This past week on Friday I attended a workshop through the emerging leaders program which was about leading with values and was presented by Dr. Pamela Harper, an assistant professor at Marist in the School of management. The emerging leaders program is a non credit certificate program which provides students with varied and unique opportunities to define, discover, and develop their leadership skills. The workshop was very interesting as Dr. Harper presented about how values and leadership are incorporated into each other.
As a part of the workshop Dr. Harper passed out a packet for everyone to fill out where there were different categories of values and next to that there were definitions of what values specifically each category contained. One of the first exercises everyone had to do was fill out what percentage of importance the value is to us and then the percent that we practice the value. After that we had to go back and pick out the eight most important values to us, then we had to go back and from those eight we had to narrow the list down to the five most important, then from there had to narrow it down even more to our top three values. This was very difficult as I valued all of the values listed so it was hard to pick out the top eight and then narrow it down to five, and then to three from there. It really made me think that even though I have a lot of the listed values which of those values were the most important to me and the ones I hold to be more important than the others. After everyone did this exercise and picked out their top three values we got into small groups and discussed what everyone picked as their top three values and why they chose them. It was very interesting to hear what everyone else in my group chose and why they held their three values to be more important than the others listed. Everyone else in my group experienced the same challenge I did with picking out the top three values as they also believed the others were important as well. Overall it was a great workshop, was very interactive and really made me think about what I value.