Leadership Implemented

Hi folks!

I just finished my last assignment for my Contemporary Leadership class this semester, a Leadership Style Self Assessment paper. It basically laid out a lot of the different experiences I've learned in leadership, both in life and specifically in this class. I thought some of you might want to read it! It's not as casually-written as most of the things I post on this blog, but for anyone wanting to look closer into my brain and everything I've learned about leadership, keep reading! Enjoy!

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Leadership Style Self-Assessment

Upon taking the time to reflect on this semester and learning about my own specific leadership techniques, I’ve discovered a few things. Most things I go for when finding opportunities to lead include the opportunity to help and serve others, directly or indirectly. This can be in the shows I direct, making sure I send out a good message to the audience, or working with my church small group to help kids’ walks with Christ grow and improve. One of my biggest values in life—probably the biggest—is growth, no matter the circumstances. This makes it a driving force of my leadership style because no matter what, I know we can grow from the situation we’re handed. That stems from my faith, mainly, because I know for a fact everything happens for a reason, so I’m always able to see the positive or know that there is one, even if I don’t see it. One of my favorite quotes is “Sometimes when you’re in a dark place, you think you’ve been buried, but you’ve actually been planted” (Cristine Caine).

It’s hard to look at myself and reflect in this style because I’m so used to talking about it casually in helping other people. Let’s see if I can word this correctly. First off, like I was discussing in my first paragraph, my primary identity is as a Christian, and it decides most of my morals and leadership decision-making because I look at leading as an opportunity to love others and work with them to show that love to even more people, just like Jesus would do. One of the prime examples of this value comes from 1 John 4: 11-12 (NLT) which states:

“Dear friends, since God loved us so much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and His love is brought to full expression in us.”

That’s one of the most important pieces in all the Gospel, and it’s what I lead my life with, as well as how I lead anything else. I remember talking about this in one of my journal entries—I made sure my personal mission statement was rooted around loving others because Christ loved us first (Chapter 4, Activity 2, Komives et al). The most important thing is making sure people feel loved and validated, regardless of if they do or don’t believe in God. This is all especially helpful when putting together a team, because “empowered people empower people” (Unknown) and they want to help others the way I’ve helped them.

Some of the most helpful traits I’ve come across in myself is my ability to analyze and process deep emotions after learning about someone’s situation. My top color on the True Colors test was gold, with only one point off from blue. I interpret this as doing my best to efficiently help people with their emotions and use those emotions to power their drive to succeed and improve. This helped me when interpreting what I’ve sort of known all my life.

I’m a very empathetic person and I love observing a situation and finding a way to help it (blue), so I’ve learned to become a very thoughtful advice-giver and a direct speaker when it comes to emotions because I place high value on making sure emotions are expressed while they’re still understandable, before someone bottles them up and mixes them with a thousand different emotions. I like to fix things at the start of the problem, so we can prevent any new thing from coming up afterwards (gold).

With all these traits combined, I view my leadership style as a very loving, thoughtful, and problem-solving approach. With these strengths, however, I’ve found a few weaknesses that I need to be more careful about dealing with. One of these problems stems from my observations and directness in dealing with emotions. I’ve been better recently, but I need to keep remembering to be cautious about how I approach giving advice and settling problems. Since I can often see problems with emotions and inconsistencies in situations faster than most, I have been known to speak my mind a little too soon, and sometimes it gets me in trouble. I’ve been working to hold my tongue on my observations more recently, because sometimes, people just need to learn things for themselves and don’t really want to hear my suggestions. I need to remember that.

When dealing with problems within your leadership realm, it’s incredibly important to make sure you’re keeping up your team efficacy and resiliency. With my leadership style, efficacy is probably the highest non-Christian value on the list. I make sure things get done, and I’ve been that way since the beginning of high school. Even if I’m not able to get things done by the deadline, I’ll try my best to.

With efficacy comes resiliency—resiliency to push past all the nonsense and obstacles holding you back to achieve the efficacy standard you wish to uphold. That’s been one of my main techniques of keeping my efficacy standards and reputations all throughout high school and beyond. I remember a specific time in senior year, I had been working every hour of my free time, and often skipping some things to work on building, essentially, horse costumes for my spring musical, “Cinderella.” I had been working all the time, with no clear instructions or guidance to figure out how to create them from scratch. My director simply gave the concept to me and trusted I would get it done. See, that was my reputation for my efficacy.

The problem was, without any clue on how to make it and not enough time to develop the product, the horse costumes eventually had to be cut, even after I had probably spent about 15 hours a week for 3 weeks making them with a team I was leading. The only way I was able to keep them going with me was the promise that it would all be worth it, and the love that I gave them to encourage them to keep going, like I mentioned above. Anyway, the way my director told this story, as I received an award at the end of the year for this proof of my resiliency, was that he had never seen someone look so incredibly defeated and then immediately spring back up to ask what’s next to work on. That’s probably one of my proudest moments in high school. It was, definitely, a fail in the creation of the product, but I grew a lot through the construction of it all, and with my motto being “growth,” it made it easy to be proud, still.

The biggest thing I would want someone to take out of that story, is that, as a leader, you have to show resiliency within yourself to encourage your team to do the same. That’s how you’re going to keep your efficacy standards and reputations high. With each new project you take on and complete, especially, your team’s spirits will raise higher and they will be more willing to work and work to complete the next project and the next, because you all keep inspiring each other to work harder and get better each time.

Unfortunately, not all leaders have these standards set in place with their teams, and that’s a huge problem. Without showing an example of resiliency when things get rough and hard to deal with, if you as the leader aren’t following through with those concepts, your team members won’t want to or feel like they need to either. They won’t have anything to look up to as inspiration, and slowly, your production value of whatever you’re working on will wither away until no client wants to work with your team because they’ve all lost their intrinsic motivations to succeed. Exploring Leadership discusses that in the last few chapters, but my favorite comment the authors make is their list of tools to take into your team. They talk about being positive and keeping it open, honest, and hopeful, destroying negative thinking by applying your knowledge from your past failures to create a better future project and a better team to work with (Komives et al, 501). This can only start with the leader, though, with or without the title. Without the extrinsic influences that you can provide as their leader, your followers’ intrinsic motivations will fade away, losing your business standard if you don’t constantly encourage them and lead by example.

My best advice with inspiring resiliency and efficacy in your teams is to constantly look forward and look for each new opportunity to create a bigger production for your team. It doesn’t matter what type of new venture that may be, but make the venture an adventure. Make it fun for your team, as well as for yourself. If you aren’t interested in the project, your followers won’t be either, going back to the extrinsic/intrinsic concept stated above. I would suggest starting projects with your team that you are passionate about, like my venture into pursuing poetry and integrating it into theatre as of next semester. I’ve gotten a ton of interested feedback on it because I’ve been introducing the concept as on ordeal that I’ve been super excited about myself. It’s been working!

That’s the best advice I could give, in a nutshell—go after what you’re passionate about, and people will want to follow you. That’s how I run my leadership style, and I hope it encourages you, dear reader, to go out and do the same. Do what you’re passionate about—the right teams will follow. Everything happens for a reason.