My goal in this class was to improve my leadership skills. Reading about the five practices of leadership, I realized that I am lacking of some of the skills a good leader has to have. One of my biggest goals was to enable others to act because I though this was maybe my weakest part. I am very motivated and I do everything I can to succeed, but it is very hard for me to motivate other people. One time in our group project some of the members became uncertain about the success of our project and wanted to stop working on it. I had sort of a motivational speech; I tried to convince them that our project is good and that we have to keep working on it if we want to succeed. I think I did a pretty good job motivating them because we decided to keep working on the project, which turned out to be pretty good. I also asked for feedback from my teammates almost every week regarding my leadership development, and at the end of the term they said that I improved a lot in the enabling other to act part.
I know that I can still improve a lot regarding to my leadership skills. I am trying to keep working on how to enable other people to act. I am on the tennis team and I am one the oldest guy on the team and I know that I can help my team a lot if I step up and take some leadership roles. I can show them the way, how to act on the tennis court and how to compete for the University of Oregon. This is a lucky situation for me because I will have a lot of chances to improve my leadership skills on the tennis team.
The most important thing that I learned regarding leadership skills during this term is that a leader is not someone who just tells other people what to do. A leader is someone who takes responsibility for the success of the project his or her group is working on. A leader is someone who is unselfish and always puts the team’s interest before his own interest. Also, the leader has to be the one who works the most because that is the only way others will accept him as a leader. If I want to be a good leader I have to be the first who gets to the meetings and the one who puts the most effort in the project. This is something that I did not think before, but after being in this environment I am convinced that these are the most important features a leader has to have in order for him to be successful.