My leadership ability

I thought for this last blog I would talk about what I believe makes me a good leader. I think that the main things that contribute my leadership ability are my willingness to take control and responsibility for a certain situation, my willingness to listen to others, and my ability to read a situation. Whenever an assignment of some sort comes up I am usually the one in the group that will take charge and figure out what has to be done. Once we have started working towards our goal I will always listen to others opinions and encourage people to speak what is on their mind. Lastly, I feel like I am very accomplished at looking at a problem and seeing a solution for it. When all of these things are put together it makes for a very effective leader. These skills have helped me a great amount throughout my academic and athletic career. I think that it would be very valuable for others to work and concentrate on these skill sets that I have developed and it would help them out for the rest of their lives.

Mike Scioscia

Mike Scioscia, manager of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, has been known as one of the best baseball managers over the past couple of years. I have decided to take a look at how he has earned this regard as being such a great leader of the Angels. Baseball is an extremely difficult sport to manage because it has many individual aspects while still being a team sport. Baseball is also such a slow pace sport that a lot of thinking is involved which means that players have to be mentally strong. One of the things that make Scioscia so great is that he builds a trust up between his players. This trust evolves from the team being very close with each other. Scioscia has led the Angels to have this bond by creating a fun and energetic environment among the players while still holding them to their responsibilities. From Scioscia we can learn that it is very important to build a bond between employees and make sure that they are enjoying themselves while still getting work done. When people are having fun with their jobs then they are willing to work harder and accomplish their goals. These things are what have made Mike Scioscia such a great manager and why the Angels have been so successful under his tenure. If we can find a way to do these things that Scioscia has been able to do we will be able to be very effective leaders.

Group project

In my marketing class we just had a 20 page group project due last week. This was a perfect situation for someone to step up as a leader for the group, so I took that challenge. To receive this position of being the leader I made myself the first one to take action in the group. I took it on myself to call everyone in the group and set up our first meeting so we could get started on the project. By doing this the others in my group realized that I was dedicated to this project and hence looked up to me to lead us to get it done. As a result of being the one to set up to meeting everyone looked to me to have a plan of how to accomplish the project. I accepted this goal and assigned certain people to certain parts of the project. After I did this I asked if anyone thought that these parts were not separated fairly. By doing this I allowed for others to put their own input in on how they thought the parts should be split up so no one would be unhappy. This made it feel like it was more of a group decision on how we were to do the project. In the end we put together a great project which we received a good grade on and everyone in my group was very happy with how everything worked out.

Leadership is Influence

Of all of the definition that I have heard in this class I think that the best definition for leadership is by John C. Maxwell. Maxwell said that “leadership is influence nothing more nothing less.” After everything that we have learned this year in class I can turn just about all of it back to this definition. Influence is so important because if you cannot influence others to do something than it is impossible for you to lead them. So as a leader you want to learn how to influence the people around you. There are many ways to do this but I think that the most powerful way is to build personal relationships with people. People are naturally influenced by people that they know. Therefore if you are able to build up relationship with the people that you are trying to lead you are going to be much more effective in leading them because you will have more of an influence over them. By learning this it will make me a more effective leader because now I know that it’s important to get to know the people that you are working with. This is the reason that companies have their employees go on trips together and other social activities with each other. It is proven that these relationships between people make for better working situations because it makes people willing to listen to each other.