The First Person You Lead: Self-Awareness, Servant Leadership, and the Use of Self in the Helping Professions

The best leaders are not the ones with the most impressive résumé. They are the ones who can see themselves clearly.

That is the conviction at the heart of this short, one-lesson course. Dr. Tammy Tenaglia spent twenty years as a clinical psychologist in addiction and adult psychiatry before moving into board-level leadership at Malvern Behavioral Health and two charity boards. When she describes what she now looks for in the leaders she oversees, she does not start with talent or credentials. She starts with self-awareness, the willingness to accept feedback, and the emotional maturity to lead through the hard seasons. And she names one quality as the most important of all: servant leadership, the leader who is there to serve both the people they answer to and the people who answer to them.

In under an hour, this course takes you inside a candid conversation between Dr. Tenaglia and Fr. Charles Sikorsky, then puts her hard-won wisdom into dialogue with DMU scholarship on the whole person and with the Christian tradition of self-examination and self-gift. You will leave with one practice you can use this week: a leader’s version of the daily examen that turns self-awareness from a vague ideal into a habit.