Servant Leadership at the Core of Regional Conferences

The Phi Kappa Theta Regional Leadership Conferences were successful once again this year. 2012 boasted some impressive changes from 2011, most significantly the focus on servant leadership in the education. Phi Kappa Theta staff and volunteers were joined by trained representatives from the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership at all four of our locations this year. The Greenleaf Center assisted with facilitation and the creation of three pieces of education focusing on servant leadership. In addition, each attendee and facilitator was also given a copy of CEO Kent Keith’s book The Case for Servant Leadership.

Based on survey feedback, attendees understanding of servant leadership increased over the weekend with the vast majority of our attendees stating that now they not only feel comfortable discussing servant leadership with others, but they plan on making significant efforts to live as servant leaders. One attendee noted that "The Servant Leadership session gave me the idea of how, if in the future I am elected President, I can lead my Fraternity more efficiently.”

Over 140 collegiate members received more than seventeen hours of training during the weekend in not only servant leadership, but topics including decision making, accountability, change management, masculinity and diversity. For the second year in a row we were able to provide training in each area of development and all education was created specifically by or for Phi Kappa Theta. On Sunday morning we were joined via webinar by the professionals at Recruitment Boot Camp for some intense recruitment training and action planning. Recruitment Boot Camp provided a systematic, results-driven approach to recruitment followed by assistance creating a detailed action plan that specifies what chapters are going to do to improve and how they will implement what they learned. In addition to this training, chapters were offered an opportunity to purchase online skills training for their chapter at a discounted rate to continue recruitment training after the weekend. In survey feedback, one attendee said, "I am the recruitment chair and making the action plan helped me get the ball rolling.” Another attendee said, "It was a fresh new insight that could be applied within my chapter as to how we go about recruitment as a collective whole.”

Almost all of our chapters and colonies were represented at this year’s RLC’s and the majority of our survey respondents strongly agreed that not only is this event an enjoyable and worthwhile one, but it is worth the investment that is made.

A special thank you to the Phi Kappa Theta Foundation and all of the donors who help make programming like the Regional Leadership Conferences possible. The RLC’s come highly recommended by our 2011 and 2012 attendees. One attendee from this year remarked, "The whole conference was very thought out. The conference will definitely have an impact on how I approach my chapter this semester.” We are currently in the process of planning for 2013 and plan to announce dates and locations at Leadership Institute this summer.