1. Summary
When I started thinking about my leadership philosophy, it took me hours to phrase it into one sentence: "One word is equal to one action/ A word, an action." Referring to that philosophical concept, it reminded me about a talk of a Mormon Church President named Gordon B. Hinckley in March 2003, stating that "we have the potential to do whatever we want to do and become whatever we want to become. We have a body, a spirit, and an intellectual." For the prophet, we need educational training that can open our eyes to success. His speech also referred me to Genesis 1st, verse twenty-six in the Bible when God said: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and overall the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." I come with these anecdotes to situate my strengths to concreate my thoughts. Because we are created by the image of God, we have the power to do anything we dream about in life.
My "One word is equal to one action" leadership philosophy directs me in the Bible again if we divinely stay in the earth's creation when God said in Genesis 1:3: "Let there be light, and there was light." This aspiration pushed me to understand that we have countless leaders who have taken years criticizing a fact and never do anything to help resolve it. Losing my imagination, I will explore my sociopolitical reality with many political parties in Haiti. These social movements protest against what they do not want without suggesting their views. I see myself as a hands-on and factual activist who believes in action according to my philosophical approach. Doing things is a process, and we should start somewhere without procrastinating. Like in Bonnie St. Jonh's presentation by HR .com on Youtube about The Power of Inclusive Leadership, she sees traditional leaders as low performers.
Being dynamic and self-motivated can make us be seen as leaders. If we are moderate in our lifestyle or peaceful observer who facilitates dialogue, our community can also credit us as leaders. Leadership is not a question of title, position, or function. It is a state of mind, a way of life, a way of working that is results in action. Even a team member can be more extraordinary than a manager. Even if we do not have any title, we can still be models by carrying our leadership philosophy and exposing it through our community organizations. No matter what job we have, no matter our level of responsibility, we always have the opportunity to do great things and express our full potential and leadership. I cultivate my leadership philosophy, and I see every work as an opportunity to bring value to humanity. Sarah, my English teacher at English for New Boston Entrepreneurs, said that I took advantage of every opportunity during my graduation ceremony in December 2019. I had not even noticed that about myself, but she brought it up in front of the public, and I took it as a compliment and recognition.
2. My core values
a. Achievement
When it comes to identifying my leadership values and envisioning them playing out in my life, I observe many concise aspects. Achievement is one of the preferences that dominate me a lot. When I have goals in my life, I pursue them step by step. My "a word, an action" leadership philosophy explains itself in acting from objective to vision. I meant accomplishing every single step that drove me to my main goal. It does not mean thinking about something and realizing it at one stage. I was a district self-reliance specialist at my church back in 2014, and one of the main focuses of being independent I used to teach is "achievement." For example: Let say we have an autonomy circle devised in four steps: School, work/business, family, and serving our community. Remember that the main goal is to become autonomous. Then, the "one word is equal to one action" reflects in sacrificing some time for school as we all know the process of graduating. The next one should be finding a suitable job or starting a business, and so on.
b. Creativity
When I was a social communicator student, I participated in a seminar on Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) with Faysal Hafidi in 2013. This psychological approach involves analyzing strategies used by successful individuals and applying them to reach a personal goal. It relates thoughts, language, and behavioral patterns learned through experience to specific outcomes. One value I deducted from Faysal Hafidi's talk was creativity. The coach stated that we mainly attributed imagination to children following their daily lives. Kids are visionaries, gamers because they are always fabricating something. Even today, creativity is still my strength because it means to me that we should start from imperfect to become perfect. It requires courage, patience, and determination. I have been struggling with the creativity value since I was a child, and I am still caressing it to make my dream a reality by working on an organizational project to change people's lives in my country.
c. Community
I developed a passion for social activism and community volunteerism during my childhood. Community is a spirit, the fact of working together, like in solidarity, and for the benefit of everyone. When I worked at a TV station as a host and marketing director, my manager often called me volunteer because money had never come first. My Haitian fellows often told me: do not you see Haitians do not want to work together? Why do you not focus on your work by yourself and make them see other nations embrace you? I said: no, my project exists to make them better, and I must accept how they are to find testimonies. If they had been good, my activities and enthusiasm would not need to exist. Who will speak for the next generations if we stop working for them? It is my way of saying that community is my value since I want to see people work together for what they wish to do well. My "one word, one action" leadership philosophy relates to making things better together.
