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Resonant Leadership Essay

Decent Essays

Using the texts Resonant Leadership by Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee (2005) and Salsa, Soul, and Spirit by Juana Bordas (2012) as a framework to examine Liz Stringer’s resonance as leader, one finds that Stringer and her leadership style have many of the characteristics listed in both texts describing what it means to be an effective leader.
Resonant Leadership by Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee (2005) stresses the importance of “emotional intelligence” and “mindfulness” in becoming a resonant leader. “Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management,” (p. 4), the four categories that make up emotional intelligence, are broken down into “eighteen leadership competencies” (p. 28). Resonant Leadership defines mindfulness as, “the capacity to be fully aware of all that one experiences inside the self... and...around us,” (p.122). Stringer shows “personal competence” (p. 29) in her juggling of many jobs, activities, and roles. Though she identifies …show more content…

The five principles of leaders among equals are, in many ways, reflected in Stringer’s leadership roles with teenagers. While there is an ingrained power hierarchy in the teacher-student relationship, Stringer aims to dismantle the negative attributes by creating a community. Stringer demonstrates compassion, a trait valued in Resonant Leadership, by truly caring about the people she is working with. Using games like Big Talk—a question card game that inspires meaningful conversations—and exercises such as Exquisite Corpse—which has I to We applications in that the final product is greater than any individual contribution, Stringer becomes more than simply an instructor feeding information to the students but instead a leader the kids can respect, identify with, and learn from in “nontraditional”

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