I will admit that in my line of work, I didn’t think that leadership training was absolutely necessary. I started it for my own personal betterment. I always admired great leaders, and thought one is either born a leader or not. In my limited knowledge of this field , I looked at leadership from the trait approach, rather than the skills approach. Over the last couple of years though, I have witnessed some colleague and superiors who have exhibited leadership skills in situations where ‘designated’ leaders have failed to live up to the expectations. This prompted me to think that maybe there is more to leadership than being born with a set of characteristics. Also, there are no fixed set of traits that maketh a leader. This has been confirmed to me with the knowledge I gained abut servant leadership and transformational leadership.
This biggest take away for me from this course has been that there is no one-size-fits-all in leadership. A leader can be a follower and vice versa depending in the circumstances. Also there is no right or wrong approach, as long as it is applied in the appropriate situation. Now that I am more aware of the different leadership theories/ approaches, I have noticed that I myself change my leadership approach depending on the situation and the circumstance; sometimes depending on the people I am working with. There are some people with whom a transactional approach works better, while with others the transformational approach is more effective. At the end of the day leadership is all about people, and understanding what drives them.
I have enjoyed reading posts from my colleagues; they have been very insightful and informative. I have learned a lot from reading their interpretation of the course material. I also found it very interesting that there were different things that inspired us in the book “Light from many lamps”! We all picked up different authors and stories to reflect on and take our life lessons from. I am grateful to our Prof for helping us navigate through this doorway into the leadership learning process.
It certainly has been an interesting journey. I agree totally with your conclusion that there is no one size fits all approach to this. Yes, there are different styles and or approaches but ultimately we each need to decide what kind of leaders we want to be and live that out. It’s important the decision is made early otherwise you could always end up searching without actually being bold and effective in the approach you choose. That’s one of the things I have enjoyed about this course immensely is although there is a lot of academic studies, it has been underpinned by reflection of past, present, and future leadership scenarios and responsibilities. Thanks for sharing.