Historically speaking, there aren’t many people who would feel comfortable associating Germany with global leadership roles. Considering the outcome during Germany’s last leader, Adolf Hitler, I’m not even sure most Germans would want to be in a position of claiming their leader to be one who influences the globe.

With the departure of President Obama at the conclusion of his presidential term, there was a brief absence of a World Leader who could represent the strongest countries while protecting the weakest countries. Would the world look to President Putin of Russia, a knowingly corrupt leader of a dictatorship? Would the world follow the leadership of newly-elected President Donald Trump, with no experiencing governing more than a board room in Trump Tower? Prime Minister Tredeau of Canada is a young leader of the world’s second largest oil deposits, yet a lack of faith in the leader on a global stage exists too strongly in his lack of experience. Most of Central and South America have issues with fair and democratic elections, rendering their leadership useless in consideration.

Instead, from a place still recovering from two World Wars physically, economically, and politically emerges our new World Leader who represents men and women from across the globe. Angela Merkel, the democratically-elected female President of Germany leads a country back into the modern era.

Merkel holds a degree in quantum chemistry, which only begins to reveal her intelligence. She’s been elected to two terms as German Chancellor, and has been a leader in the most recent world pandemic related to COVID-19. As Chancellor, Merkel has set industry standards for world leaders by making decisions that are best for her own country, while recognizing her decisions can be used by other leaders.

The Coronavirus, while Merkel has been a leader in her county’s mitigation standards, could be her most critical test economically. In a strongly opinionated article by ForeignPolicy.com written by Bremer and Matthijs, Chancellor Merkel and the European Union face financial turmoil that could bankrupt Europe and their Nations. At the time of the article, German Finance Director Olaf Scholz extended an “unlimited credit” to businesses impacted by the outbreak. While this may be effective for Germany, on a global scale, the European Union will face significantly larger challenges.

In what could be her most important moment as a world leader, Chancellor Merkel has an opportunity to be the face of Europe’s return to the global economy. Her leadership will be challenged from all sides, and her values will be stretched as she weighs the pros and cons of such a significant portion of the global economy while also committing her own country to an appropriate level of financial commitment.

References:

Bremer, B., & Matthijs, M. (2020, March 17). The Coronavirus Is Reducing Merkel’s EU Legacy to Ashes. Retrieved April 19, 2020, from https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/17/coronavirus-germany-merkel-eu-legacy/

As we find ourselves in what medical professionals believe to be the peak of the COVID-19 Outbreak, many Americans continue to push the boundaries of what local and state government are asking of us to help prevent the spread of the virus. Initially, our local and state government in California asked that all citizens stay home unless there was a need to provide for their family; food, healthcare, or another essential for their survival. With many Californians and Americans alike, many believed this time to be appropriate to be social, or experience an extended Spring Break, especially among younger demographics who were not believed to be threatened by the virus.

For example, one Spring Break-er was caught on camera on a beach in Florida on March 17th, 2020. He said “If I get corona, I get corona. I’m not going to let it stop me from partying.” (Lewis, 2020). This type of selfish, indulgent behavior to serve one’s personal needs at the expense of the many with high susceptibility to contracting the virus is an example of those who could not follow the rules from state and local government.

In California, the weather allows for year-round opportunity to surf, play volleyball, and experience other outdoor activities. In an area that is more conducive to year-round exercise, Californians rely on being able to go outside and be active. Unfortunately, many of those activities encourage groups of people to get together to participate. Here in Santa Barbara, man people continued to play their daily beach volleyball, tennis, and pickle ball games with their close friends. Within two days after Governor Newsom’s “Shelter in Place” order, the City of Santa Barbara had removed all public beach volleyball nets or locked tennis and pickle ball courts, barring the public from use. While Santa Barbarians can still take walks on the beaches or enjoy hiking trails while social distancing, LA County took things one step further. According to the City of Santa Monica, all public beaches in LA County are now closed until at least April 20th, in order to limit group activity and the spread of COVID-19.

Even with these initiatives from local and state government, Americans still attempt to engage their freedom to indulge in activities they have been offered in times of safety. Yet, without understanding they are at risk, their behavior is putting themselves and any other person they come in contact with at risk of contracting the virus.

In Hofstede’s Six Dimensions of National Culture, his last dimension is Indulgence. He defines Indulgence as “the good things in life.” (Hofstede, n.d). On his map, the United States is one of the areas that is rated the highest in indulgent behavior as a culture. In countries where COVID-19 has wrecked the most havoc, Italy and China, Hofstede had both rated lowest in indulgent behavior. While the three countries being compared have different demographics in terms of age and common health issues, my concern is the United States and it’s high rate of indulgent behavior. Will we as a nation, in a time of uncertainty and health crisis, be able to curb our desire to exercise our freedom to benefit the greater population? Or will the US become the incubator for COVID-19, and experience the most deaths as a country being hit by the virus?

