Sigma Kappa Sorority Recruitment Party Chair Committee

What?
At Virginia Tech, I am a member of the Epsilon Chi chapter of Sigma Kappa Sorority. Within my chapter I have served as a party chair, helping to plan Formal Recruitment that takes place in January.  This committee consists of 16 members with 4 people assigned to each round of recruitment. This past recruitment, I was apart of the Philanthropy committee. We were in charge of decorations and deciding how the whole round would work.
In order to learn about this process, we have weekly meetings throughout the school year. At each meeting, we present a new idea to the group. As a party chair, we accept input from the other party chairs and try things out. Through what I have learned from Daniel Levi's leadership theories, it's clear that things don't always go the way you plan when working in groups but that there is always room for improvement.

So What?
After going through the recruitment process, It's easy to see that it's important to the chapter to have certain people in charge of organizing and planning recruitment. There were certain characteristics that I saw revolving around the party chairs. Unfortunately, the girls, including myself became victims of social loafing. According to Levi, social loafing is defined as the reduction if individual contributions when people work in groups rather than alone. The head of Philanthropy round was also in charge of our week long philanthropy event in the fall. Because she was so consumed with planning that, the planning for recruitment was put off until the last minute. The rest of my group decided that she would end up doing it. We decided this because everything that we'd want to contribute to, she'd just change. When recruitment came along, we had no plan and everything was a disaster.
In our case, I think that all our group needed was a little bit of cooperation. According to Levi, good cooperation leads to good communication. This is what our group really needed. Also, cooperation is more likely to occur in smaller groups than in larger groups. Because we had a lack of communication, we had trouble identifying our goals.


Now What?
I have now seen what the process is like through experiencing recruitment. I know how we should make changes for recruitment in 2012. It's easy to see what went wrong and what needs to be changed. This upcoming semester, I will serve as a party chair again, in hopes to bring new ideas to the table. I'm eager to hear from the new girls that will serve as party chairs to see what they have in mind for us. If a conflict arises, I will know how to fix it. With what I have learned from Levi about cooperation, I will easily be able to apply that knowledge and make sure our party chair organization goes more smoothly. I'm excited to start planning recruitment 2012 because of all the ideas and eager minds that are going to be apart of the process.