Li 3
Brian Li
Mr. Gasaway and Mrs. Canuteson
Leadership Class
26 October 2014
Leadership Reflection 3
To me, I am a product of the sum of all my environmental reactions and thus learning from those consequences I realize my own personality, or my strengths and weaknesses. I fully believe that making connections will help people along their journey in life, and thus a part of me is very extroverted and likes to make personal connections to people. However I also have a little part of me that is introverted so I understand the opposite side of the spectrum when it comes to human- human interaction. I believe acceptance and understanding of many viewpoints is a key part of being a leader. This is just one tenant of what I believe a good leader should be, and to put into words the rest of the tenants would take up many pages of paper. Therefore, I try to condense them all into this one mission statement: For the greater glory of God I believe in a whole community of people to be the epicenter of prosperity and seeing myself as a very influential part of this community will try to uphold the moral values of Christ while also upholding my own personal beliefs so that everyone may together bring about a prosperous and peaceful future for my family, my friends, and myself.
The values that are important to me have a lot to do with the character and personality of people. If they are good people but make mistakes in their life then I absolutely will accept them into my life and just try to help them in any way I can to make them better. If they are good people but do wrong things and don’t have any remorse for those things then I hesitate to accept them into my life. As a servant of Christ and a very servant- like leader myself I realize that having a good environment to grow in is essential to making me the best person I can be. The whole concept of being a servant leader is, “a paradox, an approach to leadership that runs counter to common sense” (page 219), and I love that. The concept of having not a single person as a leader but making a leader who leads for a period of time before letting others take the lead role and becoming a follower himself is the exact type of behavior I encourage when I lead. This also fits into my older statement about how I lead because if the servant leader inherently follows the strongest candidate for a position the strengths and weaknesses of the group really stand out.
Having a leader who upholds their personal beliefs is admirable, no doubt, but having those ambitions pointed in the right direction is what I think is most admirable. Hitler was a great leader, however his moral compass pointed in the completely wrong direction and so his leadership was fruitless. In my own life I want to make sure I think about how my moral compass points and I want to believe that I have the general direction of God guiding me to the epitome of what I can be. Becoming a servant leader is just one step in the right direction, because Jesus came as a follower not to be followed. He “place[d] the good of followers over [his] own self- interests and emphasized moral behavior toward followers”(page 220). After all, if this type of leadership was good enough for Jesus its good enough for me.
Keeping all of this in mind, my statement about how I go about leadership and how I think a leader should be stands: Using the strengths and weaknesses of a group a leader can blend all of the attributes of his/her team together to form a better conglomerate. The way that a leader does this is up to him/her, but for me I will use attributes of a servant leader and my mission statement to help make myself a more rounded leader and person in general.