A worthy and competent leader is crucial, but the members of a group are just as important. That’s a cliche, right?
I stepped up to lead the IST Club at Penn State Hazleton this school year. As club president, my duties are to organize our meetings and events. I have fulfilled my responsibilites by consistently holding weekly meetings and keeping an open mind to new (and relevant) ideas. But I am slowly but surely losing faith in my organization, and now I want to jump off this sinking ship.
In the beginning, my whole body was overflowing with motivational energy to do all that I could do as the new leader. Being the naive freshman that I am, I wanted to use my privileges to fix our club’s image as the “gamers’ club” and make it as worthwhile as possible for everyone involved.
At the first few meetings, we had an amazing recurring attendance of 30+ members. We were filling up the computer lab, so I asked the school to give us a larger room. At this point, our club was still in the preliminary stage, trying to figure out what direction we would take it this year. Everyone was pumped up about a field trip to a gaming convention in California and a huge corporate-sponsored LAN party.
Outwardly, I nodded my head in agreement at the two events mentioned above, so that I wouldn’t scare away the new members. But I am not a gamer. Actually, I hate all video games except for Need For Speed and Gran Turismo, which is only because my car sucks and I can’t drive fast in real life. I don’t want to go to some game developers conference or scoop a handful out of our treasury for a LAN party.
What is IST? I’ll tell you what IST isn’t. IST is not gaming, which I know for a fact. So why does every IST Club at the Penn State campuses focus around LAN parties and computer games?
So the direction that I led our club was towards education and exposure to emerging technologies. Every week I would prepare a new powerpoint slide on a technology-related topic: Linux, Cascading Style Sheets, Windows Vista and so on. And I encouraged other members to share their own knowledge.
What’s funny is that with each meeting like this, the attendance rate started dwindling at a rapid rate. By the end of the Fall Semester, we had 5 dedicated members show their faces at the meetings. That means that every member that dropped out was only interested in the gaming aspect.
The final straw was pulled today when I asked our members about the current status of our Krispy Kremes fundraiser. Two weeks ago, we started our doughnut-selling fundraiser and I emailed all the members PDF files of the order forms. Today, I went around asking our members how they’re doing with sales and it turns out that hardly anyone has printed out the forms while most are not even interested. I was frustrated: Why won’t anyone cooperate? Is it because I told everyone that we would use the funds to bring in guest speakers (and not LAN parties)?
So I’ll tell you about my fatal mistake as the leader for the IST Club. Being the stubborn asshole that I am, I did not follow my initial assessment of our members and do what they wanted to do. Instead, I did what I wanted to do, thinking that I ran the show and everyone would just follow. College kids are too cool for that kind of stuff. If they don’t like it they’ll just leave. Proof: take a look at how many students drop a class after the first few days with a seemingly difficult teacher.
Fuck liberal arts campuses and unmotivated students. Just give me a day or two to cool off.
The Conversation {2 comments}
Dude,
Part of being a leader is knowing what quality clay you’re working with, then shaping your art according to that clay. One thing I didn’t get a sense of, from your essay, is how much or how little you actually interacted with (1) your fellow officers and (2) the regular members. If you were doing this as a top-down thing, and it sounds as though you were, then yeah, you’re gonna take hits from the very large portion of students who are still in their “rebel against all hierarchy” phase (some older folks never outgrow this, either… kinda sad to see).
I know you don’t want to hear this, but it makes sense to compromise with the people you are in charge of, because there’s the human factor to consider: having meetings is not just about disseminating ideas, but also about enjoying each other’s presence and making discoveries together.
Of course, you came close to saying this in your final paragraph, as you seem to have concluded that the top-down approach doesn’t bear much fruit. There’s wisdom in your insight; hold on to it. Leadership is more than pointing people in a particular direction and saying, “Let’s go!” It’s also about motivating the sheep, because, as you’ve discovered, they don’t motivate themselves.
Kevin
Kevin,
You’re right. A major factor is “to motivate the sheep.” If I could discover just how to crack my group of game-addicts, and at least create some synergy, then I would feel complete.
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