By: Michael J. Provitera, D.B.A.
The Anti-Racism and Equity Coalition is comprised of members from all departments across campus. The diversity of our members is meant to help us gain unique perspectives on university matters. Our goal is to ensure that the Coalition’s mission permeates throughout the Barry community. To satisfy this aim, we created the Voices of the Coalition, where Coalition members have a chance to write about their perspectives.
In this segment, we highlight the voice of member Michael Provitera, DBA, Associate Professor in the Department of Leadership Studies who discusses personal leadership prowess.
Approaching our leadership prowess? Many people feel that leaders are born and not made. Sure, leaders are born, so are preachers, doctors, lawyers, painters, nurses, etc. The key is to do something between the time we are born and the time we leave this place, we call earth. Leadership prowess is an art that needs nurturing.
Reading articles, cases, news, stories, and the classics is one way to approach our development of leadership. A great example of leadership prowess is a survivor of the holocaust. As a young teenager, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi survived the Nazi concentration camps. In them, he felt terrible about how so many people died. He noticed that a few people, despite the horrible conditions, survived. He later came to the United States, studied psychology, became department chair at the University of Chicago, and spent his career investigating this phenomenon of the few that survived the holocaust. Over time, he named his thesis flow. Flow, he said, is a collection of phenomena with unknown beginnings and ends. People can experience flow when they are doing something that they enjoy-feeling a sense of self-efficacy. Our personal leadership prowess is our unique special character. Thus, go with the flow.