Yourself & your best qualities or leadership skills are - Essay Example

Running Head: Leadership Skills Leadership Skills [Institute’s Leadership Skills Leadership according to John Maxwell (1998) is“influence- nothing more and nothing less.” It is not just a quality but also an ability of an individual to influence other to work together in harmony for the achievement of an objective. Leadership skills of an individual can be either inbuilt or acquired through learning and experiences. These skills either inbuilt or learned are evaluated on the parameters of certain defined qualities of leadership.
As far as I am concerned, I learned at an early age to take charge and responsibility of a situation due to having younger siblings. I realized that if I will work upon the ability of mine I could become a good leader. In this struggle to become an individual with good and strong leadership, I learned a lot. According to numerous others and me, the best qualities of mine are communication and emotional intelligence.
Over the period with various experiences, I learnt that good communication is not just about presenting ideas in a better way but is also about good skills of listening and understanding other person point of view without any mental hindrance and pre-conceived blockage. Only an individual who is able to listen to others better will be able to make other listen to him because communication is a two-way street. Emotional intelligence helped me to understand the background, importance and value people assign to their beliefs and perception regarding any subject. This understanding helped me to communicate better by helping me to develop my communication content in a more correct manner so that it does not harm the initiative by being disregardful to the individual being communicated to.
Besides these, the most important quality of a leader is his vision and strategy towards the goal and about its achievement procedure (What are Good Leadership Skills, 2007). It is necessary for a leader to have vision to see the long-term effects of the strategies in place and the future need for the organization. Only when a leader would be able to develop his strategies in regards of future benefits and goals he would be able to lead his team in a better way. This again is something, which I am learning with time and experience, and in this regard, experience is the best teacher.
I firmly believe that realizing the importance of teamwork is an essential attribute of a good leader. This is because if a leader were not able to realize the importance and power of teamwork, then there would not be much difference in a leader and a dictator. A team of qualified individuals is like a powerhouse that is able to achieve every goal even those, which are impossible for a single individual to achieve. This is because a team provides a collection of unique and varied ideas and perspective that helps to achieve the goal in a better way. I am a strong supporter of teamwork and like to work in a team as it provides a chance to learn and grow more and more.
An example of a situation, which highlights my leadership skills, would be of when my teacher gave me the responsibility of organizing the annual debate competition of school. As a team leader, I selected the team of my highly responsible and focused fellow students so that it would be easy for us to work in unison and achieve our goal without any glitch. As the name of the school was at stake and my teacher did not provide me a free hand so I kept a close watch on my team members but kept their individuality and skills in mind and assigned them the task that they could easily do. For example, the persons with creative skills were assigned the task to design invitation cards, person with good esthetic sense were assigned the decoration of auditorium etc. I believe that realizing the special abilities of my each team member and my good communication skills made me a good team leader in that situation.
References
Maxwell, J. (1998). The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. Retrieved on September 02, 2012: http://www.u-leadership.com/the_21_irrefutable_laws_of_leadership-w.pdf
What Are Good Leadership Skills. (2007). 10 Great Leaders Quality. Retrieved on September 02, 2012: http://www.what-are-good-leadership-skills.com/example-leadership-skills.html Read More