Mark Bevan - MA in Leadership (MAL)
I am the director of curriculum and instruction for the Medicine Hat School District.
As a street kid in England, I’d been out of school for about five years, between the age of 10 and 15. Life on the streets is pretty hard, and it got to the point when I was about 15 years old that I had to make a decision to stay alive and out of jail. I started to work with kids, moving them in a more positive direction. I think that whole journey and the skills I learned from the streets have really served me well throughout the years to help others and bring out the best in them.
I first heard about the MAL (formerly MALT - MA in Leadership and Training) program when it began in 1996, I believe, and had a dream to come to get my degree here, and finally managed to turn it into a reality. So here I am now, a trainer of trainers, from street kid to graduate.
As I reflect on the journey that got me here, and I think about the challenges that I have come through to get to where I am today, it is quite miraculous. It is a real honour, a treat to be here.
I did my project on Intra-Organizational Trust. I looked at leverage points, those points in an organization where you can have the greatest impact. And it seemed to me that much of the challenges in organizations were related to trust and trust issues. I found that when people lack trust, they are fearful. And when they are fearful, they withdraw; they are no longer engaged and no longer share or collaborate. So I wanted to find a way to measure trust in an organization, and then to support the structure of trust within organizations.
The most striking aspect of the RRU program is the feeling of community – the idea that we’re in this together, no matter how hard to challenge, so that collectively we become more powerful than as individuals. It was quite striking to see how we had come together as a group of learners to support and encourage and teach each other over the past two years. This program nurtures each person’s personality, their individuality, their strengths. They find ways to tap into those gems, those diamonds that we have within us, so that we can become polished. We all come in as diamonds in the rough, we all have unique skills and experiences, challenges, but through the process of finding out what we need as leaders, what’s important, where we want to go and how we want to get there, we’re in a much better position to have the tools to lead.
As a result of this program, I have increased levels of confidence in working with others and a greater capacity to assist others in making the world a better place. Now I have tools to help others to develop their own tools. I’ve become a trainer of trainers. I’ve just finished running a leadership training program and I had a graduate core of 17 adult learners. These adult learners have now developed their own set of leadership tools. That’s been very exciting to watch.
Our graduation for that program was yesterday. And I was struck, as people thanked me for helping them along their leadership journey, that a kid from the streets of England could come to a point where leaders in the community were thanking me for being a leader. I really do owe that to a large degree to the skills, the confidence, the knowledge, that I developed here.
