I believe that leadership can come from many different places and can be defined in many different ways but one of my favorite quotes is from Alan Keith of Genentech and it states, “Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen.” I like this quote because it doesn’t state that there is an authoritative power and put all of the pressure on one person, that a lot of definitions do, but instead shows that a team can instead have more than one leader contribute to the overall success.
The way that I am a leader is more of a democratic and participative way because I want to learn more about what the team ultimately wants to do and run off of that instead of just bringing my own perspective. Two heads are better than one is how I think about it because no two minds think the same way. An example of this is when I was captain of my soccer team in high school. To be an effective leader in sports, like business, you have to have the persistence to win and make your team believe that you have what it takes to win. The way I did this is I am a very outspoken person and do not like to play favorites so I was able to connect with the whole team, instead of just one line.
As I have said above, in my 5 strengths, I am a consistent person that gives everybody the same amount of respect. I definitely think that I was successful in being a leader for my soccer team because I was able to consistently respect the players on the team and in turn gained the respect back. I think this also is true for business in a lot of ways because if you cannot receive/demand the respect that you need from your team then there will be biases and failure in your team dynamics. There will be no communication and that is the team’s life line. This is why I like Alan Keith’s definition of leadership because I believe it is very similar to my way of being a leader and the goal is for everybody to contribute or else you don’t have a team and might have as well done it yourself. Usually this doesn’t work and you will have something mediocre instead of “extraordinary”.
