LEADERSHIP PHILOSOPHY

My leadership philosophy has evolved from Authentic or Servant Leadership into Transformational Leadership. I believe that these leadership styles are related to each other and overlap in the philosophy concluding that your worth of a leader is focused on how well your followers change and transform. Authentic Leadership and Servant Leadership are a bit different from Transformational Leadership in the way that they are more geared towards genuine interpersonal relationships with your followers.

Transformational Leadership is geared towards transforming not only your followers but yourself to perform a goal at task by improving adaptability, professionalism, or any skills necessary to complete the task.

My leadership philosophy is that my value of a leader is based on the growth that me and my followers go through in our journey to complete a challenge or task at hand. In other words, I am not just interested about completing the task, I am also interested in the interpersonal relationships and growth between myself and my followers. In my opinion, this describes Transformational Leadership the closest.

As compared to my earlier years at VT, my leadership philosophy was mainly Authentic Leadership. This way majorly apparent my freshman year. For example: I would spend time with my friends by eating with them, playing pool at Squires, and other activities to form a bond based on respect, trust, and personal growth. However, I was not as goal driven as I am now. As Northouse explains, an Authentic Leader is focused primarily on interpersonal relationships with their followers through trust and genuine experiences. (Northouse, 2015)

My CliftonStrength Finder results are: Woo, Positivity, Maximizer, Empathy, Achiever.

In a nutshell, these results describe me in the sense that I relate to people emotionally and I can influence them to meet their goals. In effect, I benefit from their success as well, since I place value in how other perform as a result of my influence (as seen above)

A clear example of my Transformational Leadership in practice was during a community project my Freshman year of college where a team and I were tasked with building a sustainable farm for a local farm “Three Birds Berry Farm”. I took role as the leader since I had experience with farming throughout my childhood and I was quite extroverted and clear with my goals. Throughout the project I began to enjoy the time spent with my group and was as interested in their personal growth throughout the project in addition to meeting the sustainability goals and presentations. It was a bonding experience for all of us and we became closer as a result, in fact I still consider some of the group members close friends of mine.

Northouse, P. G. (2015). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.