Leadership

Knowledge

My leadership style is balanced between consensus and directive. I understand how to balance different opinions and make sure everyone has their voice heard. Many times I like to take an informal leadership role and direct people. I do ensure that I am following only consensus leadership in those times. However, when I am in a formal position, I will put my foot down and utilize directive leadership. I like to take a data driven approach and make sure that my decisions are justifiable beyond "I said so." I try my best to make sure that things run in spite of me, not because of me.

Evidence

To evidence my ideals on leadership you can read two of my papers.

Position Paper (link)

This paper, written at the beginning of my freshman year, demonstrates the evidence based approach I make towards making decisions. We were asked to analyze Oprah Winfrey's Leadership Academy for Girls. Rather than taking a perspective of whether or not I feel like it was a good decision, I found a way to utilize evidence to analyze emperically whether or not it was a good decision. This means my analysis is not dependent on me alone.

Leadership Philosophy Paper (link)

This paper, written during my sophomore year, demonstrates my leadership philosophies. In this paper, I expound upon how one should lead and the kind of culture they should create. My thesis in this paper is that a leader should create an "us vs. the problem" culture and not "the leader vs. the people" culture. I analytically demonstrate this need and do this through anecdotes from my life.

Application

In my own life, I have been a leader in many contexts but my biggest one has been as the Youth Volunteer Coordinator at my temple's summer camp. I was a youth volunteer myself for 4 years and this year was my 2nd year as coordinator. My co-coordinator and myself had to balance consensus and directive leadership as we had expectations of the youth volunteers but still wanted to let them voice their opinions. To that end, this year, we implemented daily debriefs where we would sit down with the volunteers and hear about their problems. This was incredibly successful and helped them feel involved.