Hey AIESEC!

Dear diary, today I felt like a management consultant.

I think that I was able to help the AIESECers at Sogang University thanks to the work I've done in AIESEC. My AIESEC experience so far covers quite a few leadership positions: vice president talent management & corporate development, local committee president and lastly organizing committee president of an international conference.

Thanks to this background I had some good talks with the president here. The text below is my attempt at illustrating the situation of the the LC (local committee), some of the challenges they are facing and my suggestions to fix them.

Situation

It's quite coincidental that I found the LC in somewhat similar of a situation as my LC at Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki. Having been the brink of execution by the member committees at respective countries a couple of years ago due to low results, both the LC's are on the highway of success at the moment.

At least when it comes to AIESEC's two main products: the number of exchanges realized, both in trainees sent abroad and received and the number of leadership experiences. I guess that's the way it goes in AIESEC: vicious and virtuous circles.

The structures at both LCs are quite similar, with the one here being the following. The Local Committee President supervises his Executive Board and the OCPs:

• Vice President Outgoing Exchange
• Vice President Incoming Exchange
• Vice President Finance
• Vice President Talent Management
• Vice President Information Management
• Vice President Communications
• Vice President External Relations
• Vice President Alumni Relations
• Organizing Committee President, project #1
• Organizing Committee President, project #2

All the Vice Presidents take care of their teams. The OCPs also have team members who deal with tasks ingoing and outgoing exchange, so the LC structure will change in the near future. However, as the board is currently missing a single responsible for finance, information management, external relations and alumni relations these tasks have fallen upon the others. The LC is doing very well taken all this into consideration, with most exchanges realized of all the 14 LCs in Korea (of which 13 are located in Seoul) this year - I think.

Challenges: hierarchy

The hierarchy in Korea pretty much states that you have to respect people who are older than you or higher in the corporate ladder. Now in AIESEC you have a lot of alumni to deal with, and this creates a dilemma in Korea: how do you control a bunch of people who you are not allowed to control? E.g. if you have them in an LC meeting they might disturb the session you're having. I'll write about the sessions later in this text.

One way to approach this would be to e.g. have a symbol of power which can be given to a certain person who's supposed to be speaking. The person would then be the only one with the power to speak and the symbol could be anything, e.g. a cucumber. This, of course, should first be approved by the alumni. Of course you cannot do this all the time but to emphasize the most important things. The practice is directly copied from the Nordic Circle (don't know what it is? ask me).

Challenges: lack of ownership

The hierarchy is not as much present in communication between executive board members and the rest of the members. However, it affects the way people think here I guess. I could see patterns of top-to-bottom communication, which could very easily create a lack of ownership in the regular members. In other words, they might not appear active. You might have heard these words if you've been VP talent management.

Now the meetings are pretty much the same as in Finland: Executive board meetings (EBM), local committee meetings (LCM), functional meetings (FM) and organizing committee meetings (OCM). I believe the main problem in creating ownership is that the decisions are made in the EBMs, leaving no actual power to the regular members.

My suggestion is to shift the power of making informal decisions to the FMs. This is a critical point though. Firstly, the people whose power is being shifted might resist. That's the VP's. The whole EB needs to accept that there is potential for this to activate the members. Second, you need to walk the talk: the power needs to be in the FMs. It's up to the LC how much, but keep your words. Third, the members need to understand that they are given more responsibility. I believe the outcome is a more lean structure in the organization and developing the members' self-leadership.

Challenges: English skills

AIESEC is globally evolving into an organization which combines its two main products: leadership and traineeships abroad. This is unique. Many organizations do one or the other but no other one does them both. This creates challenges especially in Asia, though. What to do with the leaders who can't speak English well enough?

Now all the meetings are held in Korean. Even the conferences just have sessions in Korean. They tried to have some in English but it proved to be too inefficient. Goes hand in hand with my experiences in classes where the teachers use one third of the lecture to explain the material in Korean. As I see it, the way the sessions are held could be changed. Mostly the learning methodology is just lectures (in all meetings, conferences - as I understood) and I don't see that creating any leadership or practical skills.

A friend of mine once expressed his love for homegroups. Homegroups are a very simple invention: at conferences you have a lot of delegates and they are often divided into a random group of people who have a lot of sessions together. The homegroup remains the same the whole conference. The level of trust in the homegroup reaches ridiculous levels at best and are a lot better way of exchanging ideas than lectures at worst. Combine this with the following. If you ever learned a new language (e.g. English) or wanted to learn one, you probably know how much courage it takes to speak it aloud.

Do the math. This could even be combined with cooperating with other student clubs that use English a lot. It would be mutually beneficial if the cooperating student club members are interested in learning to educate others or in developing their own English skills even further. One outsider per each group for the sessions, which could even be spoken in Konglish (Korean&English).

It's up to you!

As for more similarities, both the LCs also lack a board or a supervising organ. A board of administration could be compiled of an alumni with knowledge of AIESEC, an employee at Sogang university to inform the LC about university realities and an outsider with interest in youth development. A board of advisors would help in keeping the LC up for years to come in a sustainable fashion and in maintaining a professional image of the organization. Both quite critical points don't you think.

I wrote this text about AIESEC because I wanted to share the learning points for the AIESECers in both "my" LCs. In the future, I'll concentrate on only one of the points you could see in the previous entry (learn, feel, do) because the text would otherwise probably bore you to death by its length. Or then I do something else - I do like the structure still, though. You'll see.