d. Humor
Fraternity drives humans in a stage of an endeavor to achieve a goal. Humor is also my intrinsic family value because it makes humans connect in a lovely way. I have started cultivating this value when working with youth in a nonprofit organization I worked for from 2007 to 2015 as a peer counselor. Most of the time, youth need to be entertained to learn more immeasurable. Youth feel more comfortable exchanging their thoughts and feelings in a dynamic environment. For adults, we use andragogy instead of pedagogy, a participatory technique to engage them to learn from what they have been involved in during a session. Leaders who work with different categories must have a sense of humor and be empathetic to satisfy everyone's adaptation. Humor is a welcome on the scene, an appearance that makes us seen open to communicate and collaborate. Like in Bonnie St. Jonh's talk by HR .com on Youtube about The Power of Inclusive Leadership: "inclusive leaders flex their styles and get the most out of every person on their team."
e. Friendship
To end my elaboration about my values relating to my week one reflection, I addressed friendship as a key to facilitating teamwork projects. As an exercise, even in our Leadership in Public Service class, we experience that communication is more encouraging with the most reliable colleague. For example, if I do my group assignment part and feel like it needs to be reviewed before sending it as a final to the whole group, I ask the classmate I think has the best friendly communication to take a look at it for me. Friendship is the essence that makes a good connection among team workers realistically. It is human nature to live together via collective decisions and participatory activities. We might not take it professionally in work environments to make friends with coworkers, but friendship plays a significant role in establishing confidence and long-life leadership plans. Coming from our "Functional or Departmental Teams" week-7 course contents, groups of people from the same work area or departments meet regularly to analyze needs, solve problems, support members, promote continuous improvement, and share information."
3. My detailed analysis
These detailed analyses are essential leadership experiences and opportunities to evolve and improve my abilities to determine my features. I refer to "often leaders are not aware of the assumptions because they operate from certain paradigms that will not allow them to see assumptions" course contents to acknowledge my experience as a writer during our week three reflection post. As I would explain it, writing is about feeling, conception, and our perspective about concepts. As a poet, I often live in an influential nature that directs my pen to express ideas, compared to Poet Amal Kassir, the young Muslim-American and native Coloradan, referring to her "what's your name" talk. Thus, our leaders and my conception of leadership have started from that cultural aspect. My assumption of involvement in politics came after being exposed to many social, artistic, and educational activities. I do not want to say that I did not have a choice other than becoming a social activist, but the ultimate choice I got was to express myself against injustice through my writing. Hence, my community saw me as a light to my generation, pushing me.
Even though I have never worked with a good politician, I learned helpful lessons during political campaigning with some candidates for city councilor, Mayor, and state representative in Massachusetts. I do not want to specify any name. Further, I have also learned integrity, humanity, and ethic from them. These leaders made me feel like being a leader is a calling, and we should take it as a blessing when a community elects us to serve. At the customer service level, I am inspired by the courtesy of helping others. The mantra of "customers are always right" allows me to humiliate myself and search for what makes people do and say things that make them seen bad. I am talking about customer satisfaction. These leaders influence my life by showing me that the most important thing about working with people is being humble in what we do to bequeath our name to posterity. I do not know if it is because I was into politics or a community activist, but I cannot stop saying that I had a deep appreciation for this class since I saw the title: "Leadership in Public Service." I am thinking of teaching it if ever I have to teach at an academy level.
I want to expose the starting point that will make me believe that leadership embraces a concept to concrete an action. It does not start with finality, but it starts from a fact or a lifestyle. The leadership concept takes its place in our life by fulfilling a task through our imagination that will result in an act. The secret of what I also have experienced with leadership is that our philosophy meets us in the middle. I meant we consciously know what we are doing until we start doing it. I never knew that I would become a poet until people applauded my performances and made me believe they were valuable. I would not think I was a remarkable candidate for deputy until the pole placed me in the second position among twenty-five candidates. To describe who influenced my leadership definition, I have no specific one. I would invite anyone to be well inspired in a jungle-like Haiti where everyone is fighting for their good. My leadership definition will be born of a dynamic that incumbent my ability to integrate different educational sources.
