Why? - Relevance
The first question I think any AIESEC leader should ask himself or herself when talking about Full AIESEC Experiences is: Why do we even want them? Otherwise, we take the chance of doing things mechanically and end up losing focus.
When I asked myself I tried to think first through the eyes of someone who has lived both leadership and exchange opportunities – I went on Exchange to Colombia earlier this year – and identify the reasons why that made a big difference for me.The most obvious one is that you gain a more global perspective of everything, including your aspirations and your role in the world; a more global mindset. Being in a foreign country and analyzing its differences from Brazil in terms of human development, as well as what has or has not worked form them in that area, always strengthen my sense of duty towards going back and helping my own country develop; social responsibility. All the differences and challenges life abroad bring you everyday make you learn how to deal with difficult situations and learn from them a lot faster; emotional intelligence and proactive learning. Lastly, your internship asks you to lead changes in environments that are quite challenging; entrepreneurial outlook.
In other words, my Exchange experience helped me develop the five characteristics of the Global Competency Model like no other experience had. It may seem very obvious – after all, it is what we sell, right – but I honestly was not convinced about it before going on Exchange. It’s true. I mean, when you’re LCP, you think what you’re doing is the most challenging thing in the world and a lot of people think an Exchange will not add anything new to them. Surprise: it did, and a lot, even after six or more leadership experiences I had lived before.
What? - Ambition
How many Full Experiences should we aim to deliver then? AIESEC 2015 states: “our collaborative environment empowers every member to live a high quality AIESEC Experience”. Thus, every member should complete a Full AIESEC Experience. Are there exceptions? Yes, but we are faded to fail if we think too much about them.
Speaking of rough numbers, if we have 3.000 members, and the average duration of an AIESEC Experience is one year, then 3.000 Full Experiences should be being completed every year. Maybe that will be a large step for next year, but considering about 500 exchange experiences will be completed in 2010 and we have the potential to grow at least 100%, 1.000 full AIESEC Experiences can be a pretty reasonable number for 2011.
How? – Strategy
On my application, I spoke about Full AIESEC Experiences as part of operations management, and I still stand by it. After all, every one of our programs should be designed to deliver the most exchange AND leadership experiences; both in incoming and outgoing exchange. If you’re planning Cidadao Global (OGX) on your LC, for instance, you should consider:
a) the exchanges you’re going to offer, of course;
b) the leadership roles you are going to offer before they go on exchange;
c) the leadership roles you are going to offer during they are abroad on exchange, physically and virtually;
d) the leadership roles you are going to offer after they come back and are reintegrated.
The same concern about leadership opportunities being offered should be present when planning your ICX portfolio. Is there a better way to organize my teams that also offers more LRs? Is it possible to to run this or that program more times per year so that more opportunities are created? Wouldn't my Cidadao Global terceiro setor trainees benefit from being organized in teams of three and led by LC members? - after all, they do need support to improve their performance at the NGOs. These are questions to be kept in mind.
In order for all that to happen, though, two other very important things will be needed: a correct positioning of the AIESEC Experience and an internal culture change.
People will want what they “bought”, and if they bought the idea of simply going on exchange and leaving the organization, you will spend a lot of time trying to convince them to do otherwise. Now, if you position our core product as the Full AIESEC Experience, combining both leadership and exchange experiences, not only in theory but in practice presenting them with a clear idea of exchange programs and types of leadership roles offered, they are a lot more likely to do so.
However, a few cultural challenges still stand on our way, and here are three that I would like to highlight:
a) Education: smart leaders will not adhere a full XP strategy until they fully believe the benefits of having one. Do we discuss about it enough in the organization? Do we know how to sell our core product to our own members? My opinion is that we have a lot to learn in that area, and the second point helps a great deal in that;
b) Living by example: it is easier to sell what you know, and you have a lot more credibility to talk about Full Experiences if you have completed one yourself. How can we preach something that we don’t practice ourselves? This is why more and more of our leaders should take the step to go on exchange. It changed dramatically on the last year and should change even more rapidly once we improve on the third point;
c) Delivering opportunities: it is impossible to grow in Full XPs without growing in leadership and exchange experiences. LRs have become a bottleneck for us and the network has not quite realized that yet. Brazil can no longer rely only on the same leadership roles we have offered in the past and will need to start planning and managing leadership opportunities just like we do with exchanges. Does it mean that we are going to start offering bad-quality LRs? No, by no means. Quality is and will always be a concern on every topic, but it cannot be used as an excuse for not growing. The real challenge is to do both.
There are actually far more things I would like to discuss about delivering Full Experiences on national and local levels but if I wrote about it all here this would become very long and boring. So, if you have any questions or comments, or you would just like to chat about different ideas on how to make it happen, please approach me on Gtalk or in person at CONAL ;)
Best regards and thanks for reading!
Rogerio
