Embedded Files
"The pessimist complains about the wind.
The optimist expects it to change.
The leader adjusts the sails."
- John Maxwell.
What does leadership mean to me?
My sense of leadership was formed through many different experiences in my life up until now. Some helped me understand how to be an effective leader while others taught me how to connect with others. However, every leadership-like experience I went through has had one common concept: that being a great leader means to be actively serve and involve oneself further than what is expected. This means that it is not enough to just serve the people that you lead and guide, but one must also become involved with the tasks, problems, and processes that the people they lead deal with, just as they deal with their own actions. In doing so, leaders can not only lead but participate and understand all sides and perspectives of something. In other words, they have balance.
Connection to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
These characteristics of a great leader directly translate to practicing, advocating, and even fighting for equity, inclusion, and anti-oppression. Leaders are not those who sit back and let others do all the work or fault people in environments that contain unfair situations or actions. Combatting this, leaders must understand and exercise equity, and not just equality. Additionally, leaders understand that environments are the most efficient and happiest when everyone is involved, meaning inclusion is a key piece to success. Finally, being a fair and unbiased leader is all about balance. Understanding how concepts like racism, sexism, ageism, and other oppressive social constructs affect environments where leaders work in directly correlates to how those environments succeed.
Me at the 2024 iSchool Dean's Club Celebration representing the Informatics Undergraduate Association where informatics students, faculty, staff, and alumni come together to recognize the work and contributions of our community.
Evolution of leadership over time.
My understanding of leadership and the qualities that help make a great leader can be attributed to my experiences in my past life such as coaching, mentoring, and facilitating. Through my high school and first year of college, I understood what it meant to be a leader, but not how to achieve such a thing. Thus, I went through the motions of “leadership” with a fixed mindset and thinking that leadership was binary in its job and effectiveness. Throughout my second and third year of college I discovered new leadership qualities that helped de-mystify my previous understanding of leadership and built a new concept for me to grasp hold of which is that leaders are those who understand all perspectives of a situation (or balance). This helped push me to make better decisions and approach situations with more enthusiasm and eagerness, both to learn and perform.
Connect with me.
Google Sites
Report abuse