My way of influencing others to do what I think is right makes people call me a catalyzer in my community. I got this title by pushing my network to be motivated on apparent paths. I know it might be hard to be understood because we are speaking about philosophy. Change is not only what you think you do to others, but what you make people think they can do on their own when you show them the way. My wife had evaluated me for a couple of minutes, and without even imagining, she said: "As values, you are intellectual, have a sense of leadership, and you are a people person." I am good at one-on-one, talkative, and friendly. I think this is one of the reasons why I enjoy doing customer service works. As public servants, our mission becomes a part of our intrinsic capacities, and we become free of not working when we love what we do. In the past, I used to tutor peer educators around many modules like conflict management, prevention of drugs, HIV, and communication technics. Each time they finished simulations; their auto evaluation allowed me to reframe myself better.
When it comes to my self-evaluation, I feel like I am too motivated to succeed when working in a group. During my second class with Dr. Richard, I learned that working in a group requires patience, and tasks move slowly but with better results. From my perspective, I tend to play my teammates' roles when they move slowly or do not do their job on time. This behavior makes them feel hostile, neutralized, or not valuable. What I also realized; they do not have problems with me directly but with one another. When I get in the middle of their conflicts to judge, I am affected by equilibrating reason and fault towards them. Sometimes they think I must listen more and accept others' views. My "one word is equal to one action" leadership philosophy focuses on completing the work. It synchronizes my chemistry to what I love to accomplish, and my goal is in harmony with my nature. It's like I see myself in "Doing and being" at the Global Complexity (week 7, course contents) — "Global leaders should consider what they do and make things happen. At the same time, they must be mindful of their energetic presence." I would also use the "Don't neglect" of Jim Rohn in tip 7. "Neglect is the major reason people don't have what they want. If you don't take care of things in your life, Neglect becomes a disease."
As a former law school student, I have learned that leaders guide people in the right direction and the ones who do anything to achieve their goals. "The end justifies the means" of Nicolas's Machiavel leadership philosophy would clearly state that since we realize our goal, the way we went through does not matter. The contradictory part for another author and a French philosopher named Albert CAMUS is, "what justifies the end? In my view, anyone can be seen as a leader if we look into those polemics. As I defined in my week one and two leadership value reflections, the essential qualities of a good leader should include creativity, community spirit, integrity, humanity, ethic, courtesy, etc. They are self-aware and prioritize personal development. Leaders are focused on developing others, encouraging strategic thinking, innovation, and action. Juridically and democratically speaking, the law reflects the simple majority's voice. And sociologically speaking, I would say facts make rules.
Credibility is built on trust. If we always tell the truth about ourselves, the rest of the world will fall into our hands. Our heritage background is a plus nowadays for cross-cultural leaders. Our leadership philosophy is an everyday work on what we have been doing that brings us to the final stage. The most expectation from leadership philosophy is the glory, end Jesus testified it. The Bible says in John 5:30 that he came to hearth to do his father's will, and return, he got the exaltation for centuries. Following Chris' leadership model, we can expect that sacrificing our time for the good of others can lead to a better world and eternalize our brain name. Leadership aims to make society work smoothly, promote and enforce the norms. As public servants, our leadership philosophy helps emerging new generations to ensure the future.
Our environment and community play a significant role in our leadership philosophy and impacts our actions. Now, I uninstall all social media applications on my phone to focus on this class. I came with this example to express that I could not focus on this program because I was actively in touch with my network, and I figured out that I could fall. Over the news, I heard so many distractions and things that I could not avoid being listened to, like the Haiti 7.2 magnitude earthquake on August 14, 2021, the assassination of my country's president on July 7, 2021, kidnaping all over the news, and political instability. After hearing all these, I felt like I had to do something to help my family and the country. Unfortunately, I could not do anything other than sending food and money, and I got depressed. These manifestations influenced my leadership philosophy that I had to ask for psychological support at the Clinton School council office. My leadership behavior developed through personal experiences and external forces if we study those facts.
4. Personal history and life-events
In 2019, I implemented an Organization in Massachusetts.
