Leadership Reflection - Part 5

Part 5 – Leadership Challenges


In his 2017 interview with Mosaic, Ten Thousand Villages’ CEO Carl Lundblad mentioned one of the Villages’ challenges is being far-stretched in the Villages’ efforts to help others to “discover their own abilities and potential by achieving something they might not have thought possible (Mosaic, 2017)”, especially in how to thrive through empowerment-focused model to bring retails business with the mission together to “help families to thrive the communities to flourish around the world (Lundblad, 2017) ”

Far-stretched, which will biologically cause muscle pain and psychologically cause low confident in achieving probability, possible is due to the aloofness caused by a remote connection with the targeted recipients of the efforts that Ten Thousand Villages are trying. As Lindblad mentioned, how to bring retails business to serve the Villages’ mission is the challenge the Villages currently facing in its efforts to reach to its artisan communities.

The Challenge

The empowerment defines the measures to increase self-determination in people and in community in order to let them represent their own interests as a responsible and self-determined own authority, Julian Rappaport (1981) introduced empowerment model in social work and social psychiatry as a process to form a practical approach of resource-oriented intervention (Wikipedia, 2018). Solomon (2013) emphasized it is important, in community empowerment model, to raise the self-awareness, to translate knowingness into vision but be aware of limitations to shrift from pathology to envision, and to clarify growth intention to shift from static to organic growth.

To Ten Thousand Villages, the challenges in the empowerment process are how to translate its artisan communities crafting ability into a vision of marketable crafting arts, and transform each artisan’s individual development into a community growth. The mission for the Villages would be how to use this empowerment model to shift the Villages’ current artisan-discovery static pathology of maintaining into a dynamic growth.

The Leadership

Leadership is the ability to effectively set tasks and to achieve objectives. In my passion to share the Villages’ devotion, in sharing the Villages’ mission to create opportunities for artisans to make incomes through trading, I can help to use empowerment model to shift the Villages’ current artisan-discovery static pathology into a dynamic growth. I set the leadership tasks and objectives as:

Step I: To bring-in retails:

As CEO Lundblad mentioned, how to bring retails into this empowerment-focused movement is the key to the Villages’ success.

I recommend the Villages to introduce the concept of themed beauty to the artisan community to promote specialty artisan groups that favor a particular expression or expressions about a particular beauty.

I recommend the Villages to consider event-organizers, for organizations or for privates, as special themed retails.

Step II: To build the artisan community with the Villages presence:

I recommend the Villages to promote partner-network in artisan community to build their work partnership bridged by the Village.

Step III: To transform the crafting into marketable crafting arts.

            I recommend the Villages to promote theme design crafting, customer-order design crafting, or customer-order functional design crafting, etc.

Step IV: To transform each artisan’s individual growth into a community growth.

            I recommend the Village to promote leader artisans to build the Village crafting network to edge-out the artisan community.

The Conclusion

            As the Villages CEO Lundblad mentioned, the servant leadership and empowerment-focused leading process model are what can help Ten Thousand Villages to discover talents and to help others to succeed.

References

Carl Lundblad (2017). Letter to the Ten Thousand Villages community of customers. Retrieved from http://www.tenthousandvillages.com/mosaic/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/TenThousandVillages_CEO-letter_06-16-2017.jpg

Mosaic (2017) A Conversation with our CEO. Mosaic. Retrieved from https://www.tenthousandvillages.com/mosaic/ceo-ten-thousand-villages/

BRIAN ARTHUR SOLOMON (2013) THE EMPOWERMENT MODEL. U-Yah-Tal   Empowerment. Retrieved from http://uyahtal-empowerment.com/the-empowerment-model/

Wikipedia (2018) Empowerment. Retrieved from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empowerment