A team of Wartburg College students took second place in the College Division at the Washburn University Leadership Challenge Event on March 3-4. The students also received the Emerging Leader Award, which honors the best performance of a collegiate team that has participated in the event for less than two years.

Jenna Smuszkiewicz, Andrea Salow, Aloaye Abdul Saliu, Lorna Puhl and Katelyn Eilders competed against nine other college teams under the leadership of Michael Gleason, Wartburg’s Irving R. Burling Distinguished Professor in Leadership. This year’s LCE focused on environmental issues, with teams having to find solutions to a wastewater spill at a local factory.

“The Washburn Leadership Challenge Event was amazing and surpassed all expectations that I had. Not only was it organized by hardworking and intelligent Washburn students, but it also was a great way to get some real-world leadership skills,” said Eilders.

Throughout the simulation, students participated in a live press conference, answered emails, attended to citizens’ concerns through live role-plays and researched the short- and long-term implications of an environmental crisis. At midday, participants were thrown a curveball through a live employee strike.

“This experience really pointed out to me how closely tied the economy and environment are because we had to consider the factory conditions and the farms and small businesses that sell crops or factory goods in our solutions. It took a lot of collaboration, and my team worked well to put our solutions together,” said Smuskiewicz.

The simulation comprised three rounds, which were all observed by judges and awarded points. The teams then had to defend their decisions once the simulation was over.

“Our group faced multiple tasks focused on our responsibilities as well as those that would benefit the entire group, so we honed in on communication as much as time allowed. We come from different academic and leadership backgrounds at Wartburg, so it was awesome to see each of us demonstrate our strengths and factor in how they developed our team and contributions to the final project. The Leadership Challenge Event served as a great opportunity not only to better understand our leadership skills and strengths but also how to apply and recognize them in a diverse team,” said Salow.

All five students are pursuing leadership minors at Wartburg, where they must demonstrate and reflect critically upon the Wartburg definition of leadership, “taking responsibility for our communities, and making them better through public action” and apply it to their own experiences and situations.

“The students who represented Wartburg did a great job analyzing the multi-faceted challenge they were experiencing in this scenario and then collaborating to make progress on the issue,” Gleason said. “It was impressive how they worked to leverage their own strengths and also uplift and maximize the strengths of others on their team. I am excited to learn more about how they apply what they have learned to other communities of which they are a part.”