Building Leadership One Hour at a Time 

Maverick Involvement Team’s weekly series turns everyday challenges into handson leadership lessons.   

By Joe Tougas  ‘86

When a college program has “leadership” in its title, one might guess it’s geared toward business administration students or those eager to someday head up political, nonprofit or educational organizations. 

Sometimes, however, it involves a group of people nervously pouring water into a cup. 

The student‑run Maverick Involvement Team has for years offered an early‑evening series titled Leadership Live. Open to all students, it’s a series of talks and presentations in which “leadership” is explored as a personal quality students can develop internally to address topics that affect their everyday lives. 

“We try to talk about leadership in different facets and from different angles,” said Yodahe Kebede, leadership educator with M.I.T. “Preparation for being a productive student—that’s part of leadership. Leading your life in the right path.” 

Leadership isn’t always about taking charge, noted Assistant Director of Student Activities Oluwaseun Adekeye, who helped design the series and its different themed sessions. Whether students envision themselves as future CEOs or “background types,” leadership is still something to develop today, she said. 

“Leadership is about responsibility, and taking responsibility can be behind the scenes,” Adekeye said. The series, she added, gives participants a chance to put principles into practice. 

Leadership Live tackles a different topic each session, and recent topics included Finances 101, The Art of Saying No and Saying No to Burnout.

In a recent session, about 80 students gathered to explore the combined topics of stress and burnout. Student Health Services educator Justine Schultz and graduate assistant Logan Rademan served as guest presenters. The session opened with tables of students taking turns adding water to a cup—the trick being to add water without overflowing it. 

The exercise illustrated how stressors can accumulate slowly until they reach a crisis point. 

“If we don’t release or manage that stress, we eventually ‘overflow,’ which is where burnout and overwhelm can take over,” Schultz said. “The activity shows that stress isn’t always about one big thing—it’s often the buildup of many small pressures over time. Learning how to manage them before the cup overflows is key to protecting our wellbeing.” 

From there, Schultz guided the conversation toward selfconfidence as a key tool for managing such stressors. 

Adekeye said the light atmosphere—which included coffee, popcorn and other treats on the night Schultz presented—offers easygoing encounters with topics that may be addressed in classes but not experienced firsthand. 

“Our goal is to ensure that students get practical experience—one hour of weekly, handson experience with some of the things they’re being taught in class,” she said. “Some students have leadership embedded in their courses, but they don’t have that practical experience. They don’t have that space where they can talk to people and say, ‘Hey, I had a conflict in my RSO club. How do I handle that?’ or, ‘I’m trying to relate to someone from another background, and their ideas are just so different from mine. How do I navigate that?’ That’s why we have Leadership Live.” 

Leadership Live offers several sessions every semester, and students of all stripes – from first-year to non-traditional – are encouraged to participate. Recognized Student Organization Coordinator Bezawit Berhanu described the series as an ideal opportunity. 

“These sessions are like foundation blocks, a ladder to get from one stop to the other,” she said. “It’s different each week and will help you grow your strength and confidence while meeting new people.”