Developing Leaders Requires Community Envolvement

This I believe. I believe that education is the key to become an effective leader. Through experience and observation of other leaders both excellent and poor gives each of us an equal opportunity to become a leader.

I believe that leadership is a continuous circle in which leaders never stop learning and developing throughout their lives. I believe that in order to be a leader, one has to affect those around him or her with ideologies, actions, values, and morals to create a desire for others to follow. A majority of leadership is knowing one’s self intrapersonally, which will give potential followers a realistic view of who the leader is and what he or she is really about. A leader knowing thy self intrapersonally will allow for leaders and followers to develop interpersonally creating a reciprocal process where by leaders affect followers and followers affect leaders.

Throughout my life I have experienced and witnessed both effective and ineffective leadership. Different leaders have affected me in positive ways and negative ways. Regardless of either experience type I always try to sort the nuggets of good and bad into my internal hard drive to use as reference of what type of leader I want to be and become. As a young boy, I understood the difference between both right and wrong, good and bad. Its wasn’t until I grew older that I understood the value of the community I grew up in, the leaders that made up my community, and the effects those two components had on my development as a leader. There were many leaders in my community who lead by their ideas, actions, values, and morals. One of my High schools coaches directed me by his beliefs about responsibility, dedication, and teamwork. My mother, a single parent lead by her actions of hard work, determination, and sacrifice. A church youth leader showed me how honesty and integrity was a way to lead by example to display moral and ethical leadership, while earning the trust of others. As mentors of my community each individual’s leadership gave me positive nuggets. I believe each leader’s nuggets of leadership were their way of training and ensuring there would be future and foundation for my development as a replacement or leader in society.

To further my development as a future leader is now up to me. Growing intellectually will require that I continue to learn in both formal and informal learning environments. I have created a template from the above leadership qualities and I realize that old qualities and new qualities will move and changes in regards to level of importance based on my life-long development as a leader. I also believe that it is a leader’s responsibility to mentor future leader to ensure there is a replacement. I understand that effective leadership is critical of success to be achieved in any organization. Just like leaders in my past I want to affect others by my ideologies, actions, values, and morals of positive leadership.