Leadership Exchange

and perform daily leadership activities without encroaching on individual scholastic performance.

It should be noted that volunteer chapter advisors, chapter consultants, and fraternity/sorority advisors regularly mentor, counsel, and advise individual student leaders. More formal coaching would add a new, high-impact campus and national organization-supported volunteer resource to the mix and strengthen student organization leadership, service, and development.

➋ Take;a;team;approach. Team advising is implicit in this approach. Many sororities that are members of the NPC have used this approach with great success, sharing the workload across a group of trained volunteers. One volunteer advises the president, another the treasurer, another the new member chair, and so on. Additional team members can call on colleagues for assistance or backup; the chapter is no longer reliant on a single advisor who may leave without warning. In addition, the range of skills and knowledge provided by the advising team will likely be greater than any single volunteer can offer.

With campus-supported, headquarters-approved individual volunteer coaches assigned to each student leader, faculty and/ or alumni volunteers may be more willing to serve as overall chapter advisors. Current volunteer chapter advisors will continue to play a key role and will undoubtedly welcome the help of a coaching staff to support their advising role.

➌;Expand;volunteer;alumni;involvement;as;coaches and;advisors.;As national fraternities and sororities seek to positively engage more alumni in the activities of their respective organizations, the opportunity to coach student leaders could be appealing to graduates seeking a more personal connection to their alma mater. With a more narrowly-defined job description, a smaller piece of the overall pie to manage, and less constraints associated with a regularly-scheduled face-to-face group meeting, more alumni may be interested in getting involved.

Youth mentoring programs across the country have grown in number and impact, and more young adults are serving as mentors through schools or national organizations like Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Today’s young college graduates and prospective alumni coaches are familiar with the model and attracted to it, in part, because they can see the direct impact of their volunteer efforts. Add readily available, virtually free technology like Skype to the mix, and new alumni coaches could envision themselves meeting weekly with student leaders without traveling to campuses.

The more focused role of a leadership coach could be appealing to alumni regardless of whether or not they were fraternity or sorority members. The fact that a coach for the fraternity/sorority treasurer is an accountant or the chapter president’s coach is a business owner or agency executive director could be more important.

➍ Reshape;the;roles;of;fraternity/sorority;advisor and;chapter;consultant.;The implementation of a coaching model requires reframing the roles of campus fraternity/sorority advisors and chapter consultants and suggests a change in curriculum for graduate professional preparation programs. Most campus fraternity/sorority advisors and chapter consultants assume the roles following positive, personal frater-

nity/sorority experiences in college. Many choose to pursue master’s level graduate education to transition to entry-level professional positions on a campus or at national fraternity or sorority headquarters.

Both current professional practice and graduate education focus on student development and seek to provide staff with knowledge of developmental theory to inform their work advising, counseling, guiding, and assisting students. The given activity or organization, in this case fraternities and sororities, serves as a vehicle for individual student development. Volunteer development, organizational development, and leadership coaching are less evident in the toolbox of emerging student affairs or fraternity/sorority life professionals.

➎ Provide;uniform;training;to;certify;coaches;and advisors.;One of the many significant challenges of this approach is a lack of consistent volunteer training for campus personnel or alumni who elect to assist chapters. Alumni and faculty members vary widely in their degree of motivation, availability, understanding of student and organizational development, knowledge of applicable policies and regulations and, essentially, methods to effectively coach student leaders and advise organizations. Training offered at regional and national meetings and online resources are helpful, but neither are proven to boost the overall effectiveness of volunteers in these roles.

The use of technology to extend training to individuals across the country is growing. “AlcoholEdu for College” and “Student Success,” among others, have demonstrated the viability of technology to not only deliver training online, but to assess learning through online testing and document the successful completion of training by a defined set of participants.

With the use of technology, a common, core curriculum can be developed to train all leadership coaches and student organization advisors. The curriculum can be further customized with organization-specific content. Though the cost is greater and the implementation more complex than using Skype for one-on-one meetings, the deployment of such technology could have a far-reaching impact.

➏ Encourage;preparation;programs;to;address;vol-unteer;development;as;a;required;professional;skill.

Current graduate preparation programs devote little attention to recruiting and training volunteers for any purpose or training volunteer coaches to provide leadership education. In fact, little attention is paid to specialized skills required to be a successful fraternity/sorority campus professional. For this reason, the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors (AFA) includes a graduate preparation program training track in each AFA Annual Meeting and coordinates a First 90 Days Program for new campus professionals.

Given recent “engaged learning” initiatives to promote integration of in-class and out-of-class learning activities and burgeoning interest in campus and community service learning, graduate program faculty are well advised to include instruction in volunteer training and coaching activities in master’s level curricula. Such training activities should be included if for no other reason than educating all campus academic and cocurricular student organization advisors on their responsibilities for risk management, an issue that impacts both academic and non-academic student organizations.