Zoe Riviere

A key component of my leadership philosophy has to do with building relationships. I like to be a team player and build relationship with the people I come into contact with. I like working with a team to bounce ideas off other people and listen to what they have to say and all work together towards a common goal. During my study abroad, I taught third and forth graders in Adigrat, Ethiopia. There was a teaching group of three of us and we all had to work together towards the common goal of teaching these children. We had to take into account what our translator Sister Kahsa said, our group facilitator, and the three of us as a teaching group. Sister Kahsa wanted us to focus a lot on handwriting because the teachers they had struggled teaching it. Our group facilitator, Dr. Brinberg brought tablets with us to help teach the students so we had to try to incorporate the tablets into our teaching schedule and lastly our teaching group had different ideas on what to teach the students and how to teach them. We had to all work together as a team to find the best way of teaching these children. We were only there for a month therefore we did not have much time to teach these kids all we could. We had to build on each other’s strengths and overcome the mishaps of teaching. We had to posses good interactions and focus on working together to provide the best teaching curriculum we could.

This is the biggest circle and the start of the diagram because I believe this is the most important concept in my leadership philosophy. This is the base of everything that I do in leadership and in life. According to my personality profile relationship-building this is the biggest component of my leadership philosophy and I believe it plays the biggest role in my life.

Another component of my leadership philosophy is that people are not always leaders. It is dependent on the situation and context specific instances that determine the best leader for the job. Leaders are not leaders all the time. As the environment changes so should you as a leader. I think this is important in leadership because some people think that a leader is a leader no matter what but I think it is important to realize that it depends on the situation who should be put in charge. I think this is evident when I went to the Hillel Leadership Conference this summer in St. Louis. We learned different leadership techniques that we could bring back to our campuses. The overall goal of the conference explained the best way to approach people to get them to start thinking about their Jewish journey and maybe to start attending Hillel events. This year I am a Peer Network Engagement Intern with Hillel and my job is to meet Jewish students and be a liaison between their Jewish journey and Hillel at Virginia Tech. As a PNEI some people in our team are better at certain parts of the intership then others. Some people take the lead on some projects depending on what they are related to. As a PNEI team we just had a painting party for some of our mentees. I took the lead on this project because I like planning events and feel that I did a great job with the party because more people came then expected. But in other aspects of the internship other people might be more suited for the job. Like talking one on one with mentees or locating Jewish students on campus.

Situationalism is the second circle in my diagram because it is something I take into account in leadership. It is the second largest circle because I believe it is very important in leadership but not as important to me as relationship-building. It says that leaders are not always leaders in very circumstance it depends on the situation.The relationships you make with people are important in determining which people would be best suited for each leadership scenario.  

Lastly I think the ability to adapt is a big component of leadership. Adapting and changing in the face of challenges is very important for being a leader. When a leader is faced with an obstacle they have to have the ability and think quickly on their feet. When I was a Hokie campus counselor I had to adapt to the many challenges that came my way during the three day camp. I had to take all the information we learned in the training sessions and adapt the importation to my campers. Also if a camper had a problem or felt left out in any way I had to adapt my lesson plan to help cater to that camper. Also if another counselor needed my help or an exec. member needed me to assist in something I had to try to juggle what I was doing and adapt to fit with what they needed.

The ability to adapt is the last and smallest circle because although I feel this is very important in my leadership philosophy but it is not as important as the other parts of my philosophy. The relationship-building affects what team member will be the best in the situation, and the ability to adapt is dependent on the situation you are placed in.