Leadership
01
Setting a new vision
As a collaborative effort, we made this vision statement at one of our last editor meetings before summer break. I didn't realize how important setting a vision was until I found myself constantly going back to it as I prepared for the year ahead of me. This served as a reminder of why the work we do on the publication is so important and what the collective vision for the year looked like. It can be easy to lose sight of the overarching purpose sometimes, but as a leader, it's essential to keep yourself and others accountable to it.
02
Agendas
One of the main parts of being EIC is leading the day-to-day down to the finest details. The class agendas are vital to ensuring that things run smoothly. We start each period by going through reminders and the upcoming deadlines, and from there we tackle whatever my Co-EIC and I set for the day. When making agenda, we do our best to balance work and play time to keep staffers motivated and excited to come to class: To us, this means having allotted work time each day, adding a mini-lesson or an exemplar story once a week, and a heated current events battle and heartwarming staff shoutouts each Friday. As we've gotten better with planning, we've also learned to be flexible and change agenda based on the vibe we pick up in class that day. Besides the class agenda, we are also responsible for the all-staff meeting agenda, editor meeting agenda, and EIC/ME agenda.
03
Presentations
Making presentations has become second nature to me. I think part of being a good leader is knowing how to effectively communicate and present information to people. Presentations like the one linked aim to condense information in a more digestible way and simultaneously leave people with something– in this case, goals for issue 2. I'd say the bulk of our presentations was done in August & September as we were getting staffers situated with the publication.
04
Training
One of the most intrinsic parts of being an editor-in-chief is empowering your editors and giving them the tools they need to succeed. The phrase "it takes a village" couldn't ring more true in a student publication. When making presentations like this, the questions that I always aim to answer are "What would I have liked to know as a first-year editor? What did I need to hear last year?" These trainings range on topics such as feedback, having difficult conversations, and forming familial bonds within sections/teams. Along with that, I make sure that training is never just an isolated powerpoint, but always has an accompanying activity or workshop to go along with it so editors can get the most out of it.
Issue 1
I took on much more of a hands-on approach with this issue since it was the first one and is always expected to be a bit of a learning curve. This meant guiding the visuals a bit more by helping with inspiration and just overall, working much closer with staffers and editors to make sure their first issue went smoothly. There were definetly some stressful times with the production of this issue, but overall, we were happy with the final product.
Issue 2
With this issue, I was able to apply a lot of the lessons I learned from Issue 1. I especially pushed for more though out brainstorming and planning to avoid some of the issues we ran into last time. Along with that, we also tried alternative ways of getting people to meet their deadlines: the physical board with checkmarks. While that didn't fully manifest itself the way we wanted to do, I would say this issue went better than last and grew from our mistakes from last time.