When I came to Boston in October 2016, I was afraid, ashamed, and stunned observing Haitian children's behavior. They acted strangely by walking on the Mattapan streets, begging people for money, smoking, and using obscenities in their conversations. Over the news, their neighborhoods are discriminated against for delinquency, and they seem to be marginalized. I realized some of these peers might be professionally talented and artistically gifted. They lack the guidance to play a better role in society, make a living, and serve their community with pride. I implement a literary, socio-educational, and cultural organization to gather them. I want to see these youth find suitable jobs and the right tools to develop their talents and see the future of the next generations. My mission is to empower them to build their leadership and civic engagement through arts and entrepreneurship. I used that strategy because inclusivity can influence social cohesion and conflict management in the Boston community. I also realized that Haitian kids have low self-esteem. They ignore Haitian Creole, which is their vernacular language, and some seem to be scared by what they heard about Haiti.
2. I ran for office in Haiti in 2015
I have never worked closely with any good leader in the past. But politicians used me as a resource to organize seminars and socio-educational events for them. When I was in my third year in law school, I was chosen by a political party to run for congress in August 2015. I publish a booklet to share my political view to candidates who aspire to compete in legislative elections like me. When I was a candidate, I had not found support from Haitian political leaders vis-a-vis their previous experiences to guide my steps. As a creative young leader, I developed my strategy to get my message across and sell my speech. I made it my duty to share this document which shows some project ideas that I have had. I used that guide as my megaphone throughout my election campaign and shared it with members of my campaign team committees to properly assimilate my vision into parliament. I believe it can also help future young candidates improve their candidacy plans. This book is untraceable from former Haitian candidates at all levels in the country. At the end of that book, I exposed Itiahism, the literary-philosophical doctrine I was promoting to sing a new Haiti.
3. I created a literary organization in Haiti in 2008
When Haitian literature was almost dead, I think it was my duty to revive Haitian letters as a poet. In the search for national literary identity, I invited other writers to gather under an educational organization called ITIAHaiti, or Innovation of the Terroir by the Itiahists for the Advancement of Haiti. Considered the first Haitian literary doctrine of the 21st century, Itiahism was born out of a group of committed young writers on July 12, 2008. We were willing to sacrifice ourselves by raising our hands to say no to any form of injustice that occurred during our existence. We created a literary club to encourage poetry and perform plays in the southern Haitian city of Les Cayes. The idea later expanded on social media to give birth to an academic school exalting the Haitian heritage. The primary purpose of ITIAHaiti was to promote the clarity of literature that highlights, translates, and reflects all realities of Haiti. It supports licit, teachable, and original writing while advocating innovative poetry.
For me, defending my cultural identity is one of the winning strategies and educating and engaging an intellectual elite to save my homeland. Itiahism describes the misery of zombie people of its period and exalting the beauty of what remains good. This psychological philosophy motivates contemporary artists to take their torch at last. As enthusiasts, we were alarmed to awaken poetry, restore the landscapes, sing our country, and make our pens a therapy for the traumatized and an assault against the corrupt leaders. Itiahism is neither a poem, a play, nor a novel either. Being creative, we adapted our work to the reality we were living, and we were free in our advocacy styles. As Itiahists, we build, advise, and transform to give another aspect of intellectual revolution. As some traditional politicians and community leaders did, we did not want to legate a culture of destroying, blaming, or distorting. We did not just protest but proposed new ideas and undressed while caressing. Itiahism laid a bridge between a neglected past and an alarming present to build the future of Haitian society by harmonizing and perfecting everything.
References:
"Doing and being" at the Global Complexity week 7 (course contents)
Bonnie St. Jonh's presentation by HR.com on Youtube (2:49) - The Power of Inclusive Leadership.
I created a literary organization in Haiti in 2008: https://www.itiahaiti.org/itiahism.
I implemented an Organization in Massachusetts: https://www.itiahaiti.org/bylaws.
Komives, S. R., & Wagner, W. (2017). Leadership for a Better World: Understanding the social change model of leadership development (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) with Faysal Hafidi in 2013
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) with Faysal Hafidi in 2013
Nicolas Machiavel, "the Ends Justify the Means": http://factmyth.com/factoids/machiavelli-said-the-ends-justify-the-means/.
Poet Amal Kassir, the young Muslim-American and native Coloradan referring to her "what's your name" talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LslypJkjll8
The Bible: Genesis 1:26; Genesis 1:3; John 5:30
The name of the student: Wilson Thelimo Louis
The course title: Leadership in Public Service
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