Morale - Think Small

The answer to Greek morale and unity lies in supporting small events
from our Friends at The Apathy Myth: a Blog for America's College Student Leaders

If you find your fraternity and sorority community continually struggling with member morale, junior and senior attrition, and a lack of Greek unity, there is something you can do. But, it's going to require a major change in how your community does business.

Many fraternity and sorority chapters, and their council communities, remain focused on doing huge events targeted to all of their members – large scale service events, big step shows, "sing" competitions, Greek Weeks. While these appeal to many (and in many cases can be a lot of fun), they don't appeal to all members, particularly for upperclassmen who have already done them more than once.

These people who don't get all jazzed up by a third year of "Greek Sing" wander away from your Greek community in search of something that fits them.

Here's what I suggest you do. This year, take a portion of your budget and invite small interest groups to apply for funding for special interest activities that will be open to all fraternity and sorority members. Maybe some Greeks will be interested in planning a small live music coffeehouse event for those members who love acoustic music. Perhaps a group will want to do an interfraternal rock-climbing trip for the outdoor enthusiasts. Whatever your members get excited about, invite them to create an avenue within your Greek community – everything from ice carving to environmentalism to book clubs.

But wait... all of this is available on our campus through other organizations. Why should we fund these niche interests within our Greek community? Because fraternity and sorority members who find these special connections within your community will STAY in your community and increase their commitment to it.

I recently came across an example of how enabling smaller, niche interests can have a powerful impact on a Greek community.

Many fraternity and sorority members at Gannon University in Northwest Pennsylvania desired a stronger connection with other Greeks who shared a strong commitment to their Christian faith. Some of these leaders recently started "LETtERS," a group open to all fraternity and sorority members seeking Christian fellowship.

It's not a Bible study, said Jackie Oesmann, a member of Alpha Sigma Tau and the Panhellenic Vice President of Public Relations. It's more of a discussion group. Recently, the members watched a clip from the movie "Elf" and used it as a discussion starter about finding your place in a group where you sometimes don't feel like you belong. It usually winds back to some relevant scripture readings. Sometimes, they even sing. Mostly, it's about giving fraternity and sorority members a safe place to share and enjoy their Christian interests.

"I think that overall, even though we've only had a few meetings, the group is a great new thing for the community and has a lot of potential," Jackie said. "Our councils ahve been working hard to promote Greek unity this year, and having people come together in a group like this definitely helps that."

Her campus offers six other faith-sharing groups, but the Greeks weren't participating, she said. "The solution was to create our own group where we could discuss things relating specifically to issues we deal with as Greeks."

Six other faith-based groups in their small campus community should have been enough, you might think. But, when an opportunity was created within their own Greek community, these fraternity and sorority members at Gannon became energized.

Imagine a dozen or so special interest "clubs" existing within your Greek community. Imagine four dozen. Imagine Greeks from all different sorts of chapters building relationships across chapter boundaries around shared interests. Imagine your members placing a higher value on their memberships because their personal needs are being met in a more meaningful way.

Imagine all the good that could come from that.

Great Leadership Involves Delegation

Be smart when delegating tasks
from our friends at The Apathy Myth: a Blog for America's College Student Leaders
By T.J. Sullivan
CEO, CAMPUSPEAK Inc.



You're trying to be a proactive leader, and you delegate an important task. You ask one of your fellow officers to go to the Student Activities Office before Friday and fill out an important form to register your annual fundraising event. Without this form, you cannot reserve the one space on campus that will work for the event. This officer has done these forms a couple of times before, so you don't consider this a high risk delegation.

Fast forward to next Tuesday. You find out that not only did the officer fail to get the form in by Friday, he didn't fill the form out properly, didn't get a required signature, and now the space you desperately needed for the event has been snatched up by another group on campus.

Damn it. Another case of delegation gone wrong. If you had just done it yourself, everything would have been fine. As you shift into crisis mode, you swear that you're never going to delegate an important task to him or anyone else for the rest of your term.

