Carson Lohmann

Brengarth
BA 3500
Feb 5, 2020

While I do not currently hold any leadership roles, I served as a Blood Liaison for my
fraternity, Theta Chi, this past spring semester. During Greek Week, I inspired Theta Chi
brothers and members of Zeta Tau Alpha to volunteer their time and save lives. During this
leadership role, I employed both servant leadership and also inspiration leadership.

During my time spent as the Blood Liaison, it was not easy getting people to go out of
their way to volunteer their time and their blood. Not only did I need to convince twenty
people to volunteer two hours of their time with the red cross for the blood drive, I had to get
ninety percent of my chapter to go and donate blood. I tried for a few days to get men from my
chapter to volunteer to work the blood drive, but I was having a tough time in the beginning. I
asked my friend if he had any advice for me on how to get people to do it and he said to me
“how are you going to get people to work the blood drive when you aren’t even willing to?” He
brought up a very good point, so I decided to serve the community and work two of the
volunteer shifts which helped convince a lot of my brothers to join me in volunteering to help
save lives at the blood drive. I believe this shows servant leadership because I was willing to
lead by working with my fraternity brother instead of just people the one barking orders at
them.

Getting people to volunteer was the easy part, the hard part was getting people to
actually go give their blood. I decided the first thing I would do is stand up in front of our
chapter and talk to them about the blood drive and how many lives they can save by taking
twenty minutes to go give blood. This worked at first, but a lot of spots still weren’t filled. I
decided to reach out to everyone that didn’t sign up and asked them why. A lot had valid
excuses that we tried to work around but there was one special case. One of the guys I reached
out to have no excuse but wouldn’t sign up because he was afraid of needles. I didn’t have
many spots left to fill at this point, so I decided to meet with this kid and talk to him about it. I
sat down and listened to him and he made a solid argument, but I eventually convinced him by
telling him all the good it does by him giving blood. I also told him I’ll go donate at the same
time as him, so he would be less afraid to do it. I helped save an extra three lives that day by
inspiring him and getting him to go donate his blood.

After I took the leadership style quiz I got Provider as my leadership style. This style is
described as someone who leads from the front but takes care of the people around you. This
shows when I decided to volunteer with everyone else, and when I convinced my friend to give
blood and went with him. I plan to expand my leadership skills by taking advantage of PDP
opportunities whenever I can. Some goals I want to accomplish before I graduate is to have my
GPA be above a 3.3 and have a job lined up before I graduate.