The Residence Hall Association, or RHA, serves as a tool for students to improve their Residence Hall and campus experience, and works to provide programs and opportunities to address the academic and social needs of the students living on campus. Every student living in the residence halls can automatically be a part of RHA, and each floor has an elected representative to vote at meetings and be a liaison between their floor and RHA. I ran for this position originally because I wanted to advocate for our floor to get shower curtains that were longer to allow for more privacy, a concern that was addressed by other students as well the following year. I had no idea the journey a simple shower curtain issue could present me with two remarkable years of leadership experience.
I had not only the opportunity to be a representative for my floor, but I also served on the executive board of RHA as the Programming Communications Coordinator (PCC) and the President. I was elected into these roles in January 2016 and May 2016 respectively. Other board positions included a Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, Technology Chair and the National Communications Chair (NCC). Our team worked together to uphold the mission of RHA, especially our three mains pillars of leadership, advocacy and programming. We did this by bringing in guest speakers for students to hear about ways to get involved on campus, having students speak on behalf of their floor for different discussion items, and have a large program sponsored by RHA in the residence halls each month. As the PCC, I most often used the servant leadership style. Since I was a freshman elected onto the board of mainly junior students, I mainly observed how the other board members worked together and I was eager to prove myself by going the extra mile on projects assigned to me. This style of leadership was effective for me as I started the position until I grew more comfortable to share my own ideas and have a more democratic approach. However, on the board I observed poor leadership skills as the President and Vice President were open to ideas, but lacked poor communication skills and accountability for themselves and the group, often leading to projects going unfinished. An example of this was when we worked on a project together for an event on campus called the “Tunnel of Oppression”. We worked together to pick a topic, something that had to deal with the oppression of people, and I relied on the other executive board members to give ideas because I didn’t understand what oppression meant yet.
After our topic was picked, everyone chose a partner to work with to detail out a specific sub-topic to do a poster/interactive piece on. I was the odd one out of the group and chose to work by myself. We set a deadline of when our poster had to be done by, and I took the job very seriously as one of my biggest strengths is my work ethic and holding myself to a high accountability standard. I worked hard all week to ensure my project was done despite classes and grew close with another member of the board as we glued our project together. Our advisor’s job was to hang up our posters on the night before the event started, however, I was the only one who had mine done. This upset me as I had put a lot of extra time outside of our designated office hours to finish the project and relied on my advisor to help remedy the situation as I didn’t know how to express my frustration. Our advisor took an autocratic leadership approach, assigning a new deadline for the project, and gather us together at the next meeting to discuss how to avoid future mishaps.
I will admit that at the beginning of my term as President, being the one of the returning members to the board made me take on a strong overbearing leadership role and I didn’t want the faults of the past executive board to be transferred to this group. I struggled a lot with balancing RHA and my academics throughout the year, and dealing with some of my own internal struggles. I am told often told by professors that I am one of the busiest students they know, juggling RHA, school, and other extra-curricular activities. It’s only understandable that occasionally one these areas will slip, and during my first week back for this semester it was RHA. My more autocratic leadership style as the President of RHA had led a coworker to hold animosity towards me, feeling underappreciated as an individual on my executive board. In retaliation, this person started a feud between my coworkers and I over their hurt feelings, leading myself to wanting to give up RHA entirely. Instead, I let the surfaced emotions between everyone die down and faced the conflict head on by reaching out the individual, saying we needed to sit down and have a very important conversation. I reflected this leadership style from our advisor as I found it a great approach to mending broken relationships. By doing this, it resolved a lot of issues surrounding the topic, and I also discussed how we can continue to improve our team standards for the rest of the year during our next executive board meeting with everyone. Handling conflict is a scary idea, but doing so without the prompt of being forced by another adult let me grow into a more responsible and dedicated leader. After seeing different leadership styles on the executive board and realizing my weakness of being controlling of projects, I realized I truly like a mix of the three leadership styles. I like to use servant leadership when addressing how I could help students and the University, styling it after another member of the group, Gracie Smith, who seems to always put the organization first and foremost by always joining committees or volunteering time she didn’t have. I used the democratic approach with my team when planning events and recognizing members of RHA, taking after Kirsten Andrews, the advisor of RHA, who led by perfect example of how to step back and let our team make decisions on our own. Her favorite saying was “I will let you scrape your knees, not fall on your face.” When it came to make difficult decisions that could be the wrong ones. And lastly, I liked using autocratic leadership rarely but sometimes it was necessary when I was in different committees as the President of RHA, such as the parking committee and being a voice for students on campus.