The Long Arm of the Law Leans on Leadership

ECC President, Dr. Greg McLeod, is pictured with Ryan Cox during his graduation from the North Carolina Community College Leadership Program

To Ryan Cox, honing leadership skills is part of the pursuit of excellence in his role as chair of the Criminal Justice Technology program at Edgecombe Community College.

He believes those who would have others learn from them must also learn. That’s why Cox was among the 35 who graduated this spring from the North Carolina Community College Leadership Program.

“Participants attend four multi-day, in-person retreats filled with learning experiences, networking activities, and opportunities to discover and apply best practices aligned with pressing needs and issues facing North Carolina’s community colleges,” the program’s web page states. The program takes place over six months. Graduation was held in April at Forsyth Tech Community College in Winston-Salem.

Cox’s participation is another example of how ECC faculty and leadership prioritize professional development.

Cox has been at ECC since January 2021. He’s from the Midwest and moved with his family to North Carolina when he was 18. After a stint as a police officer in Concord, he joined the criminal justice faculty at Roanoke-Chowan CC in Ahoskie in 2007, where he stayed for five years. Cox was on the faculty at Nash CC for five years and then East Carolina University for more than three years before coming on board at ECC.

“I kind of read up on the program and just decided to apply,” Cox said, after receiving encouragement from Dean of Business, Industry and Technologies, Michael Starling, and Dean of Arts and Sciences, Christine Nicodemus. “It was an opportunity to sharpen my skills and at the same time, obtain new ones.”

Meeting at community colleges around the state, participants heard from a series of speakers from different leadership areas and colleges. Almost all speakers were program graduates, Cox said.

“And then the directors of the program would arrange activities to engage us with, whether it be team building or various leadership activities,” Cox said. “Then there was also a big project that they handed out to each one of us. They put us in groups based on our leadership styles, and within this group, we were tasked with completing a larger project.”

In that larger project, attendees were given a scenario in which they were leaders at a community college campus. Demographic information was provided, along with some of the issues facing that school. “They gave us a series of questions and problems to try to tackle,” Cox said. Teams were to present a strategy for meeting those challenges and how each group member fit in finding solutions, he said.

Although the “colleges” in the exercise were invented for the program, “These problems they presented us with are real problems that community colleges face,” Cox said.

“It was interesting; it was fulfilling; it was a little bit of fun, but there were some challenges for sure,” he said.

The primary challenge was logistics, he said. “We were only given a limited time at these retreats to work on it, so we had to come up with time on our own to try to meet up virtually,” he said. “All of our group members were at different community colleges, so it’s not like we could get together in shared space and work on this, so the logistics were a challenge, just trying to solve problems and have good solutions.”

Cox said one of the benefits of the program was “exposure to different leadership styles, and just the way people handle things and interpret things.”

“It’s interesting just to hear how each one of us would maybe handle a problem differently or similarly, and deciding what maybe is the best solution. … I think I grew as a leader,” he said.

“It’s certainly worthwhile and something I would recommend to my coworkers and fellow employees.”

Cox said the training will be of great value as he pursues the goal of starting a public safety administration program at ECC. “Part of my experience there was seeing some of the creative responses you can have, and leaning on other people,” he said.

“Sometimes leadership is just understanding that you don’t have all the answers,” he continued. “Part of leadership is, if you don’t have all the answers, tap into the resources that you have, and find someone who might, someone who will help you.”