Back to Summer 2010 Newsletter
A conference devoted to leadership takes on the difficult task of first defining leadership. Herein lies a challenge. Leadership unlike, say, water quality or quantity, defies quantitative analysis. It cannot be accurately measured as parts per billion or acre feet. The task of defining leadership calls for some personal and subjective interpretation.
The conference featured two panel sessions, each focusing on leadership from a different perspective. Panelists represented a broad range of backgrounds including a creative writing professor, research scientist, student body president, newspaper reporter, utility official and representative of a developer.
Below is a sampling of lessons and advice from a few of the speakers:
The leadership I feel I have is leading from behind. I am not always needing to be in the limelight. I would much prefer to be behind the scenes orchestrating and helping people develop their own leadership, helping pull together the parts and creating a system that will work and resolve problems. Tahnee Robertson, Director, Southwest Decision Resources
Always be looking for knowledge. Look for new ways to understand things. I am an example that you don’t necessarily have to go the traditional route. I am not an engineer; I am not a hydrologist. I learned what I could about water and became knowledgeable about water resource policy management issues here in Arizona. Warren Tenney, Central Arizona Project Board of Directors
Leadership makes me a lot more able to negotiate and work through what are often the most controversial topics in water resource planning in the state, particularly from the development side of things. When you enter the room or the debate you are seen with a black hat, black shirt and it is not the cool Johnny Cash kind, more like Brutus from Popeye. One of the challenges is to overcome that by demonstrating you are a thoughtful engaged citizen who wants just as much for this community. You show you have that knowledge and also that you would work out compromise solutions that will work for each individual. Vince Vasquez, Water Resource Coordinator, Diamond Ventures.
If you look at the elements of leadership and what great leaders are capable of doing, certainly they are able to take very complex issues and break them down to deconstruct them in such a way that people can wrap their heads around them and make progress. Barry Roth, Co-Director, Teach Arizona Quality leaders have the ability to really draw the most out of people around them. Great leaders do not necessarily do the work; great leaders create the environment in which people can accomplish and do great things. Lon Huber, Policy Program Associate, Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy
You don’t have to be assigned the role. Leadership sometimes just emerges. And a corollary to that is you don’t necessarily get recognition for real leadership. You can step up as a leader, not have an assignment, not have a title of director, general manager or an elected position and you can make a big difference. Placido dos Santos, Binational Projects Manager, Central Arizona Project
The word leadership strikes terror in the hearts of reporters especially reporters who came of age in the years that I did because we were always told in journalism school “Keep yourself out of the story. Don’t inject your viewpoints; don’t inject your opinions and whatever you do don’t go out and try to affect what is going on in the story.” So that is why covering an event you will see us sitting over at the edge, stony faces, not laughing at the jokes and not applauding at the high points. Of course, the truth is every time we go to work and decide what story we are going to write that day we are injecting some of our points of view, some of our world views into those stories. Shaun McKinnon, Reporter, The Arizona Republic
In my seven years on the Arizona Corporate Commission and in a few years working for Janet Napolitano I came up with a few things that I think are key characteristic of leaders: 1) Great or good leaders are not afraid to fail 2) They don’t shy away from tough issues 3) They work hard at work worth doing 4) Good leaders are willing to find common ground and cooperate with other leaders toward the public interest 5) Good leaders are willing to share credit with each other even when they are the ones who led the way. That is perhaps the most important. Kristin Mayes, Chairman, Arizona Corporation Commission. (The above remarks are taken from Ms. Mayes’ address.)