We are now living in a rapidly developing society with multiple industries, which needs leaders to make wise decisions and adjustments to advance the well-being of the all mankind. Therefore, knowing leadership skills is vitally important for the person who wants to make the world better through their own efforts. From my point of view, in the 21st century, leadership is no longer simply some skills and methods about how to lead others, meanwhile, it is no longer only suitable or useful for those leaders, it should be regarded as one kind of graceful and subtle art that needs to be held and practiced by everyone. In one word, leadership is a kind of art - one art that can create maximum social welfare and benefit the largest crowd through personal managerial aptitude. This era needs new kinds of leadership, one more fair, balanced and creative mentality should be held by us to recognize, comprehend and practice leadership.
For an excellent leader, apparently, he/she needs good skills on how to cooperate all kinds of works, to ensure that all parts work well for the purpose of best outcome. Meanwhile, he/she needs capacity to lead teams to successfully achieve the planned goal. To help the team achieve success, he/she needs to make wise decisions from the discussion of the team, assign proper tasks to members based on his thorough knowledge about members and coordinating and handling the working process. Also, an excellent leader can influence others through his/her personal characteristic. He/she can help his members and get them improved in many aspects. Apart from the above skills, four qualities should be owned by an excellent leader, that is L.O.V.E. (Listen, Obligation, Value, Effectiveness) - L is listen, a person with leadership needs to listen to others properly. O is obligation; he/she has the responsibility to lead his/her team towards success through good teamwork. V is value, it means he/she needs to respect others, put himself/herself at a proper position when communicating with members, and E is Effectiveness, he/she must know how to accomplish the assignment in a fast and proper way through different methods. Only when leaders can put L.O.V.E. principle into practice, they can become the excellent ones.
From an excellent leader, I expect to see strong sense of justice, firm determination and orientation for service. I expect to find out their charming personality, their courage to take responsibilities and their spirit of cooperation. I expect to see their decisive decision-making power, wide range of professional knowledge and in-depth understanding of its own industry. Finally, I want to see all the excellent leaders take social responsibilities to help the whole society, to help those people who are still in poverty, to make a better world for the next generation, because they have the strongest ability to change the world.
I had a wonderful experience with one excellent leader Mr. Zhang. He is the director of airline ticket office in Tianhe district, Guangzhou. I had conducted a one-month internship in his office from July to August in 2010, working as a reservationist. In order to meet the financial requirement, each trade needs to be recorded into computer system and also, needs to be written down into notes. At first, I can obey to this rule and make detailed record for each customer, but later, I became impatient about this job, and pay less attention to take down all the information. One day, a customer booked one airline ticket and gave me his information, including his name and ID number. I personally think that as I have typed his information into computers, there is no need to write down his information into notes, which I think is quite troublesome and time-consuming, so I just did it my way. However, this mistake is discovered by Mr. Zhang soon. But he didn’t criticize me right after he found my mistake. He called me to his office after work, talked with me face to face. He told me that because I am a new comer, it can be understandable for me to make mistake, he didn’t want to criticize me in front of lots of people, which he think will definitely hurt me. But he emphasized the importance of recording trade into notes, he mentioned that because computer system has chance to break down or lose files, the notes can save all the information in case of the broken down, so the procedure of taking down trade into notes cannot be omitted. What impressed me most is his high sense of respect and people orientation. He can treat me equally and tolerate my mistakes, which really moved me. As to the lessons I have learnt from him, firstly, I learnt how to respect others and be tolerant to mistakes. Secondly, I learnt that I need to set strict demand on myself and be hard-working rather than think in my own way. Thirdly, I learnt that in order to cope with problems, I need to do it skillfully. Mr. Zhang did a very good job to educate me because he told me the importance logically rather than simple blame on me, which finally achieved very nice outcome.
