My Leadership Journey

   My Leadership Journey

Everyone is influencing others and is being influenced by others. In my point of view, leadership is about positively influencing others. It brings about innovative changes and lead people out of plight.

In my view, leadership is an art which requires many qualities. The first quality is the self-management skill. As a leader, you are not only responsible for yourself but also for others. A qualified leader must be equipped with excellent self-management skill. It is difficult to imagine a person who can’t manage themselves effectively could be a qualified leader. And I believe the time-management skill is the most essential among all the self-management skill. A person who lacks time-management skill would only be busy in solving their tedious issue and do not have energy to lead a team. The second quality is the ability to see the big picture of an organization which means that the leader is the person who has the holistic view. He should set the overall development plan of an organization and let the members know why this organization exists and what envision of this organization is. By doing so, a shared value could be formed which serves as uniting the whole team. The third quality of an excellent leader is the ability to motivate your member. In student organization, people do things voluntarily and do not get the material reward. Leaders of student organization also do not have that much authority as government officials do. The command-and-control approach just does not work. It is really not that easy to motivate the members to work for the organization with heart and soul. The fourth quality of an excellent leader is the ability of crisis management. More importantly, leaders should anticipate the potential risk beforehand and try to prevent the crisis from happening. Even though the crisis happens, leaders should be capable of handling the crisis. The fifth quality of leaders is to have entrepreneurial outlook which means that leaders must have the ability to make every bit of resources to solve problems innovatively. Leaders will meet many difficulties inevitably. And this calls for excellent leaders who could come up with innovative ideas in order to improve performance. The sixth quality of leaders is to be a proactive learner. Leaders must keep updating their knowledge and skills otherwise he will be abandoned by the changing times.

The conduct I expect to see from an excellent is to lead by example. If a leader requires his members to do something, at first place, the leader should be willing to do it and could be a model. If you cannot put up with procrastination, you should finish tasks on time.

My role model is lijiacheng who is the Chairman of Hutchison Whampoa Limited and Cheung Kong Holdings. Though Sir Li is considered to be one of the most powerful figures in Asia, he always remains humble and righteous. On the one hand he enjoys the wiseness of a businessman, on the other hand he displays our precious Chinese traditional values through his conducts. Nowadays materialism is prevalent in China and the consequence of which is that in order to gain profits those merchants would achieve their goals by any kind of means even though it is detrimental to the society. Our times call for those competent people, but more importantly, those capable people who have a sense of social responsibility. Sir Li is really a role model for us.

Basically I have learned two things from MR. Li. The first thing is that Rome can never be built up in one day. In order to achieve my goals, I must become a perseverant person. Mr. Li is often referred to as “superman” in HK because of his extraordinary diligence and perseverance. The misery childhood does not knock him down and pummeling toughens him up. I really admire those people who start from the scratch and build their own business empire. I deeply understand that it is not that easy. It is really difficult for the ordinary people to imagine how hard it is. The one who laughs last is the one who laughs best. Mr. Li is the one who laughs last because he has gone through the difficulties we are afraid of and stick to his goals all the way. The second thing I learn from MR. Li is that one should always remain humble even the social status of us has changed. Our world is never short of those arrogant people. I think there is a need for those people to be heedful of Mr. Li. People with profound knowledge are by no means arrogant cause they know their thinness compared to our cosmos. Only those dabblers are inclined to be arrogant which only displays their ignorance.

I used to be the organizing committee president of the fall recruitment of AIESEC UM this year. I was the final responsible person for a series of activities such as the promotion, information induction session and two interview sessions.

Another leadership experience for me is that I am the current vice president of outgoing exchange department and responsible for sending students in UM abroad to do internships.

In order to be a qualified leader and achieve our organization’s goal, I tried many ways to build an effective team and help my member to grow. I think the most important actions I took as a leader was to share with my teammates. I always share envision of our organization and my personal growth in this organization with my members. Besides, I also share some excellent articles written by other AIESECers around the world. I keep doing so in order to let my members to reflect on why they would like to join AIESEC and what the intersection point is between themselves and AIESEC. Only when they really figure out these questions can they voluntarily devote to this organization. This does assist me in developing my communication skill to a large extent. 

Another behavior I took was that I always model the way in the sense that I really fully devoted to this organization and tried my best to achieve the goals we set. This is quite essential because it gradually helps create a kind of positive atmosphere in our team. And this also hones my self-management skill as a leader. In order to finish what I promise, I must manage myself well so that I could have enough time and energy to handle all the issues.

The third action I took was to ask my members to point out my personal weakness as well as the weakness of our organization. This did improve me a lot and also motivated my members to not just concern about themselves but also the development of organization. This kind of reflection helps the continuous improvement of the organization and we could find our weaknesses in time and try to fix them.

The most precious thing from my leadership journey is that I realized that I am really ignorant and there are so many things I need to learn. Gradually I become an active learner and really thirst for knowledge.

I am most comfortable with challenging the process because I am a person who likes to look at things from different perspectives and try to figure out the most effective ways to solve problems. It is really an important skill nowadays. We must continuously adjust ourselves to the changing environment and be equipped with the spirit of entrepreneurs. And this is one of my talents as a leader. Another talent is that I am a person who has holistic view and could always pay attention to big picture. This strength of me makes me could easily figure out the road map of our organization and lead the organization to a right direction. The third talent of me is that I am a determined man and will never give up in the halfway. This kind of spirit will also influence my member and motivate them hold on when facing difficulties.