About me
hello 👋
Thanks for stopping by this page! I’m excited to showcase my learnings over the past few years through Gonzaga’s Organizational Leadership Master’s program.
Over the past two years, my life has been profoundly impacted by this program. Classes and immersions like Leadership and Community (where I spent a week at a monastery in the California desert!), Team Building, and many others have not only impacted my work as a leadership development practitioner, but as a wife, daughter, friend, and colleague.
This program not only provided practical tools and resources on effective leadership - it taught me to approach life with a posture of curiosity, to care deeply about improving the lives of others, and to lean into ambiguity as a place of discovery. Through learning experiences and regular reflection, I have come to know myself more deeply, enabling me to love and serve those around me more fully.
My hope is that this portfolio is a testament to the power of learning and community - and it serves as just a small glimpse of the impact this program has had on my life.
My philosophy of leadership can be summarized by Greenleaf’s (1977) answer to the question of what business is for in Servant Leadership. He writes, “The answer may be: ‘I am in the business of growing people - people who are stronger, healthier, more autonomous, more self reliant, more competent. Incidentally, we also make and sell at a profit things that people want to buy so we can pay for all this’” (p. 159).
Leaders must have courage and integrity - the ability to stand against the status quo as well as the ability to articulate a set of core values and exhibit behavior that is totally congruent. They have faith and hope in people and ultimately work toward the empowerment of others. They are lifelong learners, able to talk about mistakes but able to view them less as failures than as learning experiences. They have flexibility as well as the ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity, and have the perspective to reframe problems in a complex, changing world. They have vision and are able to translate those dreams and images (through metaphor and symbol) so others can share them. But, perhaps most important, they achieve self-awareness through introspective self-reflection, ‘the basic condition necessary for their own self-renewal that makes them able to play a self-renewal leadership role’. In other words: inner life, outer fruit.
— Thompson, The Congruent Life
