Leadership in the 21st Century

For the past six months, the 2023 Emerging Leaders Program has been exploring the idea of leadership on all scales, from an individual level all the way to a community perspective. In the August Emerging Leaders session, appropriately titled “Bringing It All Together”, we recapped many of the key points throughout the program and had the opportunity to engage in a smaller group discussion with three incredible leaders in the Dallas area who provided a unique and refreshing perspective on leadership.

To kick off the class, each participant was asked to reflect on examples of executive presence that they’ve witnessed in the past month. This segued nicely into the recap Suzanne gave over the concept of influence and how we as emerging leaders can begin to leverage six universal rules of influence. Ultimately, as Suzanne noted in our very first session in March, the most powerful way to get people to like and cooperate with you is to like them first. We also covered many key points from past sessions including our professional journey stages, what we can control in our leadership journeys, the importance of emotional intelligence, and finally, that change does not happen alone. We are called to invest in relationships and in our communities to enact real and lasting change. We ultimately concluded this recap by developing personal road maps. We were each asked to reflect on what we’ve learned, our short term and long-term goals for the future, and how we plan on getting there.

After a brief discussion with our community project groups, we moved on to our final portion of the class – leadership “speed dating”.  In lieu of our typical panel discussion, we divided the class based on our project groups and each group alternated between our guest speakers.  We were fortunate to be joined by three unique leaders in our community, Kathleen M. LaValle, President and CEO of Dallas CASA; Dan Noble, President and CEO of HKS; and Derwin Broughton, Vice President / Principal at KAI and 2023 TxA President-Elect. Each group was able to have a personal discussion with our esteemed guests delving into a number of different leadership topics, including how values shape leadership styles, the idea of work life balance, how to navigate career change, and ultimately following your passions to bring meaning and fulfillment to your life.

This was a wonderful way to wrap up the 2023 Emerging Leaders journey and we’re all looking forward to graduation in September!

Authored by Aarti Khatter, AIA