Taking leadership roles and responsibility for it is very important when you are working in groups. Future jobs will often simulate this, when you work in a company together with a lot or several people. I learned a lot about the different parts of good leadership through the 5 Practices of Leadership, and this will help me in my future career.

Leadership comes with responsibility as I said, and it is important for every team or group of people trying to achieve something. I tried to practice the 5 areas of leadership the last ten weeks in my group, as well as in my tennis team, and I feel like I completed the first steps in becoming a leader. My emotional intelligence improved, as you can read on my Emotional Intelligence page under Eportfolio.

I worked on every single one of the 5 practices and I asked for feedbacks from my teammates, which really helped the process of my improvement. I demonstrated improvement in challenging the process because I challenged more ideas during the second half of the term. Two of the five teammates said in their peer evaluation after week 5 that “I could do a better job of challenging the process and challenge ideas more often”. Feedback at the end of the term said that “he challenged us when he didn’t agree with what we were discussing”. Encouraging the heart was anonymous one of my strengths during this project, as well as enabling others to act. The only negative comment I got about that was that I need to listen better sometimes to other people’s ideas. I worked a lot on inspiring a shared vision, which I set my action plan for. My goal was to become a better leader by setting the goals for our group for the whole project and every meeting or task we had to complete. This worked out well, and I got better at it every week. I gained confidence by hearing from my teammates that they agreed with my goals almost every time, and they appreciated it a lot. One of my teammates said that “before every meeting you always set and ask us what our goals are which is helpful to keep us on track and not lose focus”.

I do not think that anybody can become a great leader during ten weeks, but I do think that this class helped me a lot to take the first steps. I would like to keep working on these practices not only in school and on the tennis court, but also in my every day life.