Examining Leadership

The Truth - "You can't do it Alone" (5th truth)

Leadership is a team sport. The fifth truth of leadership is that leaders cannot do it alone; it's about sharing responsibilities with people beneath you. No leader has done anything extraordinary without the help of others.

One of the essential aspects of leadership is the relationship between leaders and constituents. Making this connection requires leaders to listen carefully. Not just to speak with inspiration, but to be able to hear what they have to say, exceptional listening. Effective leaders understand others' points of view and this creates a resonance with constituents. After listening to constituents' desires, it is necessary to engage in a dialogue about the future. One important part of a leader's work is to discover and then reflect the meaning that others are looking for. Inspirational leadership focuses on showing people how the vision can benefit them and meet their needs. The job is to increase people's sense of self-determination, self-confidence, and personal effectiveness. Because good leaders do not accomplish their goals alone, it is necessary to build a team that feels capable of taking action. Empowering people to act like leaders themselves require an investment in their personal development.

The Event - Rehabilitation of a CISV Chapter

CISV is a global organization, which recognized as an independent, non-profit, non-political, volunteer organization. This organization is dedicated to educating and inspiring for peace through building inter-cultural friendship, cooperation and understanding, that offer children and adults the opportunity to make new friendships world-wide and understand and appreciate different cultures in the world.

At the age of 25 I first joined the organization as a group leader to a camp of 14 years old in China, which included 10 delegations from different countries. After three weeks in which I functioned as a father and a mother for my delegation, I fell in love with the organization and the values it represents.

My decision was to join the organization as a board member, as I knew they were looking for a training coordinator at that time. After 5 months we didn't have the amount of kids we expected to have and as a result we had a lower budget than we expected. The next step, which seems like the right one, was to close the chapter. As the last member who joined the board I was the most enthusiastic and passion about keeping the chapter running. All the board until than contains only parents, who had, on one hand, personal interests (regarding sending their kids to camps in the summer) and on the other hand had lack of experience in managing or doing the specific role they did. Moreover, the board was built from 13 parents that hold 7 roles.

Having 6 people in the board as "crowd" and 7 people who were pushed to the specific role they currently doing made things very unprofessional and dragged the chapter down slowly.

Back than I was relatively young and just finished my first commanding position in the army. As a commander of 20 soldiers in the field I thought that I could do it by myself. I said that the only thing I need is money to go for "Chapter Development" training and that's it. The board had no passion to build the chapter and didn't mind sending me to the training.

During the 4 days of training in Romania I learned the steps that needs to be done in order to bring back the chapter to life and more important how to motivate people who are volunteers.

After coming back the board decided to nominate me as the chapter president