The Habits of a Leader

Hi!  My name is Danny and I am going into my junior year at the University of Minnesota, and my second year with the UY.  I want to share an experience that gave me the opportunity to learn what it means to be a true leader.  The summer before my sophomore year in high school, I was invited to attend a leadership summit at the University of California, Los Angeles.  The summit was created by the People to People International & Ambassadors Program, a non-profit organization that aims to bridge cultural and political borders through education and exchange.  At this summit, I met individuals from countries including England, China, and India.  It was an eye-opener to see such a great diversity of people coming together to learn the insights of true leadership.

One of the events that was set up by the leadership summit was a workshop called Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens.  The purpose of the workshop was to help teenagers learn more about being an effective leader.  The Seven Habits were: 1) Be Proactive 2) Begin with the End in Mind 3) Put First things First 4) Think Win-Win 5) Seek to Understand First, then to be Understood 6) Synergize 7) Sharpen the Saw.  I want to go in depth on a few of the seven habits, mainly my top three that I feel are the most important. 

The first habit I want to discuss is Be Proactive.  Everyone knows that being proactive means taking initiative, but the workshop taught me that it is more than that.  Being proactive also means being able to accept responsibilities for your own behavior and making decisions with certain values in mind, rather than using your emotions.  A takeaway from this habit is that effective leaders will accept what they did wrong and take on any consequences that comes with it.  The second habit is Sharpen the Saw.  This habit is about constantly reflecting on the four basic areas of life: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.  For effective leaders, it is necessary to constantly think about how they can better those areas.  Leaders need to understand how to run their own lives first before running a team.  The third habit is Seek to Understand First, then to be Understood.  What this habit taught me is that listening to what others have to say is a priority over expressing what you have to say.  For effective leaders, they listen to their team’s ideas before replying with their own.  This allows true communication and relationship building within the team and the leader. 

The Seven Habits workshop was just one of the many events that the summit included which allowed me to learn more about being a true leader.  Before I attended the summit, I had a very simplistic view of leadership.  Leaders are people who come up with all of the ideas for their teams, and the teams help the leaders complete that idea.  They always have the last say on things, and their decisions are final.  After the summit, I learned that true leaders do more than that.  True leaders not only lead a team, but they can also take a seat and allow one of their team members to take control.  True leaders are always seeking to learn from others, and not just think that they know it all. 

The leadership summit at UCLA has helped me progress to become the leader that I want to be.  I thought that it was a valuable experience that I would do all over again.  I used the knowledge I learned at this summit to be proactive about looking for a job, and end up at the UY. This has opened the door to even more leadership opportunities for me. Now that I have shared my experience, what is your experience with leadership?  Do you feel that you are a better leader because of that experience?  Share it below!