This activity is designed to help you find your “personal best” performance or behavior as a leader. Once you know and understand how you are when you’re at your very best, then you can work to be at that very best in all that you do. Please write freely, but also be very open and honest with yourself. You grow as a leader from a greater awareness of your own self as a leader. First, think about a time when you “performed” your very best as a leader. Think about what we talked about in class on what makes a leader, a leader (so this time doesn’t have to be when you held a “leadership position,” simply when you were leading). Your experience can be during any point in your life. You just have to find a point when you were at your very best. Some experiences you might consider are something you led at school, in the community, or at home. You might think of times when you were involved in sports, working a job, volunteering, acting in a leadership role within your family, participating in a religious activity, being part of a group, sports team or club, or maybe you just “emerged” as a leader in a particular situation. You might have been recognized for your work, or maybe not. The experience you decide on doesn’t matter as much as what you did to be your very best as a leader.
Here are some things you may want to consider in your paper . . .
Set the stage and write a brief description of that experience including the organization, the people involved, the nature of the project or situation, and the challenges you faced. The situation could have been a 5-minute response to an emergency situation, or your experience could have last more than a year.
What are the actions you took as a leader that made a difference? What did you do as a leader that mobilized your group or organization to get extraordinary things done? How did you engage others? How did you keep others motivated, especially when things didn’t go as planned? What were the results?
What were the major lessons you learned about leadership from this experience? If you were going to give someone else advice about being a leader, based on your own experience, what would you share with that person? Based on what you have learned so far in this course, are there any leadership principles or practices you used in your example? If you had to do it all over again, would you do the same thing, or make some changes? Do you have any regrets?