Leadership Workshops

I attended four workshops at the Illinois Leadership Center. Each workshop provided me with a different understanding of a specific concept related to leadership.

Practicing Servant Leadership

02/26/26

The main goal of a Servant Leader is to serve others. This means prioritizing others’ ideas and goals over your own and valuing relationships first in your leadership. In this workshop, participants will recognize what servant leadership looks like, identify the core competencies of Servant Leadership and learn how to encourage others to practice servant leadership.

Fostering a Culture of Feedback

03/12/26

This workshop focuses on how leaders can create an environment where feedback is shared helpfully and healthfully. To foster a culture of feedback, students learn the qualities of quality feedback and practice different models of how to give and receive feedback.

Leading with Empathy and Compassion

03/25/26

In this workshop, participants will learn how to balance empathy and effectiveness through compassionate leadership. Defining features of this workshop include practicing active listening and tools to prevent empathy burnout. Participants will have the opportunity to make the key connections between empathy, compassion, and leadership.

Making Strategic Decisions

04/01/26

In this workshop, you will learn the different aspects of healthy individual and group brainstorming processes. Everyone will practice different types of thinking to facilitate effective and efficient decisions for themselves and their organizations.

Workshop Reflection

Attending the leadership workshops has been very insightful in my journey of improving my leadership. Each workshop showcases a specific skill or trait that can be worked on when practicing leadership. The hour-long sessions are highly interactive which I enjoyed because it allowed me to really understand the topic in depth even within a short amount of time.

Personally, I really enjoyed the workshop dedicated to practicing servant leadership. Within this workshop we did a role play activity with our groups where we were assigned different roles either being a worker or a manager. Some workers and managers were rude, disinterested, and passive where others were eager, helpful, and positive. It was really interesting to navigate conversations when communicating with different kinds of employees and it taught me a lot about how it is important to be positive, communicative, and helpful when leading. I learned to always take the input of my peers because everyone has different ideas and opinions and when you combine thoughts you can create greater outcomes.

I also really enjoyed the workshop about leading with empathy and compassion. I believe this is an extremely important trait for a leader to have. Being able to connect with your peers and showcase emotions is a very vulnerable thing for a leader to do but in turn it allows the others to see that they are just like the rest. This is a technique I have found myself using throughout the years so it was a great experience to be able to refine those skills I have already begun to develop.

All of the different activities within the workshops make it very easy to apply to the real world. Having role play activities has allowed me to understand what to do in a practice setting which will allow me to continue to practice until I am placed in a situation where the specific skill is needed.