Dr. Julie Kliegl, Assistant Professor of Business Administration
My area of interest in leadership focuses on the intersection of ethics and integrity in leaders.  My dissertation is on perceptions of followers about the leadership and integrity of their supervisors.   I am passionate about the role of ethics in leadership and wrestle every day with the news of more companies taking actions that are ethically inappropriate.  This paradox of great leaders and poor decisions keeps me challenged every day.

My research focuses on leadership in organizations, primarily for-profit businesses although I also have a background in healthcare and have conducted research in for-profit and not-for-profit healthcare organizations. 

I am interested emerging leadership development programs in organizations as well as how those programs may apply in the college setting.  Several of the large accounting firms are starting to use sustainable global service learning in their leadership development programs and I am following how this is being implemented and received.  I am also interested in how leaders create successful large scale change in organizations.  I believe leaders take responsibility for their organizations and get others motivated to act with them to make their organizations more successful.  It is a more narrow view than Wartburg’s definition as my focus is not on the community as a whole but the part of the community that business leaders most impact – their organizations.

Dr. Kevin Fiene, Associate Professor of Education
My intent/goal with my role in the leadership education program is to help students unlock their gifts as leaders as well as their potential.  This is done by pointing students to various leadership literature, then facilitating reflection on their parts on what it means to them and how it plays out in their world.  Frankly, most of my teaching is predicated on a very simple question, "So what?"  For instance, it's great to understand and know various theories but my question is always what will you do with it?  What ties all this together is always linking back to both the college mission and definition of leadership.  Because of these two links, obviously students interact with servant leadership as well as civic engagement.  However, it's up to the students to construct meaning to their own lives.  Additionally, students reflect on their identified strengths (from Strengths finder) and style (MBTI).  This is done intentionally in ID 315 as an extension of what is introduced in LS 115.  To me, the most important thing we do in the upper level of the education leadership program is help students understand what leadership is and can be in their own lives.

Michael Gleason, Pathways Associate for Vocation & Mentoring
Most of my experience has been in leadership development in non-profit organizations and investigating how organizations (Camp Adventure in particular) can create organizational cultures that empower individuals to understand their leadership potential.  For my thesis, “Mentoring and its impact on leadership development in Camp Adventure Child and Youth Services” I used the framework of Peter Senge’s Learning Organization that is discussed in his work “The Fifth Discipline.”  I sought to understand how organizations both support and challenge leaders. In LS 315, we do a broad overview of theories such as Greenleaf, Peter Lencioni (group dysfunctions), and utilizes Kouzes and Posner’s The Student Leadership Challenge.  Because of the nature of the program, civic engagement and service learning are major discussion topics. 

Dr. Dan Kittle, Director, Center for Community Engagement
I believe that leadership should be informed and intentionally integrated with personal identity development and in response to social challenges and opportunities.  How do we know what we know?  Why do we believe what we believe?  How have we come to understand leadership?  These are questions we must address first in order to practice leadership holistically and with integrity. 

Then, through analyzing models, critical reading, and personal reflections we can examine leadership theories.  How have others thought about leadership?  What are the best practices of leadership?  Informed by these leadership theories and practices, I believe we must ask our students to explore, identify, and critically examine the challenges and opportunities that they find in today’s communities.  In other words, how can students understand and impact aspects of our society that are in need of transformation?  And, how can they do this in a way that is informed by their personal identity development and vocational discernment?  This is where a service-learning pedagogy challenges and stretches students to engage and reflect on these issues in communities that are often new to them. 

Overall, the study of leadership is dynamic because it is rooted in self and informed by multiple disciplines.  Like the mission of Wartburg, it is in an invitation for students to reflect on the relationship between education, socialization, liberation, and personal development. 

Bill Soesbe, School Partnerships Coordinator and Director of the Office of Student Field Experiences

“Taking responsibility for our communities, and making them better through public action” is the definition of leadership within the Leadership Institute and although I have always lived my life with this emphasis it was not until I came to Wartburg that I really understood what it truly meant.  I believe that all can be leaders and each one of us has something to offer our communities.  It is one of our responsibilities as citizens. 

We should not lead in isolation and through collaboration great things happen.  I have had numerous opportunities to be a part of great experiences which have made differences in my life and within my communities.  My experiences as a coach, teacher, and administer have reinforced the idea that there is not a prescribed program or one way to become leader or a better leader; instead it is an individual journey.

I primarily work with ID 315 classes as part of the Community Builders programs.  My role at the college and within the Leadership Institute is to aid students in their personal journey of identifying strengths and maximizing potential while at the same time making a positive difference in the lives of those around them.  I help students discover themselves and along the way challenge them to leave their comfort zone and take risks.  This is an on-going rewarding journey of self discovery, claiming your calling, and making the world a better place.

Dr. Fred Waldstein, Irving R. Burling Chair in Leadership & Professor of Political Science
The authenticity and utility of leadership and leadership education depend upon their congruence with the mission of the group, organization or institution in which they are practiced.  At Wartburg that means congruence with the mission statement, “challenging and nurturing students for lives of leadership and service as a spirited expression of their faith and learning.”  This has led to a definition of leadership that compliments the mission of the college and to curricular and co-curricular programs which identify components of leadership that any Wartburg College graduate, regardless of discipline, can find useful in their professional and vocational lives.  The working definition of leadership used by the Institute for Leadership Education is, “Taking responsibility for our communities, and making them better through public action.”  Implicit in this civic engagement approach to leadership is the belief that all Wartburg students have the potential to contribute positively to their communities, and it is the responsibility of the College to give them the encouragement, tools, and opportunities to do so.  The primary pedagogical orientations I use are service-learning, peer learning, and case-in-point learning as means to develop the skills of critical inquiry fundamental to reflective leadership which compliments the Wartburg mission.

Dr. Bill Withers, Grant L. Price Department Chair & Associate Professor of Communication Arts
I approach leadership studies from the perspective that those who wish to not only understand and learn, but also evolve into more effective leaders, must understand 'the journey.'  We talk about leader-lives as a series of processing events, over time, and how we respond and grow from those.  One will never fully understand or grow through those experiences unless the individual understands what I call their "Leader DNA," how they're "wired" and what their strengths are.  So, I ask each student to begin by identifying (rigorous assessment) and reflecting on their strengths and personality traits; we then study leadership models and theories, then explore how their strengths and traits can be maximized.  Servant Leadership is a theory-base we tend to "orbit" quite a bit, as it articulates best how effective leaders look after the needs of others so that they reach their full potential. A strength of this way of looking at leadership is that it forces us away from self-serving, domineering leadership models, and makes young, emerging leaders think harder about how to respect, value, and motivate others as part of 'their journey.