Introverts and leadership...

16 September 2017: "You have to hold him accountable or there could be a fracture in the foundation of the group." --a student participating in the session Amy and I led at today's Student Leadership Conference at Shepherd.

We've done this presentation before a couple of times and we've got it more or less down pat. Our subject is "How Introverts Can Be Leaders." We start out with an unscientific quiz that helps students (unscientifically) figure out if they are introverts, extroverts, or somewhere in between. Then Amy leads them through some information about introverts, dispelling myths and explaining how introverts can be great leaders. Finally, we put them in groups and have them discuss certain hypothetical scenarios in which the groups they are part of have issues to work out where they need to put what they have just learned into action.

So, like I said, we've done it before and we've got it pretty down pat. But we haven't done in at least a year. A lot has changed since then in the world--even if we haven't updated our scenarios. Here's scenario #1, the one that the student above was responding to: "Jim, a member of your organization with extrovert characteristics, recently upset some members when he made an off-the-cuff racially-insensitive comment. Based on what you’ve heard from other members, most people don’t think Jim realized that he offended people—or that he is a bad guy. You agree. However, a few members of the group (who are also more introverted) seem to be pulling away from the organization in the aftermath of the comment. How would you work to address this issue?"

The student's response (a response echoed by his peers) stood out to me because the previous times we've done this presentation, students weren't so insistent on making Jim be accountable and apologize. They were more focused on how to facilitate some honest conversation and healing. This group talked about that too, but they also seem to have realized something important in the wake of Charlottesville: while we should be careful not to cut off people who make mistakes or make monsters out of them, we should insist on accountability, even if it makes us uncomfortable. To hear a room full of introverts insist on this--even in the context of a hypothetical situation--gave me some hope.

Of course, these are Shepherd students, and they do tend to rock...