As much as your advisor and guys like me urge you to delegate tasks, the truth is that sometimes it goes well, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you delegate (or "hand over") something complex, and the person does an amazing job. Sometimes you delegate something seemingly minor, and it blows up in your face. It all contributes to that most destructive syndrome of student leadership: the "it's easier if I do it myself" syndrome. We all know that just leads to burnout, falling grades, failed relationships, and stress.

Here are a few ideas that might (and I stress, might) lower your risk of delegation failure.

• Follow up a day or two later with the person, thank them for taking on the task, and ask him or her if they have any questions about the task. Use phrases like, "It's so great to have people like you I can count on."

• Only delegate to people who ask for something to do. Handing that form to a young, eager leader instead of your overworked and easily-distracted secretary might have yielded better results. Before you delegate, ask yourself, "Does this person stand to gain anything from doing this well?" If not, don't give the task to him or her.

• Ask for a confirmation, perhaps by text message, when the deadline is met. If you had asked your fellow officer to text you when the form was turned in Friday, and then you didn't receive one, you could have made a quick call to the Student Activities Office near the end of the day and scrambled, if necessary.

• Do the task with the person the first time. Don't assume that this member or fellow officer knows how to do the task. It might seem simple to you, but maybe it's intimidating to her. It's often best to do the task one time together, then trust the person to do it on her own the next time.

• Make sure the person understands why the task is important. If you had told the officer, "If we don't get this form correct and in by Friday, we might lose the ability to reserve the quad lawn, and someone else will probably grab it for that Saturday," the officer might have felt the urgency a bit more keenly. Let the person know that this is important, and she is more likely to treat it as important.

• Praise the person when he does the job right. It seems silly to celebrate someone for turning in a form, but if you want him to keep doing the job right, you need to give him some positive feedback. A public thank you at your next meeting wouldn't hurt.

• Reward work well done with more work. When someone has shown initiative and an ability to responsibly perform tasks, give that person increasingly important work to do. Let the person build on his or her success with increasing responsibility. People love it when they know you trust and depend on them. If you can build this over time, then you'll have several people that you can trust to do delegated tasks correctly and efficiently.

• Be cool if it doesn't go perfectly. If you had to run in on Friday afternoon and fix something on the form, don't overreact and chastise the person. Use it as a teachable moment and spend a little time with the other person so that the mistake can be avoided in the future. If you act like the world has ended because someone made a mistake, you're not being a good, nurturing leader. People make mistakes, and you'd be smart to worry less about punishing people than helping build their knowledge and abilities.

Delegation is an imperfect science, but you are more likely to be a happy leader if you do it thoughtfully. If you're doing everything yourself, you are not doing your job as a student leader correctly.

SigEp astronaut fixing Hubbel telescope

Andrew Fuestel, a SigEp from Purdue, is on the current space shuttle mission to do repair and upgrades on the Hubble telescope. This information is from his Official NASA bio:

PERSONAL DATA: Raised and educated in Lake Orion, Michigan. Married to the former Indira Devi Bhatnagar of Ontario. Drew enjoys auto restoration, guitar, and water and snow skiing. His parents both live in Michigan, and Indira’s parents reside in Ontario.

EDUCATION: Graduated from Lake Orion High School, Michigan. Associate Science degree, Oakland Community College, Michigan. B.S. in Solid Earth Sciences, Purdue University. M.S. in Geophysics, Purdue University. Ph.D. in Geological Sciences specializing in Seismology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 1995.

ORGANIZATIONS: Society of Exploration Geophysicists, American Geophysical Union, Sigma Phi Epsilon, Indiana Alpha Chapter, Purdue University, USA Water Skiing Association, BMW Car Club of America.

..and yes, he was one of the crew who walked in space to make the repairs. (A SigEp first, I believe!)

