The Starfish, The Spider, and Hall Council
When I was in college, I loved being involved in the residence halls. Any position or job offered by the Office of Residence Life was something I wanted to do. I learned many lessons from the various opportunities I took, but none was greater than the internship I was given working with the Leadership Development Coordinator.
This person, who became my mentor, bounced into my small cramped office one day and said, “I think the Hall Council experience could be better. You are I are going to change it and make it better”. For those of you who do not have a Residence Life background, Hall Council is an involvement opportunity in every residence hall where students represent their peers by reviewing policies and planning programs.
Hall Council is a sort of gateway leadership experience. The goal is to provide students with enough skills and experiences that will hopefully inspire additional involvement in other leadership opportunities. It’s a way to engage students in the fabric of involvement at the beginning of their college experience.
During my time in college, the Hall Council experience mirrored the structure of a typical hierarchical structure. There was a President, a Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, and so on. As I am sure you can imagine, each position had a description of responsibilities that students were elected to perform. My memory of Hall Council from my younger days as a college student was that if you weren’t on the executive board, there wasn’t much of an opportunity to get involved in the process of determining what happens. Because of this, most people in the hall didn’t pay attention.
I think that difficulty in getting involved in the process is what my mentor and supervisor was talking about when she said we could make Hall Council “better”. We started our work that would result in the creation of a leadership system that tipped the hierarchical model on its head. We created a board type structure that involved a series of committees that were predicated on the idea of chairs getting other students involved. Each committee had a distinct function, but worked collaborately to solicit ideas, plan activities, and most importantly engage peers in the process of decision making and community involvement.
There is not one single experience that has done more to shape the leadership development philosophy that has guided my interactions with students over the course of my career. The only experience that may have topped the creation of this leadership system was the opportunity that was given to me by another mentor to fill in for a graduate student staff member as the advisor to this newly created system. I am forever grateful to Robin and Sandi for the integral role they played in my development as a leadership educator by providing me with opportunities few receive.
Turning the Hall Council model on its head to create the Leadership Involvement Team wasn’t easy. As I have progressed through my career attempting to replicate the spirit of an equalitarian model, I have certainly witnessed the many challenges that come with the implementation of this type of organization. There is comfort in knowing someone is in charge providing direction to others who are in subordinate roles. We have become reliant on this model as our dominant example of leadership structure.
I think it’s fair to say the outputs of a group organized without hierarchy are different from that of a more traditional model, but I think the outcomes of what students learn have the potential to be better. To use student involvement in the residence halls as an example, the students I worked with didn’t always have the best attended campus wide events, but experienced smaller victories like increased student participation in discussions. These smaller victories weren’t always the most visible or recognized accomplishments, but they made a difference in the experience students involved gained.
There are other examples of organizations looking to turn the hierarchical model on its head. By now, you may have forgotten the title of this post is “The Starfish, The Spider, and Hall Council”. I am sure you get the Hall Council part, but what does a starfish or a spider have to do with any of this? A couple of years ago I discovered a book that showed me that I wasn’t the only one who has dabbled in non-hierarchical structures.
Entrepreneurs Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom chronicled many examples of organizations in the corporate and non-profit world that are tapping into the power of what the authors call “leaderless organizational structures”. The premise of their book is simple…There are starfish organizations and spider organizations. If someone were to cut off the leg of a starfish, what would happen? A new leg would regenerate and the starfish continues to operate through the loss and the re-growth. If someone were to cut off the head of a spider, what would happen? That’s right…the spider would die.
I am sure if you have hung on to reading this you get the metaphor. The “starfish” organizations have several limbs that are equally important to its life. If one piece becomes unavailable, the others have the opportunity to keep it going. Power is distributed and teamwork is essential to operational success.
In constrast, the “spider” organizations have centralized power at the head. If that area is unavailable or disconnected, the rest of the operation does not have the distribution of power necessary to keep going. Chaos and confusion take over as the organization begins on a descending path toward destruction.
One may think “corporate America” or well established non-profits would not be willing to take the risk of establishing more “starfish” like qualities. If you are one of those people, you will be surprised by the organizations Brafman and Beckstrom highlight in their book. Organizations like Skype, Craigslist, Wikipedia, eBay, all the companies who have created the web browsers we all use each day, Amazon.com, Intuit (makers of Quicken and Turbo Tax), IBM, and even a huge corporate giant like General Electric have all adopted “starfish” like qualities.
I am going to write more about The Starfish and the Spider in upcoming posts and I would strongly encourage anyone reading this to check out the book. Creating “leaderless organizations” is not a term I would use, so what about creating “leader-full organizations”? I am not taking credit for that term (I heard it somewhere before), but imagine organizations where everyone plays a role and everyone has the ability to lead. What does that look like? What could be achieved? It worked with Hall Council and I think if you tried, you could find ways to make it work in your world too!
