In concluding this class, I have gained a new outlook on leadership than the one I had from before. I have learned that leadership isn’t about being in charge and leading a group of people. Leadership is about collectively joining thoughts and coming together to complete a goal. There are many different aspects that go into leadership. You must have patience to deal with different people and ideas. You must be able to sort through these ideas with respect to all of those given and be able to communicate to your team what the plan is.

We have made a finding that followership is just as important, if not more important than leadership itself. Without followers, there’s no leader. But than again, without a good leader, there’s no real reason for the followers. The followers need someone they can rely on to get their ideas across and to depend on to meet a required goal. Being a leader is more than just being in charge. I feel that somebody who tries to take over is not a good leader.

My statement would be what I pretty much said earlier. “Without followers, there’s no leader. But without a good leader, there’s no real reason for the followers”. Throughout this class, we have had many different talks and we got to meet many different kinds of people, all with different values and styles of leadership. I think we’ve all realized that a leader is only as good as their followers. The leader is what makes the plan but the followers are what make their ideas come to life. That is what makes a team successful.

New Outlook of Leadership

One thing that has stuck in my head since hearing it wasn’t from just a single person. This was from a few different people all with the same idea. In one of the first group exercises, Anna kept trying to speak up and get her ideas in but people weren’t listening. And if they were listening, it seemed to have just went in one ear and out the other because they never even took her ideas into account. At the end of the activity we all came together and talked about what went right and what went wrong. Many people agreed that Anna had great ideas and had potential to be a great leader. But than again, in the next activity, it was almost the same exact thing. Anna was trying to explain her ideas to us and people choose to just implement their own again. Now I know that she has a soft voice, but I found it very annoying to see people still being stubborn and not listening, which is something that we talk about often in class. All I could think about is how aggravated id be if people were shutting me out time after time, especially in a class where cooperating with each other is the only way to complete a goal.

            This doesn’t exactly re-frame my outlook on leadership but it somewhat shows me how others deal with leadership and how it affects others in the group. Everyone needs and wants to be heard. Speaking up and voicing your ideas takes courage and when someone is shut down long enough, they will stop sharing their opinions because of fear of getting shut down again. A person can only take so much before they decide to give up. I give Anna credit for being able to put it behind her that quick and to just sit back and let everyone else deal with it.