NASA astronaut bio: Andrew J. Feustel | LOCAL NEWS | KHOU.com | News for Houston, Texas

Forbes Article Analyzes Billionaires

Billionaire Clusters

by Duncan Greenberg

provided by

Want to become a billionaire? Up your chances by dropping out of college, working at Goldman Sachs or joining Skull & Bones.

Are billionaires born or made? What are the common attributes among the uber-wealthy? Are there any true secrets of the self-made?

We get these questions a lot, and decided it was time to go beyond the broad answers of smarts, ambition and luck by sorting through our database of wealthy individuals in search of bona fide trends. We analyzed everything from the billionaires' parents' professions to where they went to school, their track records in the early stages of their careers and other experiences that may have put them on the path to extreme wealth.

Our admittedly unscientific study of the 657 self-made billionaires we counted in February for our list of the World's Billionaires yielded some interesting results.

First, a significant percentage of billionaires had parents with a high aptitude for math. The ability to crunch numbers is crucial to becoming a billionaire, and mathematical prowess is hereditary. Some of the most common professions among the parents of American billionaires (for whom we could find the information) were engineer, accountant and small-business owner.

Consistent with the rest of the population, more American billionaires were born in the fall than in any other season. However, relatively few billionaires were born in December, traditionally the month with the eighth highest birth rate. This anomaly holds true among billionaires in the U.S. and abroad.

More than 20% of the 292 of the self-made American billionaires on the most recent list of the World's Billionaires have either never started or never completed college. This is especially true of those destined for careers as technology entrepreneurs: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, and Theodore Waitt.

Billionaires who derive their fortunes from finance make up one of the most highly educated sub-groups: More than 55% of them have graduate degrees. Nearly 90% of those with M.B.A.s obtained their master's degree from one of three Ivy League schools: Harvard, Columbia or U. Penn's Wharton School of Business.

Goldman Sachs has attracted a large share of hungry minds that went on to garner 10-figure fortunes. At least 11 current and recent billionaire financiers worked at Goldman early in their careers, including Edward Lampert, Daniel Och, Tom Steyer and Richard Perry.

Several billionaires suffered a bitter professional setback early in their careers that heightened their fear of failure. Pharmaceutical tycoon R.J. Kirk's first venture was a flop--an experience he regrets but appreciates. "Failure early on is a necessary condition for success, though not a sufficient one," he told Forbes in 2007.

According to a statement read by Phil Falcone during a congressional hearing in November, his botched buyout of a company in Newark in the early 1990s taught him "several valuable lessons that have had a profound impact upon my success as a hedge fund manager."

Several current and former billionaires rounded out their Yale careers as members of Skull and Bones, the secret society portrayed with enigmatic relish by Hollywood in movies like The Skulls and W. Among those who were inducted: investor Edward Lampert, Blackstone co-founder Steven Schwarzman, and FedEx founder Frederick Smith.

Parents Had Math-Related Careers

The ability to crunch numbers is normally a key to becoming a billionaire. Often, mathematical prowess is hereditary. Some of the most common professions among the parents of American billionaires for whom we could find that information were engineer, accountant and small-business owner.

September Birthdays

Of the 380 self-made American tycoons who have appeared on the Forbes list of the World's Billionaires in the past three years, 42 were born in September--more than in any other month. Maybe that's because September is the month the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans is published.

Tech Titans Who Dropped Out of College

Forget everything your guidance counselor told you: You don't have to go to college to be successful. More than 20% of the self-made American moguls on the most recent list of the World's Billionaires never finished college. Many of them made their fortunes in tech. Among them: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, (Oracle) and Theodore Waitt (Gateway).

Skull and Bones

Several current and former billionaires rounded out their Yale careers as members of Skull and Bones, the secret society portrayed with enigmatic relish by Hollywood in movies like The Skulls and W. Among those who were inducted: investor Edward Lampert, Blackstone co-founder Steven Schwarzman and FedEx founder Frederick Smith.

