Reflections About Being A Leader

I reflected on past in my current experiences that I have with leadership. They all relate to interpersonal skills. We’ve talked about in this class such as communicating active listening and how different leaders have different qualities in high school I was. A part of an organization called College of Computer Science and Information Technologies or more commonly known as COCSIT. Within that organization I held many numerous leadership positions such as class representative, historian treasurer and even president of the entire Club. My advisor was an amazing teacher about leadership, and she instilled in me some of the qualities I have. I thought, I learned knew a lot about leadership. When I started taking this class. I learned new ways about being a leader. I think it’s important that you can improve upon yourself and your own leadership capabilities. I look forward to implementing my new skills as in my position at the University for the club of athletic training. Student Association my first philosophy is leadership is possessing a lot of different characteristics that work together to direct and communicate with others, around you in a positive way. I think leadership is having a lot of different qualities. I want to model myself as a positive leader. I had role models that were positive leaders that really influenced me. I know there are negative leaders in this world but for me they don’t have the positive outlook on life. They don’t have the positive attitude that I look forward to with or look forward to hearing from my leaders around me too with being a leader. It’s important to keep people motivated. There are times when there’s going to be stall in progress or even steps backwards, but as a leader it’s your job to keep people motivated to keep moving forward.

My second philosophy is I believe that becoming a leader is a journey and you are constantly making changes to your own definition. The ways you lead and how you view leaders around you. The idea of leadership is constantly changing what you were two years ago. When I was in COCSIT is way different than where I am now. I think, I’ve become a better leader even just after this class taking. Classes are reading a book can give you new ideas that you can implement into your own leadership capabilities. I think that’s really cool with leadership because you may be a good leader but in three years you could be an even better leader. There’s always room for improvement because no one is perfect as a leader. I think it’s important to know your own strengths and weaknesses.

My third philosophy is the possibility of being a leader is present. In almost all areas of your life whether it’s in school work or your family life I think it’s important because there is a leading opportunity everywhere so for School. For example, this could be starting your group project you could be the one that starts the communication line and kind of give ideas for how you want the project to go and work it could be coordinating a luncheon to get better. Acquainted with your co-workers around you and your family life. Becoming a leader can be setting up Christmas plans and having a schedule of events. I think being a leader you just have to find the responsibility and opportunity and take it if you want to be the leader. There are times that I’m not always a leader that I’m a follower and that’s okay too.

My fourth philosophy is I believe integrity loyalty collaboration. Humour and achievement are essential values to possess the leader especially for me. I know above I talked about how leaders all have different values and traits. The traits I listed are what important for me, but not everyone has those values. For me integrity is important because I’m going to be honest with everyone around me and I kind of expect that from everyone. Around back, to me I think it’s important because that’s how I can gain trust and respect from others, but I can also trust and respect the others around me. If they do integrity back to me loyalty is important because when times get tough you want to show that you’re going to stay. For the long run you’re not going to run away collaboration is important because that’s your open line of communication between talking to people and it’s also active listening. Humour is important because not every situation has to be serious. I have a humorous side I think it’s important to not have such serious conversations all the time. Finally, achievement is super important to me because I was a comparison sport. I was a big competitor growing up but when you finally achieve and have that success and fulfillment feeling that keeps people motivated to keep going setting goals is a way to have achievement within leadership projects.

My fifth philosophy is by respecting other opinions and perspectives. I know that they can be open and share information with me with full honesty. Active listening comes into play with this philosophy. I think it’s important to simply listen and hear what others are actually saying because they can give you a new creative idea to implement into your projects. Those are the people that really help you succeed as a leader in closing. I’m really surprised at how far I’ve come in this eight-week class I have learned so many new things to implement into my leadership capabilities.

If I had to boil management and leadership down to a small number of points it would look something like this:

1. Find out what workers, superiors, tasks, and processes have the greatest impact on operations and your own rating as a manager, focus on those first above all else. Everyone and every task on the list is important, but some are more important than others.
2. Obtain resources to carry out tasks and equip your workforce. Make sure you reward and retain the best workers in your department, they are essential to productivity.
3. Delegate tasks and choose someone to be your right-hand man/woman to help keep things rolling, you can’t run a department alone.
4. Communicate effectively, and honestly for long term success. Public speaking courses, courses on rapport building, psychology courses, and sociology courses can all help with this.
5. Optimize where possible and begin working to improve processes after you have a good working knowledge of the work at hand, and the people in your department.

Your style of leadership will vary depending on the individual workers, and the general atmosphere of the company, that you are working with. Persuasion is pretty easy to get their focus, build rapport, communicate your message, and get commitment to action or ‘buy in’. Reward and punishment (constructive intervention), group and individual, is something that should be used with great care.