Leadership for the Twenty-First Century - Essay Example

Alien Culture The word leadership may have a different meaning to different individuals around the universe, and different materials in different circumstances. Generally, leaders assist themselves and other people to do the correct things. They give direction, create a vision that is inspiring, and come up with something that didn’t exist before. Leadership involves giving directions to where you aspire to go and be successful as a team or an organization. It should be dynamic, and fun, and inspires the group that is being led.

Management skills are essential to leaders so as to enable them to direct their people to the right track of success in a way that is efficient (Rost, Joseph C 17). Back after finishing high school, my father took me to a construction site where he was a supervisor. He always knew all I wanted was to become an engineer like him, so he thought it was a great opportunity for me to have some insight into what takes place in construction projects and have a firsthand experience of the life of an engineer. For a moment I thought he wanted me to know how difficult it is in the work environment so that I could have a change in heart and follow a different profession.

The first day he introduced me to everybody at the site but he never mentioned I was his child; maybe he didn’t want me to get any favors. I was to learn the hard way. I was introduced as a student who is in industrial training. At the site, the workers were divided into different groups that had specific responsibilities. I came to realize later that my father actually assigned me to the worst-performing group at that moment. We were always behind schedule and this led to delays in the other activities that followed.

We were always on the receiving end from the management and our jobs were at stake, we had to do something really fast to change the situation. I remember that evening as I headed I was thinking of how efficiently we can organize ourselves to achieve efficiency and to be always on time. Then it hit me that maybe we can specialize i.e. every person to do what they can do best within a very short time, I also realize that we can do some activities simultaneously by doing this. That night I spent the better of the time strategizing how best we can archive this.

At least I knew the strengths and weaknesses of each and everyone, so I was in a position best arrange them. I came up with the perfect plan that not even the management had thought of but I was not going to share it with them, not even my father. I realized for this to be successful, it will require a lot of discipline, confidence, faithfulness, and confidence from all of us, but most importantly, we had to work as a team. Before I slept, I sent each and every one of them a text message requesting them to come early in the morning for I had something I wanted to share with them.

I was the first one to arrive but it didn’t take long before everybody was present. I gathered enough confidence to address them as a group for this was my first time. I explained myself perfectly well to them and they all liked my idea we all agreed to try it out if it could change things around for us. Thankfully I had already assigned everybody the area to specialize in so it didn’t take us time to discuss that. We immediately executed my plan and true to what I had visualized e were way ahead of time and we achieved efficiency.

After days our great efforts were noticed by the management and they were very happy with us to the point they even gave us encouragement in terms of bonuses. After a while, they adapted the same for all the groups and most importantly our group emerged as the best-performing group. I can relate this to great leadership because I was able to come up with something that didn’t exist before, shared my vision, and inspire my colleagues to actually execute it in the most efficient way enabling us to realize success.