Leadership seems to be a simple issue. As a matter of fact, however, it is a meaningful topic which deserves to be further discussed. For instance, it is important for people to reflect on the the essential factors contributing to becoming a good leader and to winning loyal followers in enterprises (Ivanova, Saratovsky & Latyshov, 2018). In view of my previous paper and learning experiences about leadership, I would like make some reflection on leadership in this papers, in terms of “favorite leader paper” reflection, personal best and worst leadership experiences and expectation on my leadership qualities in the future.
In “favorite leader paper”, I introduced my favorite leader, namely Jack Ma, the founder of some famous domestic e-commerce brands including Alibaba, Taobao, Tmall and Alipay. In this paper, I used some quotations from online articles and academic papers. When introducing Alibaba, I used two quotations including Alibaba is an e-commerce giant undoubtedly (Severson, 2017) and it is also a B2B ecommerce mediating service platform (Guo, et. al, 2006). In addition, when introducing Alipay, I referred to two quotations. Alipay is developed as an online-payment service (Madden & York, 2007). It occupies the largest market share in China (Guo & Bouwman, 2016). Given the chance to write the paper at the moment, I would use different quotations. Particularly, Alibaba and Alipay are two important parts in Jack Ma’s enterprises, indicating the success of his leadership. If I could use specific and detailed statistics and quotations related to their market performances and market share, this would become more powerful support for proving his leadership success. Following tracks of Alibaba and Alipay’s market movement, it is clear for readers to understand the efforts that Jack Ma has made and the significant role he has played as a leader of his enterprise.
I am willing to share one of my successful leadership experiences recently. It is not a significant leadership experience in organizing an event for our school. Instead, I take it as the best leadership experience for me as I have dealt with a series of communication and coordination problems in the process. The situation was that we were required to form a four-member group to finish our group project related to management in a course. As the group leader, I found it difficult for us to decided on a consistent time to have discussions and all of us had different cultural backgrounds in the new course environment, which had seriously increased our communication difficulties. I tried to tackle the problems differently by motivating their passion and initiative. Before allocating specific project tasks for each person, we had discussed about the management, in which we shared our different views about the topic and introduced our different advantages. In our group, Candy was interested in making and designing the PowerPoint slides. Bob showed his willingness to collect a variety of materials for further discussion. Taylor liked to read some academic papers for making a literature review. After learning about different characteristics and advantages of each member, I divided our project into different partial assignments, with clear requirements and timeline. As each of us was engaged in an interested and advantageous area, we were happy to finish our assignments respectively and cooperate with each other. Accordingly, my members initiatively to decided on a specific period for group discussion each week. It is not an easy thing to make good coordination work in my group, I think the successful leadership experience lies in that I have used a different way to motivate their initiative and participation willingness, contributing to the smooth cooperation work in the next period.
When organizing a group outing activity for the members in our sports club, I encountered the worst leadership experience. We enrolled nearly twenty members to participate in an outing activity towards an island once time, where we would spend a day and a whole nigh doing activities and camping. All the things seemed to be smooth in the preparation period but unexpected situations came to us. We ordered a medium bus to come to school to pick us up and some other camping and cooking tools. However, the bus driver was unfamiliar with the traffic environment for our campus. He spent a lot time in trying to find the specific spot we planed to gather at together and finally he stopped about one kilometer away from the spot. This meant that all of our outing members needed to walk to the bus while carrying different tools and materials. This was just an interlude in this experience. Just before arriving the destination for taking a ship, we were surprised to find the bus stopped before going into the scenic spot. I immediately communicated with the driver and learned that his bus was refused to go into the scenic spot which was only open to city buses or taxis. In the preparation work period, I and my friend took the city bus to check the tour timeline and we did not encounter this problem. I quickly discussed the problem with other organizers for this activity and we decided on two solutions. Some members waited for the city bus. Other members called several taxis to the destination, carrying the tools and materials. The time for waiting a city bus was long and it accommodated extremely limited vacancies for passengers, thus I decided on the solution plans as mentioned. The good thing was that we all finally arrived at the destination and went to the island in the end, however, all members felt tired due to the unexpected situations. This was the first time I led an outing activity for members. I would make more preparation work by learning previous experiences from other organizers the next time. Learning the different styles of leadership, it is also effective to invite local classmates to help organize the activity by encouraging them.
Due to previous learning and practical experiences related to leadership, I want to become a CE