Leadership Challenge – a Life Learning Inspiration

I have a lot of inspirations today in class that got me thinking about massive of things. I've been constructing my thoughts in my mind and try to write them down making clearly sense. Let's start with the learning points from the exercise itself.

·        The importance of Debriefing and English ability

I agree but still find arguable point of what Paul commented on our English ability - that we should forget about our language accuracy and let our mind flow, coz sometimes a not-so-good-language speaks a God-damn-GOOD-Idea! I AGREE 100%, however, I still find improving our English ability is essential. Because with a not-so-good-language, one may not be able to well-communicate with the audience, then the idea is not delivered in the best way it could be.

I majored in languages myself in college, and I know sometimes wording can cause confusion. I've been trying to improve my English every day, and I know there're endless things to learn in a language, such as vocabulary, slangs, usage, etc. But I also believe in language is just a tool to communicate with people. As long as you can deliver your ideas to one another, then it's good enough. Yet, sometimes I find when communicating with people who have different levels with mine, I get confused, or not able to communicate our ideas freely, or the whole communication process is slowed down because we all try to understand what the other person is trying to say.

So I think, English is still very important and we all should try to improve our languages as a life-long task.

And because of the English ability, it affects our debriefing skills during the exercise as well. If I can understand the content in due time and able to organise all the information at the same time, won't we be able to debrief better? It is the basic skill we should have, and we should enhance it for our own sakes if we want to become a leader in the future.

·        What to debrief? 

So far that I can think of (maybe there're more) from this exercise is that 

1. Organise the information - Key words/info (eliminate unnecessary info)

2. What do we need to do - find out and distribute each task

3. What kind of people we need for each task - categorise

4. When is the deadline for each task - time plan

5. Possible cooperation in each individual/team - organise the responsibilities

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Leader and the expectation

Everybody has certain expectation to the leader as leader has his/her own expectation to others. I think it is better to clarify and make valid communication in the beginning of the task. So everybody knows how to adopt according to different situations.

If I'd do the exercise again, I'll make sure each task is distributed to the best suitable person if possible. And have the people designing the route work together with the people in budget control. Firstly I would make a decision on which places we are going or we are not going as a leader's decision making. Then everybody focus on completing their tasks within due time and budget. After all, the leader is the one who has more knowledge, and in this situation, totally hand-off or free style is not suitable under this task. And the leader, as the one who is most knowledgeable, should at least confirm and evaluate the final route the team makes.

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Personal enriched learning points

The reason I named this article - Life learning inspiration - is because to me, I learnt something old again, and something slightly new :-) To me, this means so much coz my dream is to build a school that helps poor or people who has any kind of potential in what they are good at to be well educated and utilize their skills in every possible way – to make their dreams come true. I've been planning this since I was 17, and one day......one day I will make it happen.

When I was in college in Taiwan, a mentor told me - "Don’t let your passion fade away. Coz it can lead you to do great things." And I think this is something the real world kills over time and I need to remind myself that. I'm very grateful that my college in Taiwan let me learn and experience a lot of leadership skills since 15, we have presentations every day, group work in every subject, public presentations, exchange programs overseas, running student council, found a student club, etc; and once again, all skills and knowledge should be reviewed and re-learnt from time to time. (Life-long learning process)

My college is the only and a leading language institution in Taiwan, but probably the worst profit maker in education business. School is in huge debt because we charge reasonable tuition, and give all our students the best learning environment, professors, facilities, opportunities that we could possibly get. Even the government refused to let us go bankrupt. Its motto is to educate language professionals in Taiwan with "knowledge and personality". Every year, our mandatory courses will have Personality development. This is the quality I found similar from Leadership and Excellence module in WMG. I'm soooo content to realise again that "Knowledge or education which matters is the essence of that you can remember for the rest of your life and spend time on practicing it."

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Lastly, the definition of leadership to me:

True Leadership comes from within. You can't fake a style, not for long.

Meaning: Try to enrich ourselves......... in all possible ways......

: 05 Feb 2010 19:55 |  Tags: Le |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem