Leading a student organization is a great opportunity. You get to gain some experience in a position that can boost your resume when you transition to the workplace. It’s a real chance to influence positive change among the student body and wider community.
But it’s also a challenging experience. This is where mindful leadership can be a useful concept to explore. By taking some time to identify and adopt some strategies that are geared toward positive and meaningful leadership, you can empower yourself to be a more effective influence. You may find you inspire others in your organization to follow suit, resulting in a wholistically good outcome for everyone involved.
Understanding mindful leadership
So, what do we mean when we refer to mindful leadership in student organizations? In essence, it’s ensuring that you approach your activities as a manager with care, consideration and compassion. This is appropriate for student organizations of all kinds, whether they’re academically focused, organizational committees, or cultural in nature. The people your organization serves and collaborates with deserve to know that it’s being led from a positive perspective.
This begins with considering yourself a leader. Self-awareness is vital when running an organization. It helps you to better recognize what your intentions are as a leader as well as counter any challenges—such as biases—that might affect your approach. Self-awareness is a skill to develop, and some of the actions to incorporate as you start your journey include:
- Examining your decision-making and what thoughts and feelings contribute to it.
- Regularly reviewing your strengths and weaknesses as a leader. This helps you identify skills to develop and seek assistance from others who may help fill those gaps in the organization.
- Keeping an open mind. When you find an issue that challenges your ability to be open, this may point to some biases or concerns that impede your values. This can only help your growth.
Mindful leadership is also about remembering you’re not the be-all and end-all of the organization. You should actively seek feedback from others both about your leadership approach and how to improve the organization. It may help to give your members ways they can submit suggestions or criticisms anonymously, perhaps by creating messaging accounts or just a physical suggestion box.
Most important of all is to be clear that you’ve received feedback and are committed to making changes based on it. You’re demonstrating self-awareness while also creating a sustainable management system.
Foster empathy and inclusivity
With any student organization, you’re likely to interact with a wide range of people. Each will have their own perspectives, challenges and values that may affect how they interact with your society. One way to make certain the organization is a force for good in your college is to ensure you lead in a way that fosters empathy and inclusivity for all.
Many of the strategies that help ensure empathetic student organization are also protocols that can prepare you for being a more inclusive leader in the professional world. These include:
Building a supportive environment
Examine your organization and how it’s run for signs of how supportive it is to people with a range of needs. This isn’t just about the physical challenges, such as accessible meeting spaces and materials. It should also be emotionally inclusive, where stakeholders feel safe interacting with the organization and its members.
Encouraging diverse contributors
Diversity in your organization has multiple benefits. You get to gain from the perspectives of people from different backgrounds and experiences. They are also likely to be able to highlight gaps in inclusivity and suggest improvements that make everyone feel welcome. Importantly, diversity prevents your organization from becoming an echo chamber that only reflects a limited demographic.
What are some of the ways you can demonstrate mindful leadership that include empathy and inclusivity? When booking events and meetings, you can check for different cultural or religious holidays to ensure your intended dates don’t clash with these. You can also perform active outreach to diverse students. Perhaps collaborate with other organizations that are focused on marginalized populations to find positive ways to encourage their members to join yours, and make your society a safe space for them.
Actively listening
Ultimately, as a leader of your organization, your best route to empathy and inclusivity is to actively listen. You’ll learn more about its practical, emotional and cultural diversity by being open to having conversations. This makes you a better leader and makes your organization more effective.
Make ethical and impactful decisions
Decision-making is one of the key challenges of being a leader in any student organization.
You can start by getting a clear understanding of what the moral values of your organization are. By adhering to these, you can meet the expectations and intentions of the organization. However, you can go further by also ensuring that every decision you make within the organization is transparent. Talk about your choices with others to build a sense of trust in your organization and allow yourself to be held accountable for your actions.
For instance, when you’re making choices about how to use funding, aim for total visibility. Hold meetings in which you outline how much funding is available and discuss how everyone thinks it should be spent. Maintain spreadsheets of all expenditures and store these on a cloud drive that all active members can view.
When it comes to being positively impactful in the student community, you need to actively involve others in this element of decision-making. After all, everyone has a different perspective about what constitutes a good outcome and how it affects lives.
One approach is to hold regular group brainstorming sessions. When people from all levels of the organization are involved, you get to bring diverse voices to the table, avoid potential biases from limited viewpoints and explore the ideas everyone has in order to achieve different types of impact.
You’ll need to mitigate the challenges of a chaotic free-for-all and ensure that louder voices don’t dominate the conversation. You can do this by being a mindful facilitator. Give everyone a chance to talk and use your leadership position to identify a firm route forward.
Mindful leadership in student organizations can help ensure the positive impact you have on the university, the students and members of the community. Your actions can help you learn more about yourself as a leader, boost the inclusivity of your organization and maintain high ethical standards, among other things.
Remember that this is just the first step in your journey. You’ll occasionally make mistakes. Don’t be disheartened; rather, treat them as learning experiences. Indeed, reviewing your actions and outcomes is essential to any mindful leadership approach. Committing to your practical and emotional growth will see you thrive not just at college, but throughout your life.
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image 1 Fox; image 2: Google DeepMind; image 3: Markus Winkler; image 4: fauxels