This person, who became my mentor, bounced into my small cramped office one day and said, “I think the Hall Council experience could be better. You are I are going to change it and make it better”. For those of you who do not have a Residence Life background, Hall Council is an involvement opportunity in every residence hall where students represent their peers by reviewing policies and planning programs.
Hall Council is a sort of gateway leadership experience. The goal is to provide students with enough skills and experiences that will hopefully inspire additional involvement in other leadership opportunities. It’s a way to engage students in the fabric of involvement at the beginning of their college experience.
During my time in college, the Hall Council experience mirrored the structure of a typical hierarchical structure. There was a President, a Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, and so on. As I am sure you can imagine, each position had a description of responsibilities that students were elected to perform. My memory of Hall Council from my younger days as a college student was that if you weren’t on the executive board, there wasn’t much of an opportunity to get involved in the process of determining what happens. Because of this, most people in the hall didn’t pay attention.
I think that difficulty in getting involved in the process is what my mentor and supervisor was talking about when she said we could make Hall Council “better”. We started our work that would result in the creation of a leadership system that tipped the hierarchical model on its head. We created a board type structure that involved a series of committees that were predicated on the idea of chairs getting other students involved. Each committee had a distinct function, but worked collaborately to solicit ideas, plan activities, and most importantly engage peers in the process of decision making and community involvement.
There is not one single experience that has done more to shape the leadership development philosophy that has guided my interactions with students over the course of my career. The only experience that may have topped the creation of this leadership system was the opportunity that was given to me by another mentor to fill in for a graduate student staff member as the advisor to this newly created system. I am forever grateful to Robin and Sandi for the integral role they played in my development as a leadership educator by providing me with opportunities few receive.
Turning the Hall Council model on its head to create the Leadership Involvement Team wasn’t easy. As I have progressed through my career attempting to replicate the spirit of an equalitarian model, I have certainly witnessed the many challenges that come with the implementation of this type of organization. There is comfort in knowing someone is in charge providing direction to others who are in subordinate roles. We have become reliant on this model as our dominant example of leadership structure.
I think it’s fair to say the outputs of a group organized without hierarchy are different from that of a more traditional model, but I think the outcomes of what students learn have the potential to be better. To use student involvement in the residence halls as an example, the students I worked with didn’t always have the best attended campus wide events, but experienced smaller victories like increased student participation in discussions. These smaller victories weren’t always the most visible or recognized accomplishments, but they made a difference in the experience students involved gained.
There are other examples of organizations looking to turn the hierarchical model on its head. By now, you may have forgotten the title of this post is “The Starfish, The Spider, and Hall Council”. I am sure you get the Hall Council part, but what does a starfish or a spider have to do with any of this? A couple of years ago I discovered a book that showed me that I wasn’t the only one who has dabbled in non-hierarchical structures.
Entrepreneurs Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom chronicled many examples of organizations in the corporate and non-profit world that are tapping into the power of what the authors call “leaderless organizational structures”. The premise of their book is simple…There are starfish organizations and spider organizations. If someone were to cut off the leg of a starfish, what would happen? A new leg would regenerate and the starfish continues to operate through the loss and the re-growth. If someone were to cut off the head of a spider, what would happen? That’s right…the spider would die.
I am sure if you have hung on to reading this you get the metaphor. The “starfish” organizations have several limbs that are equally important to its life. If one piece becomes unavailable, the others have the opportunity to keep it going. Power is distributed and teamwork is essential to operational success.
In constrast, the “spider” organizations have centralized power at the head. If that area is unavailable or disconnected, the rest of the operation does not have the distribution of power necessary to keep going. Chaos and confusion take over as the organization begins on a descending path toward destruction.
One may think “corporate America” or well established non-profits would not be willing to take the risk of establishing more “starfish” like qualities. If you are one of those people, you will be surprised by the organizations Brafman and Beckstrom highlight in their book. Organizations like Skype, Craigslist, Wikipedia, eBay, all the companies who have created the web browsers we all use each day, Amazon.com, Intuit (makers of Quicken and Turbo Tax), IBM, and even a huge corporate giant like General Electric have all adopted “starfish” like qualities.
I am going to write more about The Starfish and the Spider in upcoming posts and I would strongly encourage anyone reading this to check out the book. Creating “leaderless organizations” is not a term I would use, so what about creating “leader-full organizations”? I am not taking credit for that term (I heard it somewhere before), but imagine organizations where everyone plays a role and everyone has the ability to lead. What does that look like? What could be achieved? It worked with Hall Council and I think if you tried, you could find ways to make it work in your world too!
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