Thursday, April 20, 2006

Diversity in Leadership: Comments on a public forum

The PCC Forum on Diversity in Leadership was a succesful event, despite an attempted hijacking.

Last night I attended a “Leadership Forum” event at Pueblo Community College. The specific event was titled “Diversity in Leadership” and the blurb in the Chieftain specifically stated that “Pueblo’s political diversity will be the topic of discussion…” The blurb listed three panel members.

Before the event I called and asked the young lady who returned my call (I think it was Tamara, President of the Student Senate) exactly how they were defining political diversity and were the three panelists a Democrat, a Republican and an Independent or maybe a Libertarian? She didn’t really know. She said “diversity” was kind of up to the panelists to define and they’d tried to pick a variety of people.

It turns out that using the word “political” was probably misleading, since, with one exception, Pueblo’s politics weren’t really discussed. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad I went and several of the speakers had some very valuable and thought-provoking things to say.

Louella Cruz, however, attempted to hijack the forum into a political rally for herself. She is petitioning to run as the Democratic nominee for Pueblo County Clerk, since she wasn’t accepted as the candidate at the Democratic County Assembly last weekend. She openly asked people to sign her petition, and openly described her goals if elected as County Clerk. This is electioneering and is unacceptable in such a setting unless the other candidates have been given the opportunity to be present and participate on an equal footing.

Ms. Cruz was quick to answer every question addressed to the panel, and managed to bring up her candidacy almost every time. One of the other panelists told me she even went so far as to ask him to sign her petition while another panelist was speaking. To be fair to her, I don’t know exactly what instructions Matthew, the Vice President of the Student Senate and the organizer of the event, gave her. Considering, however, that she has a master’s degree in school administration and is a graduate of a very prestigious university, she really has no excuse for not knowing better, and for not shifting gears and making her remarks more appropriate for the occasion.

The President of PCC, Dr. Mike Davis, in contrast, gave a very good overview of various leadership concerns, regardless of whether the leader is functioning in public or private spheres. He emphasized the need for leaders to assess their own strengths, weaknesses, motives and constituents.

Christian Piatt, a writer and nonprofit consultant, also talked about various characteristics and issues in leadership. He quite honestly pointed out that too much diversity in values, ideas and communications can weaken an organization, something a lot of organizations won’t admit. My take is that leaders and organizations need to decide what kinds of diversity will strengthen them and what kinds will weaken them. While Mr. Piatt mentioned his unsuccessful run in a nonpartisan election, it was done by way of example and was not the focus of his remarks.

At least one of the speakers did mention that diversity (of whatever kind) should not be regarded as a threat, but as an opportunity to learn.

I don’t think PCC student Emiliano Madrid has had much of a chance to evaluate or think about leadership in the abstract. His remarks were primarily about the youth organization he works with and what they were doing. While he didn’t address leadership much as a topic, he displayed the qualities of a leader by focusing on the goals of his organization, rather than himself. He also illustrated one of Dr. Davis’ points by remarking that he returned to school because he was advising students to go to college, but wasn’t doing anything about it himself. This displayed Dr. Davis’ point about self-evaluation.

Dr. Lana Carter, Dean of Arts and Sciences at PCC, got us on our feet in an exercise which demonstrated how something as trivial as shoe styles can divide people. She also talked about polychronic and monochronic concepts of time and how this is something where people are diverse. Let’s face it. How many of us ever think that someone else has a different concept of how time should be spent?

When asked how she ended up in her career, Dr. Carter said that she kept looking for a career where her outspokenness would be tolerated. It seems her previous employers were not tolerant of her diverse views.

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