Journal 3: Leadership

The 7 C’s of Leadership are Consciousness of self, Congruence, Commitment, Collaboration, Common Purpose, Controversy with Civility, and Citizenship. Consciousness of self is the awareness of oneself basically like being self conscious. Having consciousness of self as a leader means searching within yourself to really know your beliefs and values that you stand for, and using that individual knowledge to guide yourself and those you are leading. It’s important to have consciousness of self because it helps you have an understanding of what you excel at and what you need to improve. Congruence is where you find a mark on your beliefs, principles and values. It’s important to be a congruent leader because that means you have a clear alignment between your personal beliefs and your leadership actions. Commitment in leadership is persistence with purpose. It’s when leaders unite a team by showing their commitment to the common goal. Collaboration means working with all the individuals you are leading by valuing openness and communication. Collaboration is all about respecting one another’s opinions, even if you disagree. Common purpose in leadership means having the same goals, values, and strategies that  form a “group” into a “team”. Having common purpose in a group is important because it involves trust, commitment, and unity within the group. Controversy with Civility means that even if leaders and followers disagree, they can still be able to focus on the common purpose or in goal. The difference in viewpoint is inevitable, but when differences in opinions happen, it’s important to be civil and respect one another’s opinions. Lastly, citizenship is working well with all the members of the group, being respectful and loyal, and doing one’s part in the group. It’s about being responsible and contributing to the group

Now that I have covered the aspects of each of the 7 C’s, I will now show how they are being used in my non profit organization-Zooniverse. In Zooniverse I have worked on a project called “Seabirdwatch”. In the project we have to look at different pictures, and help monitor seabird populations by tagging time-lapsed images. There have been 17,806 volunteers working on this project, and I would consider that to be a great example of citizenship. Everyone works on this project at different times, but there are many of the same members that are helping to classify these Kittiwake birds. Everyone is loyal and is doing their part in this project. The common purpose of this project is to classify the correct birds. Since some photos might be blurry, and there are different types of birds in the photos, we have to make sure we are all classifying the right one. If there is an instance where there is a bird that might be a Kittiwake, but we don’t know for sure, we can add a comment and other members will chime in. This is where collaboration takes place. Everyone could have an opinion on what type of bird it is, and there have been disagreements, but everytime this happens we go with the majority vote, and we all respect that and move forward. I would also say that is an example of controversy with civility, that we all respect, we have different opinions on what bird we think it could be, but we go with the majority vote and move forward. I have not used consciousness of self or congruence in this project, my values or beliefs haven’t really taken place in this at all. I will say I have used commitment in this project, sometimes it can get tiring looking at the same images for hours and classifying birds, but with my commitment to this project, I keep coming back each day for a couple hours to do my part.

My three big takeaways would be that without citizenship, controversy with civility, and collaboration, this project would not be where it is today. There have been 787,762 classifications which means the project is 98% complete! Each member that has participated has been loyal to this project, and knows the common goal. We have all had moments where we had controversy with civility, but we handled it well and it wasn’t something that became a handful. We are all strangers working on this project, but we all share a common goal and we all know that collaboration is what got this project where it is today.