Leadership Challenge

¶ … person's life experience, there will appear opportunities to step into and fulfill a leadership role in a particular situation. Each person is presented with these chances for leadership, but not every person takes the risk and practices his/her style of leadership. In my life, I have tried not to shy away from opportunities for leadership. While I am comfortable occupying the position of team member, it is important to experience what it is like to be in a leadership role on occasion, at least, if not often.

I contend for the importance for people to experience both sides of the team situation, as a leader and not as one. It can help one understand what leadership means and the consequences of leadership. I have often read of quotations regarding how leadership experiences illuminate the quality and quantity of a person's character. Therefore, from this perspective, if a person wants to see what his/her character consists of, jumping into leadership role is one of several great ways to do that.

A particular leadership role I took was as a team leader at a summer residential camp for Autistic children, adolescents, and adults. I was a member of the team with the teens, along with several other older and younger adults. We were a team with several adults and approximately thirty teens. Within this group, there were smaller teams led by team members. The team leaders shared some of the leadership responsibilities, reporting to the team supervisor.

Team leaders were responsible for administration and had some oversight over team members who were not team leaders. I was pleased, but nervous to be assigned to this group. This would be my first experience working with the Autistic population as well as being a team leader at a residential summer camp. Before camp began, new summer staff members were offered two weeks of paid training in the center where many of the students attended during the academic year. This experience was valuable for a number of reasons.

It first gave new staff the chance to meet some of the students they would work with and lead during the summer program. This training also gave new staff the chance to meet and work with some of their other team members. Some of the team members for the summer camp were new and hired from outside the school, and the rest of the staff consisted of current staff at the center, as well as a few parents and regular volunteers or interns.

Familiarity with the population and my coworkers was very important for me. This training helped allay some of the anxiety I felt toward this new leadership position. Of course, the training and the school environment are very different from the residential camp and the natural environment. Autistic people are a group that are exceptional sensitive to changes in the environment, which have direct affects on areas such as quality of response, attention, level of calm, and many other factors.

Even just loading them onto the bus was a fairly complicated ordeal. Parents and campers were very emotional. A few were completely unaffected. There were several that were quite physically upset, and then there were some teens that were perfectly excited and ready to go off to summer camp, away from their parents for a bit. I have learned through my leadership experiences that I am an experiential learner and kinesthetic learner. I learn by doing. The best lesson for me is practice or experience.

Leadership positions such as being a team leader at a summer camp for the Autistic challenged me in new ways that other leadership roles had not. It was fun, though it is not an experience I would choose to do again in the immediate.