If you are lucky enough to become a facility’s activity director you have a lot of responsibility. Like it or not, you are instantly a leader in your department as well as throughout the facility. Your activity staff will look to you, for better or worse, for an example of what to do and as someone to follow.
There are many components to being a great leader, and I don’t intend to cover all of them in this post. However, there was one that hit me yesterday that is crucial for any position you may find yourself in life.
When people in your facility look to you, do they think you follow through what you believe in? This can make all the world to the staff underneath you. If they believe you really follow what you say you believe, they are more likely to get on board with your new ideas. If they can see a discrepancy between your words and your actions, you’ll run into problems. I’ve been slowly implementing a new approach to planning our activity calender that really involves our program’s participants. Yesterday, I was challenged by one of my staff to prove that I was willing to do what I’ve been preaching.
At the end of June I ran an activity where I asked all our members to help plan a special event calender. In this way, they could feel empowered and have an ownership in our program. We picked out things they would enjoy celebrating such as Amelia Earhart day and the National Korean War Veteran’s Memorial Day. We also decided to have an ice-cream social on the anniversary of the ice-cream sundae!
Well, the day before our social, I ran another group where I asked them to help us plan the menu. It worked out pretty well, but we had a list of items that was a little bigger than our usual snack. Chocolate, vanilla, butter-pecan, maple-walnut ice-ream, and they wanted real Sander’s hot fudge. At the end of the day, before she went home, one of my co-worker’s asked, “Are you really going to get all that stuff they asked for?”
It seems like such a trivial question, but in this moment I had the opportunity to put my money where my mouth was. If I didn’t let her know that I fully intended on letting the members plan the menu, she would walk away knowing that all my talk about incorporating the members to help run the program wasn’t very genuine.
So I told her, “Of course, why wouldn’t I get what they wanted after I asked them to tell me?” I wanted to hit home the point that I was treating them like real people and letting them have a hand in their own program.
“Oh,” she said.
I wanted to go a little further with her and find out what prompted her initial question, so I asked what her opinion of the matter was.
“Well, I didn’t know if you were going to get all the stuff they wanted, it seems like it could be a lot.”
“Yea, I see what you’re saying, I’m definitely planning on sticking to their menu, though its a little much. However, I did already tell them that Maple-Walnut ice-cream is just about impossible to find!”
We held the ice-cream social today, and everything went well. They were really excited about the real Sander’s hot fudge! And the staff had no problems helping carry our vision out. I recently read a quote somewhere, that said managers see that programs are carried out, but leaders see that the right thing is being done. And that is what I tried to communicate to my staff, that by asking the members to help plan, I would be doing wrong by doing it our way behind their backs.
- Justin Zarb, ADPC
Image by Hamed Saber (flickr)
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