Leadership between Democracy and Authority
Pathways: Dynamic Leadership
Level 2-1: Understanding Your Leadership Style
Content
As a newbie without going through too much in the society, it seems I never have taken time to think about what if I am a leader, because in my work life, the only thing I can control is my computer, and she will never resist my order. What kind of leadership style will I have, and can I get along well with my subordinate? It turns out that if I want to figure out my leadership character, I need a real case.
After searching in my mind, I realized I did have an experience of leadership, but it’s not quite a delighted one. What happened? Please let me share the story.
When I was in college, to encourage students to do some technology innovation, the school established a foundation to support new ideas and creations. At that time, I was quite interested in coding, thus I decided to recruit two of my classmates and as a group we will make an Android app to apply for the fund. And of course, I would be the leader of the team. That’s the first time I realized that there could be so much problems coming from my leadership styles.
At the design stage of the project, to act as a friendly and democratic leader, I just let everyone to share their thoughts, this is all right, but the crazy part is that I decided to achieve them all. Though I knew some ideas were difficult, I just didn’t want to reject any idea from anyone, I didn’t want to be the bad guy. That’s the moment when the nightmare started.
After finished design, we needed to write the paper of project plan. At the meeting, I asked the team: do you want to write the document? No one responded. Then I continued, or I can do this if you don’t… There is no doubt this job belonged to me. Actually I didn’t want it at all, what I wanted was just being nice and letting everyone can do anything. This idea sounded good but felt bad.
But just as the saying said: The only lesson mankind has learned from history is that it never learns anything. When we finished distributing the jobs and entered the coding stage, I said: please feel free and you can do this job at your spare time. Then we came to home on the summer holiday. To decrease the pressure I brought to my team, I didn’t ask about this among the whole holiday. After we went back to school, guess what, nothing had been done by them. I feel angry, but I need to be nice, so I behaved something like nice-angry. I said: It’s impossible to have zero free time to work at home, now that you didn’t finish yours, I will try to do these jobs by myself.
The project was complex and I have to work overtime. The coding had been not that attractive and made me exhausted. I felt tired, angry and regret, I just wanted to be a good leader but now all the things messed up.
Eventually, I nearly finished the whole project on my own, unfortunately all of us needed to report to the teacher about the role and duty in the project, then I had to make up some workload for them, how ironic it is!
I don’t think this is a smooth and successful project, there existed a candy bomb: I tried to be democratic, but failed to provide enough communications and connections in the team. It became so inefficient because too much freedom made the team lost the direction.
Suppose I have another chance to lead a team, I will limit the democratic in a reasonable range and be more authoritative in some critical stage to make sure everything can be finished on time.
That’s the leadership experience of mine and the style I have, now I believe the good ending of a project needs the balance between democracy and authority.
Evaluation
Good point
- Start the speech by asking some questions
- The speech title is interesting
- the description of the story is vivid
Bad point
- Could use more gestures , such as showing number
- Could use more body language to make the conversation in the speech vivider
- Put more emotion in the speech, do not act as reciting an article
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