Quality water, leadership focus of recent 360 meeting

story and photos by Linda Kaufenberg

Seeking quality water and quality leadership was the focus of Thursday’s (Jan. 7) 360 Leadership Series held at Hardscrabble Country Club in Fort Smith.

A group of graduate business alumni from John Brown University-Fort Smith organized the 360 Leadership Series. The mission of the organization is to provide development and networking opportunities for professionals in the Fort Smith region.

Dr. Delia Haak, executive director of the Illinois River Watershed Partnership since May 2007, reminded the audience that those with leadership titles do not always deliver leadership. Haak serves on the Governor’s Taskforce for Water Source Protection. Prior to joining IRWP, Haak was an associate professor of business at Siloam Springs-based John Brown University. She designed the Master of Science in Leadership and Ethics (MSLE) and an MBA with an emphasis in leadership and ethics that began at JBU in the fall of 1999. Additionally her family was named Arkansas Farm Family of the Year.

She offered positive characteristics of leaders such as confidence, experience, goal oriented, motivated by purpose, foresight or vision, strong will and personal power influence.

Haak said leaders with too much power become corrupt and insensitive to their followers. They display pride, arrogance, self-aggrandizement, insensitivity, manipulation, domination and tyranny, she explained.

“What happened in 2009 was a result of unethical leadership. We all have a compass with true north, but we are always being pulled off by the magnetic north,” Haak said.

Real leadership qualities, according to Haak, are:
• Highest aim is always best interest of those led;
• Greatest satisfaction is growth and development of those led;
• Willingness to accept obligation (“I will hold myself accountable.”);
• Display caring love;
• Genuine humility and willing to listen; and
• Share power and empower others.

Haak said the four “legs of a table” that hold up leadership are Trust (most fragile), Love (most rugged), Respect (most neglected) and Understanding (takes longest).

Talking about the IRWP, she defined a watershed as an area of land that receives rainfall which drains to a river, lake or wetland. More than 20 municipalities in Arkansas and Oklahoma have come together as part of the partnership to represent organizations that don’t ordinarily work together.

Haak said objectives of IRWP are:
• Increase public awareness of the Illinois River as a water resource;
• Cooperate to identify water quality impacts, causes and sources;
• Educate the public about their contribution to these sources; and
• Work with the membership and the public to implement water quality improvement and watershed restoration projects that will reduce these identified sources.

“Let’s educate people about what we are doing right and grow more action,” Haak said of the partnership’s efforts. “I want to improve our cooperation and leave our environment better.”