Response post #1
Kouzes and Posner’s The Leadership Challenge outlines five practices of exemplary leadership, with the fourth and fifth being Enable Others to Act and Encourage the Heart, respectively. These practices emphasize the importance of fostering collaboration, building trust, and recognizing contributions to achieve shared goals.
Enable Others to Act revolves around fostering a climate of trust, facilitating collaboration, and strengthening others’ capabilities to act towards common goals. This involves sharing power, developing competence, and creating an atmosphere where team members feel valued and empowered. In the film Defiance, Tuvia Bielski exemplifies this practice by convincing and assisting a large number of Jews to escape, indicating a profound trust in their collective ability to survive and resist oppression. By enabling them to act, Bielski essentially empowers the group, emphasizing mutual respect and the significance of each individual’s contribution towards their survival. Encourage the Heart is about recognizing contributions, celebrating values and victories, and creating a spirit of community. This practice is vital in sustaining morale and commitment, especially during challenging times. Bielski’s leadership, as portrayed, likely includes moments where he acknowledges individual and group achievements, encourages hope and resilience, and fosters a sense of belonging and significance among the refugees.
In personal or professional settings, these practices can be manifested in various ways. For instance, enabling others to act can be demonstrated through delegating meaningful responsibilities, providing the necessary resources for task completion, and offering support without micromanaging, thereby building trust and competence. Encouraging the heart could be shown by acknowledging someone’s hard work, celebrating team successes, and creating traditions that reinforce shared values, which in turn enhance collective identity and spirit. Remember, exemplary leadership is not just about leading others but also about fostering an environment where everyone feels empowered and valued, essential for achieving common goals and overcoming adversity.
(please respond to this post; please include two scriptures and four other references.)
Response #2
It must have been such a traumatizing experience for the Jewish community to find themselves in the situation shown through the video. Daniel Craig plays the role of a very stern but loving leader. At this point, the Jewish community likely fresh out of trust long ago, yet Daniel Craig explains that they must work together and build trust in order to create new lives, and fight for their freedom. And just like in the video clip, we can find this noted in the Kouzes and Posner Text, at the beginning of Chapter 5. One of the subsections is “Foster Collaboration and Build Trust” (Kouzes 2009). Much like in the video clip where some where clearly lacking trust, especially with Daniel Craig, and this lack of trust would certainly lead to a hesitance to collaborate together to remain strong and get stronger. Daniel Craig made his intentions quite clear with the community. Through harsh rules such as work for everyone, including the women, and forbidding pregnancies. However, he explains that this is because everyone must be ready to fight, work, and help each other out so that they can make it out of this situation, and grow stronger. When I was younger, I have had personal experiences that remind me of these two sources. This was when I moved to a new, stricter school. At first, I thought that the overbearing rules were nothing more than commands that could be barked at me. However, with reflection, I can clearly see that these have helped developed me into the man I am today, and I would not have wanted it any other way. I at first lacked trust, but through collaboration, I experienced a positive outlook.
(please respond to this post; please include two scriptures and four other references.)
