Personal Mission Statement
How students define leadership. Many students also describe their "core values" and why these values are important to them.
Peter Northouse describes leadership in this way: “Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.”
Based on this description, I have come to adopt Peter Northouse’s leadership definition as the basis of my own leadership definition. Further, to me, leadership is when a person, whether through legitimate power or more importantly referent power is in a position to lead a group of individuals towards a common, ending goal.
Leadership is an asset that can be considered continuous learning. In order to achieve the common, ending goal, a leader needs to adapt to the times, and in order to do this one must be open to learning new styles of leadership. Continuing this lifelong learning of leadership is important because leadership in its entirety is a highly transferable skill. Personally, by developing my self-awareness and interpersonal skills, I can work to have greater knowledge about myself. With this better understanding of myself, I can understand my strengths and weakness as a team leader as well as a team player. Also, by being more self-aware, I will become more in tune of how I interact with my peers and how my interpersonal skills play a role in my interactions.
Connecting with how I view and define leadership is how I make leadership decisions. Throughout this program I have discovered my core and supporting values. My core value in which I aim to base my daily decisions on is integrity. Whether those decisions are a routine choice or an ethical dilemma, integrity is my freely chosen core value because it is needed for a leader to do the right thing over doing things right.
To be a leader with strong core values, I feel honesty, responsibility, and inner harmony are key supporting values of integrity. To have integrity, one must be honest to their peers and their environment, responsible with their words and actions, and have inner harmony with themselves. In my everyday life, I try to think before I make a decision. If a choice I make does not reflect my core and supporting values, then I either need to reevaluate my choices or the position I am in. Integrity and its supporting values provide me with a basic structure on which to make my decisions from leadership to daily conflicts.
