Leadership Programs
JWU Charlottes office of Student Engagement provides opportunities to help you develop individual leader and group leadership identities, abilities, and confidence, while also gaining a better understanding of the role of leadership within social responsibility.
Launched in the fall of 2022, our Student Leader Development Program monthly workshop series serves to enhance the overall collegiate experience of invited students. Each non-cumulative workshop focuses on a different model of leadership. Effort is taken to draw out the differences and similarities between leadership models.
During the first year of the program (2022-23), participation has been limited to past or current Resident Assistants, Culinary Assistants, Orientation Leaders, Tour Guides, and student organization executives (President, Vice President, and Treasurer).
The Student Leader Development Program meets on the third Monday of each month from 8-9pm in the Wildcat Center Den.
For more information, contact Student Engagement.
The September Student Leader Development Program workshop focuses on the Social Change Model of Leadership. The Social Change Model of Leadership was first proposed between 1994-1996 by a team of leadership educators with the Higher Education Research Institute. The model exists on three related perspective levels, joined together by a shared focus on creating change. While all the perspective levels are end-directed at change, each level has unique contributing value-means. Collectively these value-means are often termed “the seven Cs.”
Individual Values
- Consciousness of Self: Awareness of personal values, skills/strengths/talents, and beliefs, and ways of being, knowing, and doing (identity).
- Congruence: Existing in alignment with your self, as you have become aware of it.
- Commitment: Akin to motivation, passion, and internal energies toward change.
Group Values
- Collaboration: Sharing responsibility, authority, and accountability via pro-social behaviors such as dialogue, negotiation, compromise, and conflict mediation.
- Common Purpose: Aggregated individual commitments that manifest as a unifying vision.
- Controvery with Civility: An egalitarian determination to see others as contributing unalienable human dignity, resulting in an open/willing approach to conflict.
Societal Values
- Citizenship: Existence in communal relationship with others, an embeddedness in something larger than yourself.
“The point of the model is to help students acquire the skills and perspectives that will enable them to become effective change agents, regardless of their actual position or level of affluence.” (HERI, 1996, p. 77).
The October Student Leader Development Program workshop focuses on the Situational Approach to Leadership. The Situational Approach was developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard in 1969, and was further developed by Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi, and Drea Zigarmi in 2013. The model focuses on the importance of situational context in developing a responsive leader approach. It is easiest to focus on the two leader behavioral components and the two follower readiness components, before seeing the model in its entirety.
Leader Behavioral Components
- Directing Behaviors: focuses on technical and one-way communication — leader to follower.
- Supporting Behaviors: focuses on conceptual or relational and two-way communication — leader AND follower.
Follower Readiness Components
- Competence: focuses on follower technical ability (and belief in that ability).
- Commitment: focuses on follower-perceived attachment to the organization and its members.
Leadership Styles
- D4/S4 Delegating: Low supporting and low directing leader behaviors meet the needs of highly competent and highly committed followers.
- D3/S3 Supporting: High supporting and low directing leader behaviors meet the needs of moderate to highly competent and committed followers.
- D2/S2 Coaching: High supporting and high directing leader behaviors meet the needs of followers with low competence and low commitment.
- D1/S1 Directing: Low supporting and high directing leader behaviors meet the needs of followers with low competence but high commitment.
The November Student Leader Development Program workshop focuses on the Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning model. The Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning model was first proposed by Tamera Bertrand Jones, Kathy Guthrie, and Laura Osteen in 2016. The model expands previous work from Guthrie, Bertrand Jones, Osteen, and Hu (2013) and Komives, Longerbeam, Owen, Mainella, and Osteen (2005; 2006). Principally, the model integrates a leader identity development model within critical contextual domains, adapted from Ladson-Billings (1995). While the model was revised in 2021, the November workshop focuses on the original 2016 conceptualization. Below you will find a description of the leader-leadership relationship as well as a description of the critical domains, as depicted by the model.
The model centers the relationship connecting leaders as people to leadership as a process occurring between leaders. This relationship is reciprocally supported by the development of leader/leadership identity, capacity, and efficacy.
- Identity is the internal integration of diverse ways of being, knowing, and doing that are self-attributed to “leaders.” A belief in the statement “I am a leader.”
- Capacity is the adaptive knowledge set (including concrete skills and abilities) necessary to overcome given leader/leadership challenges.
- Efficacy is confidence in a leader/group’s ability to overcome given leader/leadership challenges. Leader/leadership efficacy may also be likened to belief in leader/leadership effectiveness or success.
This inner leader/leadership relationship is contextually grounded by the five critical domains. The domains act as lenses that can be used to evaluate the leader/leadership climate. For CRLL these domains critically evaluate the climate as it relates to the presence of inequitable power — oppressive systems. Through this critical climate evaluation CRLL becomes responsive to nonrepresentative compositional diversity, exclusive organizations and structures, and histories of bias, as well as behavioral and psychological prejudice, as it impacts relational leadership processes.