1.1. WHAT IS LEADERSHIP?

WHAT IS LEADERSHIP?

   What does leadership mean to you? Try to write your own quote or draw your own picture.

   To me, leadership is a skill, it implicates having the ability to create trustful connections between the members of a community in order to better organise it and to inspire others.

   Moreover, leaders are not born leaders. I would define it as something that can be learnt, because it is believed to be said that you are either born a leader or not, and I totally disagree with this idea. There are people that are chosen as leaders because of their abilities but there are others who learn to be.

   I found this picture that in my opinion includes many important features a good leader should have:

   Can you think of some examples of leaders? Think of some leaders you have worked with (formal or informal leaders). Think about the one you consider the best. What characteristics did they have? What about the worst leader? What characteristics did they have?

    I have met very good leaders both in my school years and at university. One of them was my TFG tutor and French mention teacher. She is French and teaches with a particular style. She always gave us freedom to choose the most stimulating contents for us, the topics we preferred to present, and she wanted creativity to be in the centre of her subjects. She always trusted me, she listened to us and she was one of the most inspiring people I have ever met. Thanks to her, I became aware of my own skills and abilities, and I finally developed incredible projects with amazing results.

   Another leader I remember was the leader of my volunteer group. She had been a Primary teacher for all her life and created this volunteer group for helping immigrant children without resources with their homework and personal worries. I worked with her, first as a teacher, then also as a secretary and finally as a leader and learnt a lot from her leadership skills.

    

    I think these are the characteristics of good leaders, the willingness to inspire others and help them become the best version of themselves, guiding them and giving freedom to make decisions and work for their ambitions.

   I also remember very bad leaders. One of them was a school leader who made decisions by himself, without counting on the other members of the school community. Whenever they expressed their opinion, he disconnected or left the room, without considering any other option. He inspired fear among the community and his work had a bad impact on the working environment. When he left, things started changing.

    And these may be the characteristics of the worst leaders. People are usually afraid of them because they are extremely directive instead of democratic and they do not give much freedom to others. They prefer to make decisions alone and they don’t accept criticism. That is why they are normally being replaced by other types of leaders.

   Considering the pictures about leadership, which ones do you agree the most and the least?

     The ones I agree the most with are:

    - The jigsaw: because I always use this parallelism to speak about how teams should be. Each member should contribute to the group with his knowledge, skills, and attitudes… as a piece of the puzzle. Then, all these contributions together complement each other and create an effective jigsaw. The leader is among them but not in an upper position, because he guides the group participating and making collaborative decisions.

   - The circle: it is something similar as the jigsaw. All the members of the group/community collaborate while the leader, who is in the same position as they are, guides them towards a goal. I like the fact that they are holding hands as a sense of fellowship.

    - The rows: the thing I like the most about this one is that all the members of the community/leadership team are looking in the same direction. They have the same goal so they work together. Maybe I would prefer that they were holding hands because there is no connection between them. The leader raises his hand as a sign of responsibility. Even if all the members should be responsible of the decisions taken in the group, the leader is the one who sticks up and supports the rest of the group.

    The ones I agree the least with are:

   - The leader is on the top and the rest of the members are around him: I don’t like this model as the leader is the traditional figure of “boss”. He is on top, it is a vertical model where there is no place for collaboration in making decisions as he decides everything. It is not a democratic model and normally it doesn’t have a positive impact in the community.

   - The leader is carried by the members of his community in an arrow: this model makes the leader as the power figure, the person in charge of everything while the rest of the community just accepts the decisions he makes. Nevertheless, I like the fact that the arrow indicates the way to the main objective or goal, which is a common one.

    - The leader carries all the weight of his group: all the decisions taken and all the responsibility falls on the leader. He is the one who decides what the others do and the one who works the most. I don’t think this model is appropriate because leaders should not be as “bosses” of everything and the only one responsible of what happens. Moreover, they don’t have to carry the weight of everything as decisions should be collaborative and leadership should be distributed.

    We did this activity in the classroom group and here we can see that the blue post-its indicate the ones we disagreed the most with and the orangeones were the ones we agreed the most with. The answers of the group were similar to my answers, and the explanations given too.