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| 03-26-2004 | Previous edition: 03-25-2004 |
        
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Printer-friendly version Trainer leads Boilers to find leadership styles
Staff Writer The frequent cheers and audible enthusiasm filling the North Ballroom of the Purdue Memorial Union Thursday evening sounded more like a basketball game than a lecture on leadership. Vernon Wall, a leadership trainer and assistant dean of students and director of student activities at Iowa State University, gave his "Lead With Style!" presentation Thursday night. "I’m a leadership geek," said Wall, who also serves as a senior consultant for The Washington Consulting Group, specializing in multicultural organizational change. "This presentation not only aims to help you understand yourself but also to help you understand others and what motivates them." Wall achieves this by employing a method developed by Tom Champoux, a leadership expert who noticed that the best leaders in corporate mid-level management tended to have experience as student leaders in college. The method presents participants with a "style checklist" that has four groupings of descriptive phrases, from which they choose the phrases that best describe them. The amount of checks on the checklist reveals what leadership style participants have, whether it’s being a controller, a persuader, a stabilizer or an analyzer. While laughs and cheers rang out as students listened to themselves being described, it slowly became apparent what certain leadership styles bring to a group setting and how to deal with the style of others. "I really gained a new way of looking at how people are and how I can deal with their motivations," said Andrew Lewis, a team supervisor for the Boiler Gold Rush freshman orientation program. "As a supervisor who must lead other student leaders, I feel way more confident about dealing with each individual’s personal style of leadership." Wall’s most relative example definitely hit home with the college audience: the group project. "Whether you want to do it by yourself and get it done, make sure everyone gets along, make sure things stay on track or just get your peers excited about it; everyone in the group has their own style of contributing." Printer-friendly version |
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