A Community In and Of Itself

Reflections on Group XIV’s LEADERSHIP IN A COMMUNITY CONTEXT Seminar

by Renee Koenig, Group XIV, Kewaunee.

Mindy Habecker, one of the seminar chairs, said that in some ways our group is like a community in and of itself.  I appreciated hearing that metaphor or simile.  It made me think about how our group is bonding and forming stronger relationships with one another.  At the same time, we are coming together as individuals who have important roles in our lives back at home.  The skills we learned at Treehaven will help us in both “communities” – in our Leadership Wisconsin group and in our neighborhoods.

Our group was led through a variety of leadership development activities at beautiful Treehaven.  We devoted a lot of time to improving our understanding of dialogue, diagnosing conflict, and recognizing habits of systems thinking.

Dialogue is an important component of building relationships. We learned five key practices for dialogue: listening, respecting, suspending, reflecting, and voicing.  Throughout the seminar, we had several opportunities to practice our dialogue skills.  Sometimes we practiced role playing characters from The Milagro Beanfield War movie and sometimes we used our own personal experiences to sharpen our dialogue techniques.

Conflict, we quickly learned, is not always a bad thing.  Jeff Hoffman, our guest presenter, showed us how to map a conflict process.  In pairs, we practiced using non violent communication by sharing an experience from our personal lives.  This activity was a good way to learn more about each other on a personal level at the same time we learned how to express our needs and emotions to convey our message.

Habits of systems thinking was introduced to us by Gerry Campbell, our other Seminar Chair.  Gerry used the iceberg model to help us recognize the interconnectedness between our mental models and the events occurring around us.  Treehaven offered a conducive environment for us to explore and reflect on our mental models.  Recognizing the fact that our mental models or our ways of thinking might be different from the way other people think was expressed by several participants as an important challenge that we will have to face in our communities.

Whether or not these leadership development exercises promote cohesiveness in our communities partly depends upon our individual role to apply our new skills.  I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to practice these leadership techniques with my Group 14 community!