Goldman Sachs

A stint at investment bank Goldman Sachs is a prime credential for becoming a finance billionaire. Of the 68 self-made American billionaires that derive their fortunes from finance, at least eight cut their teeth in Goldman's investment banking, trading, or asset management divisions. The company's crown jewel: its "risk arbitrage" unit, which launched the careers of billionaires Edward Lampert and Daniel Och, as well as former billionaires Tom Steyer and Richard Perry.

Click here for the full list of billionaire clusters.

Copyrighted, Forbes.com. All rights reserved

Are Your Officers Doing All that They Can Do?

Give under-utlized officers something to do!
fromj our friends at THE APATHY MYTH: A Blog for America's Student Leaders

Regardless of what student organization you are in, there are probably officer positions that don't have a lot to do. Some, like president, have so much to do they can't keep up. Some others seem to have no specific role and they spend time twiddling their thumbs. This is a problem.

It's hard to stay motivated when you have very little important to do. And, it's hard for the overworked officers to stay motivated when their counterparts aren't carrying the same amount of weight.

And remember the most important rule of student leadership motivation: PEOPLE SUPPORT WHAT THEY CREATE. If your officers are constantly feeling like they are helping to create a successful organization, they will not be motivated.

Here are a few suggestions for energizing those under-utilized officers.

1. Don't be hemmed in by the job descriptions in your bylaws or Constitution. Just because your bylaws say that the Secretary's only job is to keep minutes at the meeting does not mean that he or she can't do other things. Put your Secretary in charge of a long-lingering problem and put some deadlines and expectations on him or her. So what if your Historian is only supposed to take pictures at events. Put him in charge of upgrading your risk management. Maybe even ask these officers if there is a significant organizational problem that they would like to tackle this year? As president, you should not feel constricted by your bylaws with regard to offering opportunities. In fact, your executive board will run better when everyone on it feels like he/she is making an important contribution.

2. As a fall-back, constitutional revision is always a great way to keep someone busy. Not to say it isn't important, but it is time consuming and can be tedious. Most busy officers don't have time to sit down and do it. It's a great thing to delegate and the discussion it produces in your organization will fire a lot of people up.

3. Assign under-utilized officers to help the overworked officers. If your Parliamentarian doesn't have a lot on her plate, then make her 2nd in command to the officer in charge of Homecoming. Have them work as a team. If your officer in charge of Homecoming protests, tell him that you don't want him burning out or feeling overwhelmed, so you've asked another officer to back him up. This is also a great defensive move against having one person in your organization totally responsible for a big thing, then flaking.

4. Put one of your officers in charge of your executive committee goals (this assumes that your exec actually has a set of goals for the year). Each week at your exec meeting, this officer is in charge of spending some time reviewing pertinent goals and helping the exec committee, as a whole, to make progress on the goals. Many of you have goals, but no one is staying on top of them after they are set. Assigning an under-utilized officer to manage their progress is a great, meaningful leadership opportunity. You can even say that you are putting this officer in charge of the organization's "strategic plan." That sounds very important.

5. Put an under-utilized officer in charge of "External Relations." This person is now in charge of finding co-sponsors for events, creating networking (social) opportunities with the student officers of allied organizations on campus, etc. This might not be necessary for a student government, but for special interest student organizations, it can make a big difference in terms of campus image and member recruitment.

You can really tell a lot about what kind of officer someone will be by how enthusiastically they seize or avoid these requests. Someone who seizes the opportunity to be the "strategic plan manager" might end up being a good future president. The officer who does nothing with a delegated set of responsibilities is probably at the peak of his or her ascension in the organization.

Be aware that giving under-utilized officers meaningful sets of responsibilities is an exercise in delegation and relinquishment of control. If this is a problem for you, then it's something to work on. You should trust your organization and your fellow officers enough to spread the important and critical work around.