Final Reflection

S Fahmy LDR2010

Introduction

My name is Suzanne Fahmy, i am a junior at the University of South Florida. At the beginning of the semester I had a whole other point of view about leadership. I originally thought that leadership was a trait that cannot be taught, you're either born a natural leader or you're just not. After I took the Leadership Fundamentals class I learned that many characteristics could be taught for a person to become a leader. I cannot say I am 100% sure that this is the case but studies have shown that a person can in fact grow up to learn these characteristics. Ones like public speaking, communication skills,…

My philosophy always included a solo leadership, one that involves only one leader and not more. During class I learned about the shared leadership, the relational leadership model and many other notions; but the point is I learned that being a leader doesn’t mean doing everything on your own but it means taking charge and guiding a certain group of people while respecting them, letting them contribute their ideas, and listen to what they have to say.

Values

My 3 core values are trust, approval and diversity. I believe that as a leader I need to have some kind of trust towards the people working with me and also gain everyone’s trust, or at least everyone that is following me. They have to have confidence in me and I also have to confide in them. For a leader to become a leader he has to be credible and that is also another sub-point to my first core value. My second one is approval and that can be viewed as acceptance from the people following me and for me to accept them to follow me but it also means having an open minded and accepting new ideas and different ideas from your own. Finally, my last one is diversity, and to me that means different cultures, various languages and people from all around the world from different countries

Leaders think we're all winners

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s My first takeaway is not to put too must trust in my colleagues when it comes to winning or losing. No such thing as we’re all winners. When we played the X and Y game, all teams agreed on something and then two teams did the exact opposite, therefore setting the other two teams to lose. It was definitely a fun game but for someone who is very competitive like myself, it wasn’t so much fun when we lost.

No denial in leadership

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My second takeaway would have to be an activity that we did outside with our TA Amber, that involved all students to pick a side that represents whether they would do or did the told action. You think you know something until you learn you have no clue about it. I was surprised to see how different we all thought about things. Culture definitely plays a huge role in our decision making process as students.

A leader respects everyone around them

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Another takeaway I had from this class was how as students we managed to respect one another and listen to each other no matter how different our views were on a specific point. There were no mean girls scenarios.

A leader does't give up

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An “aha moment” or a moment I won’t forget is when our prof said he never had such an engaged group of people in his class and when we played the X and Y game, he said he never had a class that made it do different on themselves. You don’t need to complicate your world my friend.

Leadership can be taught

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My last takeaway from this class has to do with all the material I learned in during the semester. I never thought I was going to learn that many things about leadership.

Commitment

My experience throughout the class is going to help lead my new style of leadership. I learned many notions and forms to use to become a better leader; which I will eventually put to trial once I am in a leadership position. I definitely had a paradigm shift during our lessons, I don’t think I will ever use the same approaches I used before. I am more open to new ideas now, more respectful towards other opinions and more acceptant to criticism.