My vision of leadership

Introduction

This blog will compare my vision of leadership in the past and nowadays. Moreover, a specific leader who inspired me and some important feedback from my colleagues may help me to futher my leadership skills. Finally, a conclusion will be given to summarize my opinions of leadership.

Previous vision of leadership

According to a book, I simply defined leadership as an ability to lead other members in a team or even in an organization in the past (Tracy, 2014). To be more specific, leadership stands for authority which means leaders have power to control in any situations they may face. Futhermore, the management of leadership could be step by step because subordinates are led orderly. For example, some excellent employees can get rewards but punnishments will simultaniously be given to those people who perform bad in the company.

The man inspired me

However, after reading the case study about Ricardo Semler, my vision of leadership must be changed. Firstly, Semler is an irregular leader. For instance, he can work anywhere so that his workers can not find him at office for a month. Then, the most important thing make him be succeed is he shows respects to all his colleagues. It is undoubted that the relationship between the manager and subordinates can be more close if they respect each other. Next, Semler will give freedom that any other companies cannot provide for their emplolyees. For example, the most amazing idea from Semler is he allows people to apply a holiday for maximum three years in any reasons (Semler, 1993). Last but not least, there are no key persons in his company because he said that key persons may affect the performance of a team. What it means is what individuals do will truly impact the development of the company.

Feedback from colleagues

It is clear that 360 Degree Feedback is an effictive approach to give comprehensive and useful feedback to any people (Ward, 1997). Based on this theory, my colleagues have also given me some precious feedfack after being a leader in some activities and doing researches in our chosen industry, e-commerce. One of the main feedback is I need to make enough preparations as a leader when we have group activities during class. For instance, if we have a disccusion about a case study in seminar, I must firstly make sure about what should we do and then arrange other members to devide their jobs. This suggestion may improve my efficiency of leading others. In addition, I receive a feedback about responibility for our research in e-commerce. Specifically, we need to make some interviews on different people who working for e-commerce companies. As a leader, I neither choose interviewees from other industries nor ask colleagues to interview in random. On the contrary, I should be responsible for selecting interview targets and make a specific interview schedule in order to get high quality results about e-commerce business.

leadership skills

Definetely, there are various of leadership skills provided for managements. In this part of the blog, I will illustrate two important skills that I want to develop. The first one is to show a sense that you belong to a team (Mullins, 2005). It is obvious that teamwork plays an important role in running a team. That means no one especially the leader can work without a team (Gregory, 2013). The second one is to communicate with your members in patience (Adair, 2010). This is an efficient skill for a leader to provide an opportunity for subordinates to express their opinions. Fortunately, I had an experience of using this leadership skill in my university life. I took part in the “Market Simulation” as a leader when in my second year in university. At that time, I communicated with my team members everyday and got some great ideas from them. With the help of my lovely friends, we finally won the “Best Creativity Award” in this simulation. Undoubtedly, this successful event encouraged me to promote this skill in the future.

Conclusion

To conclude, my vision of leadership has changed after I learnt some professional knowledge from my MBA lessons. To be honest, if I have a chance lo be led as a leader like Ricardo semler, my passion of working may go to the peak because I gain respect and have enough freedom. Based on some theories, in order to develop my leadership skill, I will deal with any problems as a team and try to give an useful feedback to all my colleagues (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977). From the point of my view, except imitating others’ leadership approaches, I need to form my own leading style because I would like to be a creative leader in the future.

References

Adair, J. (2010). Develop your leadership skills. Philadelphia: Kogan Page.

Gregory, H. (2013). Teamwork. North Mankato, Minn.: Capstone Press.

Mullins, L. (2005). Management and organisational behaviour. Harlow, England: Prentice Hall/Financial Times.

Semler, R. (1993). Maverick. New York, NY: Warner Books.

Tracy, B. (2014). Leadership. New York: American Management Association.

Tuckman, B. and Jensen, M. (1977). Stages of Small-Group Development Revisited. Group & Organization Management, 2(4), pp.419-427.

Ward, P. (1997). 360-degree feedback. London: Institute of Personnel and Development.