A 3-day Learning Journey

My favourite part of my internship thus far has been the opportunity I had to witness a Global Leadership Experience (GLE) in Prague. A GLE is a program developed for college students which seeks to help students solve complex issues in cities and organisations. Students go on immersion visits to local organisations and learn about how leaders within a city combat issues within their specific field. At the end of the program, students put together a proposal for a project that they believe would benefit individuals within that city. From my perspective, many of the final projects from the Prague GLE captured the root issues that manifest in larger ways. Students challenged themselves to think about issues such as the integration of immigrant populations into cities. They also addressed issues of discrimination by proposing a project to build common ground on their college campus

I was also able to go to a program designed for a large company. The program has been split up into three: one day in November of 2018, One day in June 2019, and a half-day in July 2019. In the second part of the program, I noticed that the way in which sessions were facilitated differed greatly from that of the GLE. The conversation and challenge focused more on manifestations of underlying issues rather than the causes.

Although it is much harder to challenge established professionals to think critically about issues affecting their work place, I wish that my organisation’s facilitators had held program participants to the same standard as our university participants.It was clear that the challenge made some of the junior employees second guess the purpose of the program. One asked why the challenge was presented, and if it was posed to boost the company’s ego. Another noticed that it seemed as though the only people the challenge applied to were senior leaders in the company. It is evident that some participants wanted a genuine answer from top leaders about building an organisation where they felt empowered to achieve a common goal. Within such a large organisation, I think it is crucial to ensure that all employees feel that their needs are being addressed.

From an organisational standpoint, I do believe that my organisation worked too hard to make everyone comfortable. I think that the program facilitators under used their temporary leadership of the group. As facilitators, they could have used their power to steer the conversation. My organisation was founded to solve complex issues in companies. I do not believe that in this case, they addressed a lot of the largest problems faced by organisations today. In contrast to the GLE, the program facilitation did not dig deep enough into organisational structure, power dynamics, and inequality to help participants answer the challenge. I understand that this may be tough to do given the scale of the program and its participants. I also understand that programs need to be changed to fit the target audience. With this being said, I believe that as an organisation, it needs to be established that issues that affect all organisations should be highlighted – no matter how uncomfortable they may be to address.

At the end of the day, I was able to voice my opinion about this part of the program. I believed it was received well as one of the program facilitators was able to draw a connection to the November session in which they talked about issues of inclusion in their workplace. Moving forward, this facilitator noted that he would touch on this aspect of their learning journey in July, when he opens up the last section of the program. I hope that my suggestion will help bring to light new ways for participants to address a seemingly straightforward challenge.