MAVERICK MACHINE

I served in several leadership roles in the Maverick ‘Machine’ Athletic Band. For the 2019 and 2020 season, I served as the section leader for the clarinet section. In this role, I was involved multiple ways. My main job in this role was running sectionals and aiding in the communication of call time and what we were to wear. In 2021, I served as the band manager. This role was a little more involved than what I did as section leader. In addition to helping the section leaders as needed, I aided in uniform check in and out, bringing items over to the football field, and helping the band director in any way needed to make events run as smooth as possible. I had a co-section leader conduct my performance evaluation. I chose her to do it because she saw me act in the leadership role and was able to describe well what she thought of my leadership abilities.

Through these roles, I learned a lot about being on a large leadership team. There are a lot of times where we were able to divide and conquer tasks based on our strengths. I think that we were way more successful when we did this rather than when we would all try to take a leadership role in a setting. Personally, as someone who is very organized, I was able to step up and be a leader when there was paperwork that needed to be done or handing out equipment, such as uniform checkout. I struggled more when it came to running music sectionals because I was not a music major. I was able to work with a section who had a music major as a section leader for us to learn the music and play the music to the best of our ability. I think the most effective leadership style I saw while working in this setting was the sharing of leadership duties. There are a lot of events that we must prepare for as a band, and it is way easier to split the leadership duties of the events rather than trying to do them all yourself. Some roles that we split up as a leadership corps was spirit coordinators, drill teachers, music teachers, uniform distributors, and apparel distributors. There are a lot of benefits to splitting up the leadership roles. First, it prevents too many people from trying to teach and perform the task which would overwhelming other members of the band. Additionally, if there is a section leader that is bad in their role, it does not affect the band as much. This is because other people are able to step up and help them rather than making the leader figure out how to make the changes on their own. The leadership style that I saw as ineffective in this situation was trying to be in charge of everything and make everything perfect. Band is supposed to be fun. If you run your section as a tight ship and force everyone to be perfect, no one is having fun. It is important for us to sound good and look good, but it is more important to build relationships in the program than anything else. In this role, I think I was able to build my leadership theory by finding out what I like and what I do not like to see both in a non-leader role and a leader role. Overall, I found that I liked to learn how to lead from past leaders and then I wanted to teach the future leaders how to lead when I was in the leadership role. This is because everyone benefits from learning how to lead and it makes for a stronger program when you have a group of leaders, even if everyone does not have a defined leadership role. I hope that others in and out of my section could learn from how I led the section just how I learned to lead from watching the others before me and from the feedback I received.

I think that from this role, I have learned a lot of team leadership skills that I can use in the future. I have learned how to thrive in a group leadership setting and have learned how to work as a team to maximize everyone’s strengths. In my future career, I will often be working on a team of researchers. Therefore, it is important for me to be able to lead in a team setting and lean on my other team members’ leadership strengths.

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For my leadership evaluation, I had a section member fill out the form. I think that she was a great person to fill out the form because she saw me in all 3 years of my leadership experience. Although she did give me an excellent rating, we did talk about a few things that I could still work to further improve. The biggest one is my confidence. If I am more confident in my leadership style, then I will be able to be an even more effective leader. I am excited to take all that we talked about in our conversation to make my leadership style more effective as I move to the next chapter of my life.