Ziqi Tang

5/28/2016

zot5033

Assignment: Personal Interview of Leader

Leadership is a practical skill encompassing the ability of a person to lead

others to achieve the goals. This assignment is aim to interviewing a leader
to understand their practices and compare with best practices such as
Baldrige model. Interview with a successful senior leader can help us
learning from their experience of succeed, and utilize their leadership skills
and knowledge to help promote our future career.
The person I chose to interview is Nan Xu, who is the president of the
Chinese Undergraduate Student Association (CUSA) at Penn State University.
Chinese Undergraduate Student Association It is designed to provide a
healthy and optimistic environment for Chinese students, and its goal is to
stimulate the students' extracurricular interests and activities. CUSA aims to
inform its members of current news, such as job listings, academic
information, and a variation of tidings. Nan Xu said: CUSA wishes to bring
students satisfaction, and a successful future. We want to make the students
feel like at home, this will always be our major goal
Nan Xus approach to leadership is that of lead by example and constant
information flow. She reasons that before she was voted to be the president
of CUSA, she used to be the Minister in event planning department. She has
a strong referent power and expert power. After her being the president of
the CUSA, she still likes to corporate with others and led members rather
than just assign the works to subordinate. She also has a strong

Ziqi Tang
5/28/2016

zot5033

communication skill. She believes that to really lead his organization, it is

important to make people believe in the organization and to trust it. The
layout of the organization is flat, no one really has much higher ranking than
anyone else.
For the strategy, because CUSA is a non-profit organization, most of the
funding are from advertise and sponsor. During Nan Xus tenure, she is aim
to connect the local Chinese restaurant and store with students. The
restaurants will give some discount to the students and supply funds for
CUSA. In return, she will help them advertise during the big event.
The customers of CUSA are the whole Chinese undergraduate students in
PSU. Nan Xu cares about the customer feedback very much. Customers
feedback is used to design training and mentoring efforts for staff
development. CUSA is continuous improving with adopt customers feedback.
The organizations performance measure is also by the students feedback.
This may be the weakest point for the organization in the Baldridge criteria,
because there is no real formal performance reviews for the company itself.
As the leader, Nan Xu is very confident about the performance and results of
CUSA. She thinks CUSAs achievement and improvement are impressive.
In conclusion, I feel this interview shows how a typical organization run,
common goal driven organization works. Different types of leadership work in
an organization, and having a good strategic plan, and constant
communication will certainly help that organization succeed. The need for

Ziqi Tang
5/28/2016

zot5033

change to the best practices is an important part to developing a successful

organization.