Leadership At The Start Of This Semester - 1680 Words

At the start of this semester, I had a very narrow understanding on what leadership was and what leadership could do. I was always under the impression that leaders were cultivated through a series of trials and tribulations where this single individual’s vision was faced with extreme difficulties. Through this course, I have learned leaders are, in fact, created, but not through the narrow lens I always saw with. Leaders can be created through the need for leadership, by cultivating leadership traits in individuals, and even from the spontaneity of challenging situations. Our scope of learning leadership was expansive this semester: we first identified the definition of leadership having to include leaders, followers, and the situation,†¦show more content†¦Leadership requires followers. Followership is the ability to align one’s objectives with the objectives of the leader and actively participating in making the leader’s vision come true. Dr. Prince a nd Robert Kelley taught us that even followers are dynamic and can act differently depending on what kind of follower they are. This concept of different types of followers is extremely important because leaders need to be able to adapt their strategy in dealing with followers. For instance, a leader will work with an exemplary follower differently than a leader would work with a pragmatic follower. The exemplary follower embodies everything a leader would want in a follower and trusts these followers to actively pursue success for the vision. A leader would not have to check in and intrinsically motivate these individuals; however, for pragmatic followers, it is the duty of the leader to let pragmatic followers know they can take risks for the betterment of the vision. Another key characteristic of leadership that I believe has to be constant through leaders and followers is the act of being ethical. As we have learned in class, ethics does not have a tangible definition because it varies between people and organization. Dr. Prince provided us the best framework to view ethics: virtues. Virtues are universal; we can see virtues exist through different kinds of people, different civilizations, and different organizations. For instance, many virtues exist in