Sigma Kappa Delta, Psi Alpha Chapter Guide for Officers

Enjoy.

Introduction

So you want to be an officer. The title is cool. You can tell people you're a Secretary, like the Secretary of State or the Interior. You can picture them imagining you asking for a report on whether the latest outreach efforts were effective. A whole team gets back to you with a 10 page document in color with graphs, charts, and a little summary. You use that summary to tell the next team what to do.

There's control, organization, and giving commands. People get told. Why doesn't everyone want to be an officer? It's obviously awesome. As soon as you get your title, everything changes. People aren't just trying to figure out how to make the projector work anymore. They magically get these uniforms and a glow up. They're like the staff of any reality TV show which transforms someone unpopular or overlooked into a celebrity. And you're in charge of them!

The most important part of being an officer is getting the power fantasy out of the way. It isn't real and it doesn't help anything. Nowadays on Roblox and Minecraft there are plenty of servers where those who are older take full advantage of telling younger people what to do. It's not cool, it is usually incredibly toxic, and you can see how productive that behavior ultimately is.

What you do as an officer is make a commitment to your own growth and the growth of the organization you serve. You're going to be better for this and everyone will benefit as a result. That means on the one hand you're chill, keeping it positive, making sure everyone is safe, comfortable, and having a good time. On the other, there's the respect you give and receive, as well as the standards you model and uphold. You know you're doing a good job when other people get recognition, feel seen, want to do more, are excited, asking how things work, and want criticism and feedback. (Notice there is nothing in here about acting like a recently promoted manager with a new Altima.)

With that in mind, let's move on to the Basics:

Basics, or Asking Questions Which Get You Actionable Answers

There are three questions you need to be asking all the time in order to identify responsibilities and opportunities:

1. What do we need to do for the school?
2. What are we doing to advance our purpose and vision?
3. What are people already doing that we can work with?

There are more questions than these, obviously. But if you learn to ask these and answer them in productive ways, you don't just become a good officer. You become one of the best, as you get a skillset few have. Lots of people can do the job when the job is explicitly spelled out. This includes some with lots of prestige: organizations which give big fancy titles don't want people to fail, so they make things easier. In academia, the professors at the top don't have teaching loads with hundreds of students. They're paid to write and encouraged to apply for more money to write.

I want you, however, to have the skill of identifying and creating what's necessary. No fancy title, no drama. Build with an eye to refining the position as you learn more. What have you found is most essential–what has the highest impact–and how do you repeat that efficiently?

So when you ask "What do we need to do for the school?", your mind should turn to doing the things to secure funding from the school. I believe right now that means we should volunteer as an organization and have a fundraiser. It also means managing attendance records–don't you want to know who is attending your meetings?–and taking charge of advertising. Shouldn't the school know about our meetings and events? Moreover, regular lines of communication between members should be open. An e-mail list of what we have planned going to the appropriate people is always a good idea.

Notice that these things aren't just requirements. They are things that help build the organization. You might be wondering why it is so easy to skip over them: why do some take it for granted that they'll get done? And there's a good answer to this and a bad answer. The good answer is that people are rightly focused on the experience of meeting and making the most of that. If the meetings are awful, who would want to join anyway? The bad answer is that it is easy to get distracted. In today's world, there are things people have devoted their lives to which are going to go down as distractions. Of course freedom means people should be able to create and do as they like. But that doesn't mean some things aren't more important than others.

I urge you to pay especial attention to the last question, which essentially asks what's already being done. It's okay to ask people to go outside their comfort zone here and there. But your job is to see how people are already creating and harness that. Don't let good work go unrecognized! Provide encouragement to those who are trying! Work with what's there first–these are the powers of awareness and observation you need to be a real leader.

The Advanced Lesson, or More on Creating Your Own Job

The most important point about "The Advanced Lesson" is this: you don't ignore the basics. If you feel you've created your own job but nothing is actually getting done for the club, congratulations. You've lost the game.

All of us who work in a professional capacity shape the jobs we have in different, meaningful ways. Note the term "meaningful." This doesn't mean your job manning the register is bad, or that you don't do exceptional things for coworkers or customers in need. But that sort of job isn't really built for setting a unique standard others want to follow. It's a job, it gets a paycheck, you make some friends at work, you leave. There are other careers where you lend your full self, because you want to help a community grow. And that means how you make a role yours is of the utmost importance.

It says something about our world nowadays that people are not even aware of this sort of career. The abuse teachers get, for example, is remarkable. Someone is spending their time to make sure young minds expand. As a reward, they're underpaid, under resourced, and complained about continually. Of course, you would want to marginalize the role of teachers if you want a labor force willing to do anything for however little it pays. The trick is to never let anyone know anything could be different.

What I want to try at our chapter is creating a variety of officer titles based on how we're collaborating and addressing needs. I want to get you in the habit of identifying and pursuing meaningful work. If you believe that there's something which makes our meetings special, can you ask about it? Ask me, ask the other officers? Can you get a committee together, make a plan, and then continue or build upon that? We can certainly create a title based on a small program you implement.

I want you to talk to the other officers we have and asking what they need. I want you to talk to the other members and officers about what needs to be done and offering your help. You need to be thinking about how you can do this work and actually doing it. And I want strong habits of communication and collaboration to accompany that. Far too often people get elected to something like Student Government, do absolutely nothing, but are addicted to the feeling people voted for them. That's really bad. Think of what a Student Government which cared to have extra snacks on hand for students in need would achieve. Or one that got peer tutoring groups started. When a group does nothing, it isn't just that an opportunity is lost. Something isn't addressed and there are consequences.

Meaningful does not mean you go to Harvard or do well on tests. It may not pay. Often, it won't receive any praise from others. Getting a Super Bowl trophy isn't actually meaningful: that's why people are always debating who the greatest team ever was. The skill and passion which go into the game are entirely separate from the results.

Meaningful means you can identify the moral purpose behind your thinking and actions. You can say how you want to grow and have grown. This is not uncontroversial in this day and age. Witness how many act like overgrown children and profit, if not govern. Some are terrified of the maturity of others, believing that anyone who does more will leave them behind. It never occurs to them to join in the work.