Greek Life Leaders: Working the Final Business from MikePaines's blog

Many may only see collegiate Greek life as a social group who hides their partying behind community service hours and charitable donations regarding τελευταια νεα. However, I want to challenge that stereotype by focusing on the professional development and self-improvement opportunity that's presented to Greek life members - especially people who hold leadership positions. Currently, I serve my one-hundred member sorority as chapter president and assist other officers to maintain a well-balanced, structured, and involved organization.

Fraternities and sororities must operate as a small business first, and a socialite second in order to be successful. I would like to indicate some key concepts that report the relation between Greek organizations and businesses.

Greek organizations: 

• Divide officers into teams to focus on specific regions of the chapter 

• Must operate on a strict budget, fueled solely from member's dues 

• Must market themselves well to be able to continue to recruit new members 

• Have mission statements and values to keep their members to and gear their brand 

• Must follow rules from, and report to, their national headquarters 

• Have insurance to cover their organization and its members, in addition to many policies and procedures in place for holding events

They're just a few points that report how Greek organizations are ran as the ultimate business, combining friendship with professionalism and offering members a good opportunity for personal development.

As president, I see all sides of owning a Greek organization and must help every officer no real matter what team her position is really a part of. My days are filled with constantly making decisions and weighing the consequences. I have learned to make fair decisions that benefit the higher good, while remaining unbiased in the process. I also reply to everyone's questions and concerns while problem solving when an unplanned event takes place. For example, we'd a tiny crisis with flyers which were made to market an event we were having. Once they came in, we noticed the contact email on the flyers was spelled wrong. After some deliberation, we chose to use the flyers we had and made a fresh email address with the typo included.

A massive section of managing a successful organization works well and professional communication. Our main forum of communication between officers and the advisory board is emailing. I have discovered how exactly to properly send and respond to emails in a specialist manner. My communication skills have improved substantially since being fully a leader of my chapter. I have discovered to communicate concisely and format information in the most truly effective way. I have discovered providing information in bullet lists is the greatest way to get members to learn messages fully. All of our officers must hold team meetings and get reports of progress in the various areas on their team. Officers are accountable for organizing their particular meetings and taking minutes to record that which was discussed. Greek organizations teach members to effectively and professionally communicate through emailing, holding meetings, and working with others.

One of the very valuable traits that I am still learning through my presidency, is how to get more comfortable with hard conversations. I work closely with our Director of Standards and Ethics to make sure our members are holding themselves to the high ideals and values. If someone is falling behind, it is our job to possess conversations together about why this really is happening and what we can do to ensure it generally does not happen again. These tough conversations become even tougher when remembering that the members of our chapter will also be our friends and sisters. As a leader of a Greek organization, I'm learning to have these hard conversations while staying in control of myself and the conversation.

Greek life has much more to supply than the social facet of the business, and can truly prepare adults to join the professional world. Through developing members personally, and developing officers professionally, Greek organizations could possibly offer life-changing collegiate experiences that can't be found elsewhere.