ORGL 522: Leadership, Community, Empowerment, Collaboration, and Dialogue

Professor: Dr. Michael Carey and Dr. Mary Stover

Taken: Fall 2023

Description: How does the leader develop community to facilitate individual growth and collective flourishing? Through experience and scholarship students explore and practice empowerment, collaboration, and dialogue in the context of creating structures and processes for sustaining and transforming community. Joining the monastic community at St. Andrew’s Abbey students become participant observers in a learning immersion designed to explore, practice, and come to an expanded understanding of the role and purpose of the leader’s involvement and commitment to building and sustaining meaningful and purposeful community. Experiential findings are then integrated with the literature on building community and used to formulate a proposal for enhancing community.

Reflection: Leadership and community. The title of the class struck me as a rather simplistic and an easily understandable approach. As I sat at the St. Andrews Abbey, talking to an Abbott, I wondered how my want to increase my leadership skills lead me to this place and time. Allowing myself to sit silently and reflect each morning at St. Andrew’s Abbey was not easy. I would not have thought sitting and thinking through my learnings and applications to my life would be a burden, it was not easy. I did not realize that my leadership journey would require so much introspection, I thought leadership would be about how I lead others, how I influence others to go forth and meet the strategies that I defined. I have found that for me to be a true leader, I must continue to seek my truth, challenge myself, and value humility, inquiry, and possibility. Being vulnerable is hard but I want to lead with my true self, my whole self, and be authentically me. I walk away from this class as a transformed leader.