References:

As a High School Volleyball coach, I have a small checklist of requirements that should be accomplished in the event that our team wants to be successful for the upcoming season. One of those categories is Team Cohesion, which I’ve defined as “the ability to produce high-level results as a team by maximizing each players strengths in a selfless pursuit to achieve our goal(s).” While teaching the X’s and O’s of a game is not easy, I’ve found that getting groups of young men and women to work together is significantly tougher, yet far more satisfying to observe the learning process and final outcome. The sport itself will be a game played by my players at a recreational level for as long as their bodies can hold up physically, but teaching players how to work together as a group with sometimes very little common ground outside of an attempt to be successful as a team together; that’s a life skill.

In Lesson 6, we were introduced to the concept of Synergy. According to Moran, Abramson, & Moran, “Synergy is a cooperative or combined action, and occurs when diverse or disparate individuals or groups collaborate for a common cause. The objective is to increase effectiveness by sharing perceptions and experiences, insights, and knowledge. (Moran, Abramson, & Moran, 2014, p . 266). Our Lesson material goes on to further define synergy as “the synthesis of what each individual in the group has to offer.” (PSU WC, L6, 2020). As I continued through the lesson, I realized that my definition of Team Cohesion was very close to how synergy was being discussed in our lesson. This led to a deeper alteration of how I will go about achieving Team Cohesion AND Synergy for my teams going forward.

In my first year with the school I currently work for, I had three weeks to familiarize myself with the 32 players in our Girls Volleyball program prior to our first match. This three week period gave us less than 15 practices to prepare for competition… yikes! While our coaching staff was trying to determine who the best players were, I assigned the task of identifying players exhibiting strong leadership and team work qualities to another coach on staff. After a few sessions, we realized we had three categories of players; talented, less talented and not talented. From those three categories, we spent the next session evaluating whether these players showed strong leadership skills, an awareness of empathy when players around them weren’t performing well, and whether they showed support for others in situations where both positive and negative outcomes took place. The results of our eye test were somewhat disappointing; most of our better athletes with the high level of overall talent were falling into the behavior patterns of not being a good teammate. Those who were somewhere between the less talented and not talented were overall better teammates, and showed support for the higher level players, while also trying to support the players who had no idea what was going on on the court.

As you could imagine, this led to a long conversation among the coaching staff that led to a daunting decision that would shape how our program would move forward under my leadership. Would we put together the most talented teams with the players we had available, teach them the game, and try to get them to support each other as teammates? Or, would we place more value on being what we defined as “being a good teammate”; someone who served as the glue between those who lacked the empathy for lesser players and the players who didn’t quite have the short-term results the older players had.

The decision was made to allow the older, and in some cases more talented and experienced players remain on the Varsity team. With the less experienced, but not so much less talented group, we put them with our most experienced coaches on a Junior Varsity team. While in most programs, the importance of being successful at the Varsity level is the highest priority. For this group, we realized we had a significant culture issue centered around what our lesson would define as an issue with synergy. We had older kids who were not supportive of the younger players simply because they weren’t in the program as long, which I had to manage on the back end with one on one discussions among players.

Throughout the season, we had numerous talks as a team before and after competitions about the lack of cohesion, or synergy, that was felt on the court during times of great success, or times when the outcome was not good. Each and every time, the conversation would begin with a Senior stating that the team needs to work together more, and communicate better; followed by calling out a younger player who didn’t do what an older player said to do. No empathy for a lack of experience, and no flexibility to discuss with that player why we should do what they were suggesting. What we as a coaching staff eventually concluded was that the Seniors on the team weren’t getting the support from their teammates, or in their opinion “respect”, that they felt the “deserved as seniors on the team”. So, with this group feeling slighted by the younger, less experienced, yet more talented group, they refused to work with them and “lead” them unless they received the credit they felt they deserved by being older.

As a result, we had many of our sophomore players ask to play on the JV team. This was something I had never experienced before; younger players turning down opportunities to play up at the Varsity level. While I did not think our team would be successful without their participation, I allowed those players to play at the JV level, and moved forward with our less talented, more experienced players for most of the season. By the time playoffs began, our Varsity team was just above .500, and qualifying for playoffs with the group of seniors that refused to work with the younger players. Meanwhile, our JV team, with a combination of young, talented players and players who shared empathetic qualities, found themselves with only one loss on the season. Shocking, right?!

