​Jordan Graham

I spent two years on the Panhellenic Executive Council during my time at the University of Washington. My first year, I was Vice President of Membership Development, which entailed working with New Member Educators from all 18 sororities to provide new member and educational programming. My second year I served as the Vice President of Recruitment Management, which put me in charge of all Formal Recruitment activities for the entire year. Both of these roles helped define my leadership styles, and allowed me to learn a lot along the way.

 

Understanding of personal values, motivations, passions, purpose, and ethics, which guide ones behaviors

One of the most effective excercises we were able to do one the board, was the Strengths Finder workshop to find our leadership identities to understand more about ourselves. I found that my top five strengths were Deliberative, Includer, Maximizer, Strategic, and Woo Factor. These 5 strength helped me figure out how I work as a leader, what motivates me, and the ethics that guide my behavior. For example, being a Maximizer means that excellence, not average, is my measure. Maximizing on my own strengths, as well as those around me, motivates me to excell to not just getting the job done, but getting the job done the best. This helped me identify how I would work with a team and the rest of my board for the year.

 

Ability to engage in reflection and critical evaluation of self as a leader

Every quarter, I was able to schedule a meeting with my advisor Krista, and our President of the association to reflect on my effectiveness that quarter. I was able to critically evaluate myself as a leader as I was asked about the goals that I set for the quarter, events I was able to put on, and my communication effectivness with the rest of our board and the recruitment chairs I managed. This meeting ended with a discussion on whether or not I earned the stipend for the quarter, and what goals I wanted to set for the following quarter.

 

Able to manage people, delegate tasks, trust in others, identify the strengths and weaknesses of others

One of my biggest and most important tasks I was given during my second term, was to organize both Greek Preview and Formal Fall Recruitment. On the day/each day of these events, there were a lot of tasks to complete, and a lot of different people equipped to help me. I was responsible for not only planning my own day, but was also responsible for managing all of the potential new members who came through, recruitment counselors, chapter recruitment chairs, and the executive board team. I really had to trust my executive recruitment team to cover our office during all times of the day, as my job was to continuously be checking in with each delegated team. I was constantly on the go, answering phone calls and text messages to distraught recruitment chairs and PNMs, that I could not be guaranteed to be at any place at any time to complete a task. I really had to delegate out tasks to executive board members, recruitment counselors, and my co-recruitment team members to ensure that even the smallest details were taken care of.

 

Able to implement and execute ideas, programs, events, projects, etc.

In my role on the board, I was in charge of planning Greek Preview in the Spring. This event hosted about 250 high school seniors who had decided to attend UW in the fall and were interested in going Greek. This event took about 3 months to plan, and included everything from renting rooms, making flyers, promoting the event itself, and coordinating guests to come speak to the parents. Although I did not come up with this event by myself, I had to figure out a lot of the details by myself because there is really no guide on how to plan these events.

 

Able to assess the strengths and weakness of team

For formal fall recruitment, one of my jobs was working with my counterpart to oversee the Recruitment Counselors. We decided to split them up into teams for different jobs, and paired groups up based on personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. This allowed out recruitment team to have diverse, well balanced small groups that we knew we could depend on for different tasks throughout the week. There were also strengths and weaknesses within each team, and team leads were assessed based on what task needed to be done, and who on the team would be able to complete the task the most efficiently.

 

Understand one's audience

One of the most important aspects of my position was to promote going Greek to incoming freshman during the Spring and Summer in preparation for formal fall recruitment, as well as present to our potential new members during orientation in the Fall. When planning for these presentations, I tried to remember what it was like to sit and learn about Greek life during my orientation sessions, and realized that I didn't remember because it wasn't memorable. Choosing where you were going to live seemed to me at the time the most exciting part about going to college, and I couldn't even remember learning about Greek life. So, as being an audience member 3 years before, I planned these presentations as if I was the audience member, and scripted something that I would want to hear, and something that would be memorable. My counterparts and I decided that using a Prezi presentation was a god, interactive way to keep an audiences attention, but that we wouldn't necessarily rely on it, because that is typically when things get boring. We came up with a few jokes to throw into the mix, and added some silly anecdotes about housing features that were mentioned on a bullet point. In the first few weeks we tried out our presentation to the first few batches of Freshman, and it really worked. We decided that a low key, laid back, and fun presentation would be the ultimate experience for the students, especially if we wanted to be remembered: which we were! I still have freshman coming up to me randomly and saying they remember me from their Summer orientation session, or formal recruitment orientation.

 

Maintain the balance between big picture items and tasks necessary to achieve goals

Planning Formal Fall recruitment is an all year round effort. For example, I started booking rooms for September in January, and started promotion in May. I created an internal timeline of myself, a month to month calendar of what I needed to complete for the overall goal of planning formal fall recruitment. One month was ordering brochures, another was working on our shirt order (which was over 2,000 shirts), another month was dedicated to ensuring all of the recruitment chairs understood the implications of the new recruitment bylaws. Every month consisted of meeting with the recruitment chairs from each chapter, and checking in on their recruitment planning, and making sure everything they were doing was in compliance with our rules. I also was in constant communication with my adviser, Krista, as she played a major role in planning recruitment through the University itself. From January to September, I was constantly working on little things that contributed to my major year long goal of planning a successful recruitment: which I did!