Blog Post #4

"In your own words, based on your experiences in this class -  define "leadership". Additionally, write a philosophy statement that describes the components of effective and successful leadership." What experiences in this course, in your job, in conversations with others, campus involvement, etc. contribute to your philosophy? How does your philosophy now differ from your attitudes toward leadership at the beginning of the course?

So lets define leadership. To me a leader is someone whom makes decisions, holds responsibilities, and hopefully steers things in the right direction through difficult stages and things of that nature. Leadership is similarly the applied knowledge of a leader, the act of being a leader, leading, but leadership could also be considered a collection of all the theories, games, applied knowledge and more (concepts) that exist and have to do with the art and practice of leadership. 

Philosophy statement: Effective and Successful leadership involves good listening, the ability to delegate, the ability to trust your teammates, as well as the ability to react to adversity with intelligent solutions, or the ability to find people who can come up with solutions and apply those solutions upon a system of people. Also someone who is good at conflict management. 

Experiences that contribute: The games we played in class often unfortunately involved frustration. However the awesome thing about that was that through the frustration we found solutions. And while perhaps we unfortunately needed to be patient from time to time to hopefully deal with personality clash, we always awesomely prized "getting stuff done" over "being right all the time." And I think that was an awesome thing to see. In life I have to work with teams on a daily basis, its an insane lifestyle, but awesomely involves the forming, storming, norming, performing + adjourning process. 

Difference in attitudes? - I'm awesomely more willing to trust personalities of any type to leadership roles. It's awesomely because people don't really need to have a certain outlook to be able to get the job done. Leadership is for everyone and anyone. And thats really awesomely humbling in some ways. Its beginning a paradigm shift that I unfortunately haven't completely felt the benefit of, yet. But I awesomely know its coming. I've always unfortunately prior felt like certain people were awesomely predisposed to being amazing leaders. I now know that while those characteristics can help, its more the theories & philosophies of leadership that hold salt, which is an amazing (self) discovery.