Week #12 Learning Leadership

Thursday 04-09-09
By Nick Smith

“Some leaders learn to lead by making mistakes and then reflecting enough on those mistakes to develop principles for the future… another way is to learn the principles based on the mistakes of others.”

With this statement we can see there are two ways to learn leadership. First of all, we can learn by experience. Our leadership skills will improve over time because with time we find out what works the best and what doesn’t work the best. Over time, we also learn people a bit more. So out skills with people will improve after doing wrongs and rights with people. Of course, all of this wont work out unless we are able to actually reflect on these situations and look at them honestly enough to pinpoint flaws and extract the good. The second way to learn is sort of up front learning. We study leadership skills in order to know what to do in certain situations therefore being able to avoid problems as they come. The best way to do leadership in my mind is to combine these two styles. Learn as much leadership theory as you can up front, that way you will have some idea of what to do, but then when you do make mistakes, reflect hard on them and decide what you could do to improve.