HONORS 401: LEADERSHIP AND INTERPERSONAL SKILLS

As part of the Honors program, I took the Honors 401 class on how to develop leadership skills. I decided to take this class since I was going to be section leader in the Maverick ‘Machine’ in the fall and I wanted to improve my leadership skills before I took on this role. In this class, we learned about how to be a leader and how to communicate and work with others. As we were learning these skills, we had to do projects to show how we were critically thinking about the skills we were learning and how we could apply them to our futures. The first project was researching our career field and the second project was interviewing a leader in the professional world. While doing these projects, I got to observe people at various levels in their workplace performing leadership roles.

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From this class and these projects, I learned how I may have to alter how I lead depending on the group that I am working with and at what level of the company I would be leading. I found that when leading a group of people on your team, the best style to lead with is as an equal to them. However, when leading a whole company, you need to have a strong leadership presence. I think that I can use these skills in my future career in several ways. First, when I am working with other researchers on my team, I think that I can lead them as a peer, and we can have open communication about what we want to do to be successful. If I were to be leading someone else, such as an intern or an undergraduate, I could take more of a step up and have a strong leadership presence to help them be as successful as they could in the project.

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In the future, I will think back on what this class taught me so that I can be a successful leader in many group settings. I will need to think about the relationships that I want to have with others so that I can be a strong, but not dominating, leader like this class has taught me. I plan to challenge myself by taking small and large leadership roles. I could do this by being in the Maverick ‘Machine.’ For a year or two, I could be a section leader, and then later I could be a band manager, student assistant, or drum major if I choose. I explore this topic more in my Maverick ‘Machine’ reflection.