Final Reflections on Leadership

            Before trying to formulate all of my experiences from this class into an official philosophy of leadership, I thought it best that I look back to my first blog post of the term, in which I explained what I thought were the most important elements of effective leadership.  In that first blog, I stated that the most important elements of leadership were adaptation, as in a leader's ability to adapt their leadership styles to varying situations and learn from their mistakes, and communication, as in being able to effectively communicate with followers.  Looking back at this now I understand that while these are important leadership elements, understanding leadership goes a lot deeper. 

            After our class discussions and activities, I now have a broader understanding of all the main elements of leadership.  The first two, as I said before, are adaptation and communication; however, there is more to them than I originally explained.  Adaptation means learning from your mistakes, understanding different situational circumstances and adjusting your leadership style accordingly, and lastly, understanding differences in the people you are working with and reacting appropriately.  Communication involves practicing active listening when dealing with followers, providing constant constructive feedback, and making sure that you communicate clear objectives so your group understands your purpose.  The next leadership elements are being inclusive, empowering, and ethical, which I believe are all interconnected.  I believe this because in order to empower your followers, you have to be both inclusive and ethical, as in treating followers with respect, dignity, fairness, and involving them in decision-making processes.  The last element is being mindful of your purpose.  To do this, you have to focus on being process oriented when it comes to short term goals, while avoiding subjecting yourself to tunnel vision, and remembering the big picture and keeping long term goals in mind.  With all these elements in mind, I'd say my philosophy statement describing leadership is this:  Leadership is a multi-dimensional process by which an individual works with others to accomplish a common goal through the use of effective communication, adaptation, empowerment, and the creation of a common purpose.    

            These elements that comprise my leadership philosophy have all been displayed at different times during our activities in this course.  In every activity, we were able to see how important communication is to succeeding as a group, whether that was in a large group setting like during the golf ball pipe activity, or in a one on one setting like during the, well, I can't remember the name of it, but the one with that weird product that we had to assemble over the phone.  We saw how adaptation, empowerment, and having a common purpose were important during the pipe activity as well.  Because there were so many of us trying to work together at the same time, we all had to make adjustments to one another and our different leadership styles.  We saw how when working in a large group it can be easy for some people's opinions can get put aside, which quickly has the opposite effect of empowerment.  Finally, we saw that when we all united behind the common purpose of just trying to get the golf ball through the pipe, we were able to put personal differences aside and came very close to achieving our goal. 

The Value of Active Listening

            So far out of all our experiences in this class, I think the one that was the most eye opening for me was observing everyone's, including my own, reactions to the activity we did to demonstrate active listening.  In that activity, we had one person designated as the talker, one as the listener, and one as the observer, so everyone got an opportunity to see the activity from every perspective.  As you can imagine, the results were very interesting. 

            My first position in the activity was being the active listener, which proved to be much more difficult that I could have ever thought.  I sat there and listened to my partner talk about an experience she had at work for about seven minutes, which felt like an eternity because of my inability to provide any verbal feedback during that time.  While I tried my best to listen and use non-verbal cues to still engage in the conversation, it was extremely hard to stay completely focused on her and avoid getting distracted by my own thoughts that I wanted to contribute to the conversation.  This was very uncomfortable for me because I usually consider myself to be a good listener, and not being able to speak in the conversation made me realize my flaws as a listener that I hadn't realized before.  I was then interested to observe my two partners interact in the same role. 

            After observing my two partners interact in the active listener role, I could tell how they were equally as uncomfortable with it as I was.  All three of us were visibly uncomfortable with not being able to speak for so long, and this made me realize that to a degree it is human nature to be bad listeners.  I don't know whether it's our egos or just our natural desire for people to think we are intelligent, but most people have a tendency to concentrate much more on what they are going to say next than on actually listening to what is being said. 

            For me, I think this activity helped me see how important it is to practice active listening skills, for both leadership and relational purposes.  A big thing that we've talked about in this class is being open to other people's different perspectives, understanding the people you are working with, and being able to learn from those you are working with through constant feedback.  It's now clear to me that being able to practice active listening is crucial to making these goals a reality, and our activity in class is what helped me to realize this.