The Pursuit of Improvement in My Development of Leadership

Leadership has long been an interest of mine. From a young age I excelled as captain of my hockey team, and preferred to always be the team leader in school projects and extracurricular activities. As a young adult I wrote music and lead a band through some success. Now, in my thirties, I’m a GM for a local growing restaurant chain, and I’m working toward one day owning my own restaurant. My reasons for enrolling in this Leadership development class include, understanding the characteristics of a great leader, learning my strengths and weaknesses to become a better leader, and understanding how leadership has evolved and how that may effect future generations of leaders, such as myself. Understanding the characteristics of a great leader is probably my biggest reason for taking this course. In Northhouse’s Leadership Theory and Practice text book, one of the biggest enlightenments I encountered was that there are significant differences between managers and leaders. Even though both share traits such as influence, working with others, and achieving an effective goal, the differences were very surprising to me. I was intrigued to read that truly great leaders are more in touch with there emotions and the emotions of others around them. I guess I had felt that great leaders usually took a more logical than emotional approach. In a managerial setting, emotions don’t come in to play quite as much. Managers are really there to give a sense of structure to an otherwise chaotic situation. However, after pondering the subject, it does make sense that truly great leaders, like Martin Luther King Jr. took more of an emotional approach to achieving their goals. I was also surprised to read that a manager is a rather new concept in perspective to how old the concept of leadership really is. The role of a