Yesterday was the first meeting of my band’s Student Leadership Team (SLT). Just a short time ago, I announced to my students at Summer Band that I wanted to meet with all Juniors and Seniors prior to our camp (which begins next Monday). A few days ago (while on vacation in Utah) I sent out both tweets and email announcing meeting specifics. I had eight students show up, about 1/5 of the band. I have had an elected “Band Council” in past years, but have found it largely ineffective. This year, I am initiating this SLT that will include every Junior and Senior that has been in our band for at least one year. Officers will be selected from within the group, but will primarily define specific needed roles and not suggest a “higher” position of leadership.
I talked for about 30 minutes on the importance of leadership within the band. The main point I was trying to get across was that if we, as a leadership team, agreed upon a common mission and vision for the band AND actively worked toward that end, the younger band members would naturally and eagerly follow our lead.
Leadership is about doing, not telling. It is about action, not reaction. It is about service, not superiority.
After speaking about the importance of leading by example, we discussed the concept of mission and vision statements. For the Student Leadership Team to really be (and appear to younger band members) unified in purpose and direction, we need to delineate to each other exactly what our purpose and direction are.
After looking at some sample band mission statements that I found online (mostly from Texas, I think not so coincidentally), we broke into small groups and began writing down our values as an organization, our purpose, and where we want to be as an ensemble ideally. This lasted about 20 minutes. Then as a full group again we went through what everyone had written. I transferred main ideas to the white board. I circled the words or phrases that we all agreed were valued highest. We now had a very rough draft for our mission and vision statements. Over the next week – at camp – we will continue to meet to refine it into two clear statements defining our group.
I transfered what was on the white board to a new page at notepad.cc. (If you haven’t used this site, take a look. It has no bells or whistles, but is great for online note-taking and particularly collaboration. It’s basically an online whiteboard with no passwords and a unique url that can be given out to collaborators.) I emailed each of the students taking part and told them they were to come up with a sample statement by Monday from the ideas we had isolated. 24 hours later, there is already some good discussion taking place.
If you have 40 people trying to pull a car with a rope in their own direction, nothing will happen. But if they are unified in purpose and all pull in the same direction, it will move.