As a staff, we decided for our playoff matches that if we wanted to be successful, we had to build for the future. We asked that all of the JV players move up for playoffs, and we met with the Seniors whose playing time would be affected. At this point, they realized that the younger players were more talented, and they needed them in order to win games in the playoffs. Yet I still didn’t feel the buy-in from a few seniors who assumed leadership positions on the Varsity team. For the first time in 25 seasons, our program won a playoff game; with the young players all playing a role in the match wins. In fact, our season-ending loss by four points (in the fifth game) in the Section Quarterfinals (to a team we had no business competing with) was due to the older, more experienced players not performing to the standards we needed to be successful, and our younger players didn’t quite have the experience on a stage that significant.

As a coach, I was faced with the task of reviewing the season in order to best prepare for what we needed to improve going into the next season. Among the list of areas we needed to improve, Team Cohesion was what I kept coming back to. Throughout our spring training sessions, we’ve applied principles of synergy to our practices, which require teammates of different background, skill level, levels of empathy, and positive energy to work together. We’ve also incorporated self-evaluation assessments for our players to initiate conversation about how well they performed, but also how well they helped a teammate improve or raise their level. Going into next season, I believe our synergy and cohesion will be one of our best strengths based on the results so far. Will that translate into wins…maybe not. But as a life skill, these players will have learned the steps it takes to be a good teammate who can maximize the results of themselves and the people around them to achieve a common goal.

References:

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2014). Managing cultural differences: Leadership skills and strategies for working in a global world. New York: Elsevier.

PSU World Campus Lesson 6: Cultural Synergy. (2020). Retrieved March 2, 2020, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2041071/modules/items/27977849

As teachers, one of the main requirements would be to successfully convey a message to an audience that can then apply the received message in the way we want them to. Teaching is exactly that; sharing a concept to a classroom full of students who take that concept, prove they understood it, and later apply it to their own lives. In order to be a teacher, your talents as a communicator must be high, because not every student will learn the same way. Some students may learn better with pictures, some may take in more information through listening to a lecture and taking notes. So why is it that teachers have such a difficult time communicating with one another?

Despite our success in teaching the concepts we specialize in to our students, I find that our faculty and staff at my school have a difficult time communicating amongst each other. Even though we know that not every person receives a communication the same way, and that many of us actually don’t keep the message as literal as it was sent, my fellow teachers have had a tough year so far communicating with one another.

The area where we as a staff have the most trouble is through email communication. According to Kruger, Epley, Parker, and Ng (2005), “nonverbal cues (e.g., gestures, intonation, etc.) missing from an e-mail would reduce its effectiveness in carrying a message to its receiver because those nonverbal cues often take certain words and modify them in meaningful ways.” An example of this occurred yesterday between my fellow staff members and I regarding a group of students I’ve named my “Academic MASH Unit”. This is a group of students who are Seniors in high school, who have a grade of C- or lower in one or more classes. Part of my role at my school involves me tracking down students who are experiencing difficulty in a class, and help provide them with resources to improve their grade in the class they are struggling with.

My email went out to a handful of teachers who have these students in their class who have a C- or worse. My message was written as a note to them to let them know I have identified these students, they know I would be reaching out to check in on their grade in the class the students were struggling, and that I want to work with them (the teachers) to help these struggling students improve their grade. In a group of five teachers, two did not reply, two replied who received my message the way I intended it to be received, and one replied asking to meet with me personally. The teacher who wanted to meet personally set up a time, and we met yesterday to discuss the students I had tabbed as struggling academically in her class.

This teacher, while she may be a great math instructor, proceeded to vent to me as to how little the students I had asked about try in her class, and that they deserve the grade they are receiving. She was disappointed that I was trying to ask her to improve their grade in the class without understanding how little they turn in, how poorly they participate in class, and how their progress has been so far this semester. She clearly misread my email, for whatever reason, and thought that I was asking her to “fix” their grade because they were athletes at the school.

After clearing the misunderstanding up, we moved on to put together a very strong program for these struggling students to follow that will increase their chances of passing the class, and furthermore, make sure they graduate on-time this May. All due to one email that was received in a way that made sense to the reader, but not received the way the writer intended for the reader to receive it, communication was muddled. If not handled correctly, this could have been a lingering problem over the course of our time as colleagues. I am very thankful for the outcome, specifically for my professional relationship with my co-worker, our students, and their increased chances of learning the material and graduating high school.