Reflection Paper On Leadership

Throughout this course, our textbook readings, the posting to threaded discussions, my responses to a classmate’s post, and reading various classmates’ responses helped further digest, comprehend, and synthesize the leadership content within Daft’s “The Leadership Experience” textbook. Our weekly lectures with various classmates’ interpretations and responses during the open discussion forums about the textbook themes brought a variety of unique viewpoints to the specific leadership topics. This reflection paper was an extension of this learning, and provided a deep introspection about leadership concepts; how did I, how am I, and how can I apply this knowledge in my workplace. This writing exercise uncovered new meaning and insights while both challenging and supporting certain personal views and ideas about leadership.

Starting on May 24th, the Ranger Institute came up from North Carolina and taught us a variety of essential skills and lessons for us to know before we entered the field. The group was informative and had us start off the first half of the morning with leadership and communication games and activities, so we could get accustomed to each other. These were great ice breaker activities and got our blood pumping. All the games we participated in, we got into each others personal bubble and had quite a bit of laughs.

Leadership perspectives are very important when making decisions and strategies. A leader that only sees information on one side does not have the grasp on a situation. A leadership perspective such as understanding that there are more than one way to see things and it does not have to be what you see is what you get as a leader. When a leader uses their surrounding and employees the perspective may change and rather than seeing one side they see a variety.

I took something away from the different sources of power. Power is the capacity of potential to influence. Power can corrupt good leaders. Power, by its nature, it is powerful and tasteless like carbon monoxide. The more powerful one becomes, the more likely we are to overestimate our own mental virtue. There is position, power and personal power. Power can be more deadly than drugs. Many leaders allow power to go to their heads. They forget what and who was important to them. They allow power to consume them.

Goal Two: Find staff who are providing exceptional care to patients and publicly recognizing one person per week by placing a note on the staff bulletin board stating who was “Caught Being AWESOME!”.

Mary used her gift of writing to effectively communicate her stance on women's rights, and help spread awareness for her cause.

My leadership philosophy is constantly developing over time. There is not one leader that stands out individually, however there are many traits from my past leaders that I use. The traits used by my past leaders help me in the development of my philosophy throughout the years. There are several values that I think make the perfect leader. These attributes are the values of humor, the will to always improve, and trust. With these three values, one can always improve the organization while maintaining high standards and moral.

What insights have I gained about my role as an educational leader from these chapters?

As an ASB leadership student we represent the student body, manage the finances of other clubs with our business meeting, but the part I enjoy the most is we organize events such as dances, meetings, pep rallies, and assemblies. Pep rallies is where we can express most of our creativity from how we organize our class section since we make banners, decorations, as well as coming up with class rival games, getting clubs to perform, and introduce that season’s sport teams. As one of the ASB Co-president, our job is to come up with an organized schedule and finalize it with performers and given time for each part involved. Organizing the schedule with performances, announcements, and games involves thinking for the student body in what they’ll enjoy seeing more of. Coming up with games is where we think of new games we have not done in the past as well as creating ones people have never heard of to get the crowd going. After creating the games, we test them to see if we need improvements or any changes to what we made.

Over the years, a great deal of time, and research has been dedicate to the study of leadership. Even with extensive data on the topic, many still disagree on what leadership really means. Hence, leadership is a word that has many different meanings and different researched theories associated with it. On a basic level, leadership involves having and establishing a clear vision, sharing that vision with followers, respecting followers, and leading an organization with excellence while ensuring that everyone is part of the team. Leadership is also a method by which a leader uses his or her influence towards getting a group of followers to take ownership or buy into a vision.

Most Christians think their leader or pastor has to be perfect in all of the ways, however, Nobody can be perfect but Jesus Christ, and nobody can satisfy people without mistakes. The leader’s qualifications do not require a professional position nor need to be a “full-time Christian worker.” They don’t have to be perfect, but they have to try to be perfect and learn leadership to be a good leader. Then, what is leadership? This book define the leadership is a dynamic process in which a man or woman with God-given capacity influences a specific group of God’s people toward His purposes for the group.

What are some of the personal dynamics in my life that impact my leadership style? I believe that it all starts with me and how I raise my children. As a parent, you are called to be a leader. We teach our children to be honest, respectful and, do their best at whatever they set out to accomplish. We do this in hopes that when the time comes for them to leave home, they will have a firm understanding of what it takes to be a good person. The similarities in parenting roll into my leadership at work. As a leader, we apply the same principles that we are teaching our children to our constituents, in hopes that they aspire to grow in their professional lives.

As part of the end of the school year and in order to celebrate the successes of our students and staff as well as build relationships between the community and the school, Theresa Bunker holds an annual community involvement activity called Camp Bunker. This year, as part of my practicum experience I was tasked with leading the planning and preparations for this week long event. Three months before the event took place, my team and I began preparations to make connections with the community including the fire department, police department, and several businesses to make this event successful, fun and memorable for the students. This required me to lead my team of teachers to make contact with several community members and organize the team to take on various responsibilities. Through this leadership action I was able to learn to delegate responsibilities, keep people accountable, and solve logistical problems as they arose.

Prior to attending the Business Internship course, my knowledge and understanding on successful business leaders was very limited. Although I had heard of countless success stories in business, I had never actually understood what it took to achieve such measures of success. However, it wasn’t until we had the privilege of hearing from four different business magnates in weeks 6 -9. Each of the business leaders gave an hour’s seminar and which was aimed at providing insights into their personal lives, working experiences and the core essence of 21st century business leadership.

In class, so far, we have discussed many different topics about leadership. One being different leadership theories. The one that I feel most represents the leader I want to be in the future is servant leadership. When we discussed servant leadership it was defined as this leadership model is based on the leader and the followers wanting to serve others. Basically, this means the servant leader you put your focus on the needs of others before your own. The followers goal is to serve clients and the leader’s goal is to serve the employee and implement the organization mission statement. The leader supports other employees by noticing their goals and provide the proper support to help them reach those goals. This