One of my leadership experiences till now I still remember is that I have successfully led a group consisting of 6 people (including me) for one research topic in ECMC290 course to get full mark on the research final presentation. The situation is that we have problem in task distribution and cooperation before, so that we performed bad on our progress report presentation, and got a very low mark. Under this situation, as the group leader, I need to use my leadership skills to fix the inner relationship among members and make best preparation for the final presentation. Therefore, I make the following adjustment to help achieve the goal:
(a) I constructed a more reasonable task distribution so that each member had approximately equal workload, which can prevent some group members from complaining about their heavy load.
(b) I reconsidered the advantages and drawbacks for each member, distributed different tasks to them so that they can completely devote their talent in the areas they are excellent in.
(c) After I have assigned the tasks, I constantly tracked the stages of their tasks so that I could make sure they can accomplish before deadline.
(d) I intentionally set the deadline for them earlier so that it can prevent the procrastination problem from happening.
(e) Whenever I received the work from one group member, I would thank and appreciate for his/her kind devotion to the group so that they can have high sense of achievement and more willingness to work.
(f) I made it the responsibility for each members (including me) to evaluate the work from others and put forward suggestion for improvement.
(g) After I composed all of our final work together, I scheduled a time that was suitable for us to did rehearsal so that we would not have trouble in turn-taking, and it occurred frequently in our progress presentation.
After I made the above adjustments, my group members performed quite well on final presentation and successfully got a full mark for our hard work. I learnt from this leadership experience that as a leader, I need to trace all the work in time, kindly concern about the working progress of each member, and put more effort into my task.
As a leader, I think I have the following strengths and talents:
(a) I am enthusiastic about the things that I am really interested in. I can devote myself into those things and have determination in achieving the goals related to them.
(b) I have self-judgment about whether one thing is good or bad and the morality or immorality of a certain event.
(c) I am delighted to communicate with people from different aspects. Learn from them to see how I can improve myself for the sake of becoming a better person.
(d) I am always glad to help people who are in trouble, provide them with necessary help.
But on the other hand, I know that I have lots of weaknesses, they are:
(a) Sometimes, I am a little bit emotional. I can be very nice to the people who I have judged as person with good characters, but maybe indifferent to the person that I have emotionally judged as having bad characters.
(b) I have trouble in procrastination. Sometimes, I cannot fulfill tasks in time or just hastily finish them right before the deadline because of procrastination.
(c) I cannot stick to a good practice that I think it is good for me, providing the situation that I have not built up that kind of habit before.
Therefore, I still need the following improvement:
(a) I need to eliminate my simple emotional judgment on the characters of one person. Try to use logical judgment on him/her after a relatively long period communication and contact.
(b) I must cope with the procrastination problem well for the sake of my bettering fulfillment of tasks and better building up of good characters.
(c) If I have considered one thing as good for my physical or mental development, I need to stick to it and see whether the outcomes are consistent with my expectation, after which I should make adjustment.
In order to become a better leader, I have made the following concrete resolutions:
(a) I plan to communicate and contact with some persons that I have previously judged as person with less patience by using my emotional judgment. Try to see whether my emotional judgment gives me accurate expectations. Learn to see things from their perspective.
(b) I need to put one method on dealing with my procrastination problem into practice. That is finishing the tasks before the deadline by intentionally setting it earlier for me.
(c) I should insist on the habit of drinking two bottles of milk everyday for a long time since I am fully convinced that milk can bring me lots of nutrition, thus is good for my health. Since body is the basis of future.
(d) I should strengthen relationship with others by sharing cooperative goals and power with them. I need to show my trust in others by distributing important and difficult tasks to them.
(e)I need to enhance my ability of seeking innovative way to change, grow and improve, and my courage of learning from previous mistakes for the purpose of better self-development.
(f) I will try to put forward some innovative ways to achieve one goal before actions taken. Analyze their feasibility and finally select one to fulfill that task.
(g) I need to take detailed record of the mistakes I have made for my latter introspection and further actions for improvement. Meanwhile, I need to observe others; find out their creativity and innovation.
I firmly believe that if I can insist on the above improvement and make progress step by step, finally I can become a qualified leader.
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