Paying it Forward
On March 5th, 2017, the students of MGMT 174, instructed by Professor Barry Posner, developed, lead, and executed a leadership seminar. The participants of this seminar were 75 high school juniors from the Bay Area Boys Team Charity League, a volunteer service organization “dedicated to developing an altruistic spirit in young men through active participation of parents and sons in philanthropic projects in their communities.” At the end of the workshop, 85% of attendees responded that the seminar enhanced their understanding of leadership.
Third-year senior management major, Samantha Malone, explained that developing the seminar was a process, and took some amount of trial and error.
“Initially, we were very eager and tried to fit all five of the leadership practices we learned [from Professor Posner] into the seminar and have games for each," she said. "Then we realized that we only had three hours with the students and decided that we needed to cut things down. Eventually, we decided on three activities and incorporated the five leadership practices into them."
She continued, "We named our workshop POL (Psychology of Leadership) because MGMT 174 is ‘The Social Psychology of Leadership.’ We organized our schedule, reserved the California Mission Room in downstairs Benson, designed t-shirts so we all matched, and bought snacks for the students.
"Things went by a lot faster than we thought they would and our classmate serving as MC was really great about modifying activities to make them last longer. Since it was a Sunday afternoon the weekend before SATs and some of the students had come from as far as Granite Bay, we tried to keep things moving so the students didn't get bored.
"Overall, we thought it went well. We learned that backup plans to your backup plans are best and students will respond the best when you're engaged. If we could do it all again, we agreed that we would want the workshop to be longer since it takes a little while to get high school boys to come out of their shells and really connect to other people.”
At the end of the workshop, 85% of attendees responded that the seminar enhanced their understanding of leadership.