Leaders are Just Really Good Followers

It seems to me from reading all these leadership articles that I have a lot to learn in the aspect of leadership itself. I believe everyone has a different approach to leadership, but the hard part is understanding what kind of leadership to portray in certain instances. From reading and personal experience I believe you must be versatile and very flexible in the leadership world, due to the different personality traits of your followers and the environment in which you work. Also I believe you must know how to follow as much as you know how to lead, maybe even more so on the “following” part.

According to the test results I pretty much bombed the test when it comes to the leadership abilities that are specific to the survey. I had to ask myself does that mean I will be a bad leader? Then I think of all the times that it was my job to lead and I think I guess I did alright. Didn’t I? One of the test stated I scored high in the introvert section of the test. I always knew that I was kind of a loner and kept to myself, but I did that when around new people that I didn’t know that well. If I hung around my lifelong friends then I am more open and relaxed when socializing inside my group. I guess this is considered a trait of introvertism. And I can accept that and I will try and put myself in more situations to where I go out and seek a conversation with a stranger or colleague that I don’t know more personally. I must learn to have a better understanding and stronger people skills and these articles helped me realize I have a lot of work to do in order to be a balanced leader and member of a team.

I read a quote once but I can’t remember from where. It stated “To know where your going, you must know where you have come from”. Most of us were not born into leadership, at least I know I wasn’t. We were born into being a follower. If you take into account the whole nature verses nurture concept, you can see leadership and following in the same aspect. We grow up following whatever guardian raised us from a child to the person we are today. Along the way we learned from our environment around us and continue to grow even today from new experiences and mistakes made. I believe this is where the leadership ability evolves from follower to leader.

There was a lot of information in this module so its hard to pick out any one specific part but a couple things caught my eye and stood out to me. In the “Leadership Do’s and Don’ts” article it states “if your motives are pure then your actions surely reflect that”. And this one “Leadership is goal oriented with followers working towards a common goal”. I never really grasped these two phrases in real life scenarios but now that I look back, I see that I had some good leaders that implemented a lot of the techniques in these articles and probably didn’t even know it. So if I take anything from this class it will be that there is more than one way to be a leader and the most important is to be a good follower so that when you do become a leader you know what it means to be on the other side of that leadership.