Greek Living Leaders: Working the Supreme Company

[MikePaine]

Many may only see collegiate Greek life as a cultural group who hides their partying behind community service hours and charitable donations. However, I wish to challenge that stereotype by focusing on the professional development and self-improvement opportunity that's presented to Greek life members - especially those that hold leadership positions. Currently, I serve my one-hundred member sorority as chapter president and work with other officers to keep up a well-balanced, structured, and involved organization.
Fraternities and sororities must operate as a business first, and a celebrity νεα socialite second to be able to be successful. I want to indicate some key concepts that report the relation between Greek organizations and businesses.
Greek organizations: • Divide officers into teams to work on specific aspects of the chapter • Must operate on a strict budget, fueled solely from member's dues • Must market themselves well to be able to continue to recruit new members • Have mission statements and values to hold their members to and gear their brand • Must follow rules from, and are accountable to, their national headquarters • Have insurance to cover their organization and its members, as well as many policies and procedures in place for holding events These are just a couple points that report how Greek organizations are ran as the best business, combining friendship with professionalism and offering members a great opportunity for personal development.
As president, I see all sides of running a Greek organization and must help every officer no matter what team her position is just a part of. My days are filled up with constantly making decisions and weighing the consequences. I have discovered to make fair decisions that benefit the greater good, while remaining unbiased in the process. I also reply to everyone's questions and concerns while problem solving when an unplanned event takes place. For instance, we had a tiny crisis with flyers that have been made to advertise an event we were having. Once they came in, we noticed the contact email on the flyers was spelled wrong. After some deliberation, we made a decision to use the flyers we had and made a brand new email with the typo included.
A massive element of running a successful organization works well and professional communication. Our main forum of communication between officers and the advisory board is emailing. I discovered how to properly send and respond to emails in a professional manner. My communication skills have improved substantially since being truly a leader of my chapter. I discovered to communicate concisely and format information in the very best way. I have discovered providing information in bullet lists is the best way to obtain members to learn messages fully. All of our officers must hold team meetings and get reports of progress in different areas on the team. Officers are accountable for organizing their particular meetings and taking minutes to record the thing that was discussed. Greek organizations teach members to effectively and professionally communicate through emailing, holding meetings, and working with others.
One of the very valuable traits that I am still learning through my presidency, is getting more comfortable with hard conversations. I work closely with our Director of Standards and Ethics to make sure our members are holding themselves to the high ideals and values. If someone is falling behind, it's our job to possess conversations together about why that is happening and what we are able to do to ensure it generally does not happen again. These tough conversations become even tougher when remembering that the members of our chapter may also be our friends and sisters. As a leader of a Greek organization, I'm learning to have these hard conversations while residing in control of myself and the conversation.
Greek life has much more to provide than the social facet of the corporation, and can truly prepare adults to join the professional world. Through developing members personally, and developing officers professionally, Greek organizations could offer life-changing collegiate experiences that can't be found elsewhere.