The following interview was conducted by Kara Kubarych, Chair of the Leadership Development Initiative (LDI) of the Leadership Institute, with Liora Simozar and Jenna Louie, LDI members and designers of a workshop at the recent Millennium Campus Conference at Harvard. They discuss the purpose and style of the workshop below.
Jenna and Liora, tell me more about the workshop.
Jenna: At the end of last semester, the Millennium Campus Conference (MCC) invited us to present a workshop on “Sustainable Organizations and Leadership Transitions” as they pertained to student groups at universities around the nation. We were very excited to have been asked by such a prestigious group to lead a session on such an important topic in the context of student organizations.
Liora: They’re sponsored in part by the United Nations!
Jenna: We spent the summer assembling a diverse panel of past and current Presidents from some of Harvard’s most successful student groups, including the Leadership Institute, Harvard College Women in Business, and the First-Year Outdoor Program. The panelists spoke to the systems, structures and innovations that have allowed their organization to persist and thrive on campus.
How did you choose your panelists?
Liora: The rationale behind our panel structure was to mimic the flow of information over time: ideally, we wanted to counterbalance the thoughts of the founder in building the organization with the current president leading or managing the organization. We wanted to emphasize that organizations change a lot over time – and it’s a good thing, it’s their way of responding to the environment they grow in. We were fortunate to have one founder on our panel – Jon Doochin – who expressed his surprise at what the Leadership Institute had become since he started it six years ago.
Jenna: Both Liora and I realize that as members of LIHC, we’re extremely fortunate to have the original founders and some of the past presidents still around because they can provide a lot of insight into how organizations change over time, and the potential for them to do so even when it doesn’t seem possible.
Your panelists talked for an hour and a half? That’s a long panel!
Liora: Not quite – there was also a second, interactive component to the event. We wanted to engage people and get them thinking about specific leadership issues and what a dramatic effect they can have on the future of an organization and, most importantly, its member retention. After all, member retention is what makes an organization sustainable. We crafted short and intentionally vague leadership scenarios that depicted different roadblocks that organizations face – whether it’s a leadership issue or a structural issue.
Jenna: That was definitely the hardest part of planning the workshop, and the part that kept us up for hours!
What was so difficult about developing the workshop materials?
Liora: Well, to start, we wanted to keep the leadership scenarios vague, in part so that anyone could relate to them, in part because, well – leadership issues in the real world don’t come packaged as a “scenario.” You’re not given a story and asked to tell what’s wrong with it. To quote, “there’s no red flag that goes off during a time of poor leadership”. We wanted to illustrate that by writing about horrible leadership mistakes in a way that got the point across and sounded…positive.
Jenna: Exactly. It was also surprisingly difficult to whittle down our list of possible leadership problems to the eight most fundamental issues. We needed them to be different enough to make people think more broadly about leadership, and not just one or two easy-to-fix gaffes – I mean, there are so many things that can go wrong in a student organization!
Creating a workshop from scratch is a pretty unique experience – do you have any thoughts or advice you’d like to share?
Liora: I’ve been to tons of “leadership workshops” that ended up being forgettable. The two of us really wanted to get people to think in a different way – a way that would stick and reach out to them on a deeper level. You really need to challenge your audience. It took a lot of effort for us to get to that point where we believed we wouldn’t be just another workshop. That being said, it’s important to have fun with it! If you see our materials, you might catch some of the puns we wove in.
Jenna: And it was especially exciting when a few of the attendees came up to us after and asked if we could present the workshop at a similar conference in New York this semester! That’s when we knew that we had been successful!
If you’re interested in more information about our programming or this workshop in particular, please contact Liora (liora.simozar@college.harvard.edu) and Jenna (jlouie@college.harvard.edu).
The Leadership Institute at Harvard College 