec 2s. At the beginning, it really felt as though there was no exco at all, and it took a really long time for us to get disco to where it is today.

So, what are the teachers trying to do? Maybe they think that because disco had survived once, they will survive again... Wow, what a happy thought. I seriously do not appreciate this. Its the same as letting your civilisation wage war against your neighbours over and over and over again in "Age Of Empires". What happens in the end? You run out of resource, and you get overrun by the remaining civilisations whom survived your massacre...

The teachers might have saw some potential in the people whom they selected to unfortunately, through a weird twist of fate, become the "destroyers of the servant leadership" foundation. Since the teachers seems to be intent on destroying the servant leadership foundation, we should leave them to it and see what happens.

I won't go into criticisms on people since I do not feel that I know enough of those people to talk about them as yet. As you can all see, my main focus is on the destruction of the servant leadership foundation, which I believe would bring adverse effects to the council once people get into council not to serve but to try their luck to become an exco... Council will then become a collection of power-hungry people whom are, as Cheng Xi described it:

I think the "onion-ring" system of identifying student leaders is poisoning the minds of some of the students.

It is really true that you do not need those rings to lead. Whoever steps out in the situation and leads the group out of it together, working together, is one true leader of the group, regardless of how many people in there whom are "recognised" as leaders... and to do this, you need to be able to work well with your group, and not assume a leadership position the minute you enter it...

While I am here, let me wish disco all the best for the next council ahead. Shark are strong. we'll survive. Here, I also give my sincere wishes to the new exco that she'll be able to learn the ropes quickly and gain the respect of everyone in disco and even the council.
27th Disco is coming to an end...

Whatever happens, happens... but everything will work out in the end.
(Quotes from Cowboy Bebop and Shaman King respectively)

Discmon