Experience with a UR Alum

This week I got to attend my first All-Team Meeting. VSH is full of lots of different and diverse job titles, positions, and people. From the real estate team, to the support services, and to us, the more behind-the-scenes, Mission Advancement team, we were all there. After talking to my supervisor, Kate, about what these meetings usually look like, I was excited. She described how they are usually in-person and very high energy. It was unfortunate that this one would be on zoom, but I was looking forward to it regardless.

While in the meeting, Allison, the Executive Director and University of Richmond alum, talked of personal stories and shoutouts. She highlighted team values and talked about her personal life. I could tell right away that she is a relationship-oriented leader. Not once were specific tasks asked of people or even mentioned. Instead, she included an entire slide to talk about her newborn baby and how he is doing. The chat fired away with cheers and people gushing at how cute he was. The slide that followed this was one about remembering people we have lost. VSH as an organization has faced a good amount of loss in the past year, as many people have due to COVID. Allison spoke vulnerably about people she had lost and invited everyone to join her in a moment of silence while also sending the names of people in the chat that they had lost. Some people mentioned past coworkers while others mentioned family members like brothers and fathers. It was quite sad to see how many people had really lost someone. At the same time, it was encouraging and inspiring to see so many people rally and mourn together in that moment through vulnerability.

Weirdly, I was taken aback by all this at first. “Weren’t meetings supposed to be ‘productive’ and task-oriented?” I thought to myself. I thought back to my Theories & Models class with Dr. Forsyth and the concept of relationship vs. task oriented leader and the Relationship Theory. Allison was clearly relationship-oriented and it was clearly successful in this environment. I recalled that relationship-oriented leaders do typically produce better results than task-oriented in the majority of circumstances. Clearly within VSH, this leadership style was working as well. It takes a good leader to engage such a diverse group of people, especially over zoom, the way Allison did.