Part I: Personal Narrative

Four years ago, at the age of just 17 years, I encountered my first leadership experience. I was a senior at Canton High School and it was my third year on the varsity golf team. I was very passionate about the sport and I loved the feeling of sisterhood I was able to experience with my teammates. When my coach told me that I was going to be the team captain, I was overwhelmed with many different emotions. I was excited and nervous about being the new leader of my team. As captain, it was my responsibility to mentor the newer girls at practice, pump the team up for matches, and give pep talks to the girls who were struggling. Throughout my team captain experience, I really learned about my leadership style and technique. Personally, I felt that I was very good at mentoring girls and helping them to improve their golfing skills. I was good at this because I was able to give my teammates constructive criticism about their golf swings without hurting their feelings. I am very thankful that I was blessed with the opportunity to be captain of my golf team because this is what prepared me and gave me the foundation for my leadership experiences that I would encounter in college.

Lixie

My next leadership experience came from my University Seminar class during my freshman year at Lawrence Technological University. In this class, we were required to partner up and do a service project. My partner and I chose to volunteer at Lawrence

Tech Make a Difference Day where we spent a few hours working at Forgotten Harvest. Although I was not put into a specific leadership role for this project, it still taught me about being a leader. For example, the volunteers had to work in teams to perform certain tasks such as packaging food, breaking down boxes, and washing dishes. This taught me about working with other people. I also developed leadership skills while working on the final report for this project. Since I did this activity with a partner, I had to figure out how to divide up the workload evenly and also had to learn how to coordinate my schedule with another person.

 My next leadership experience in college occurred when I was elected to be on the executive board as Treasurer of my sorority, Delta Tau Sigma. There are a lot of responsibilities that come with being on the execute board of a sorority. I, along with the president, vice president, and secretary, had to make decisions and deal with difficult situations that occurred within the sorority. There were also many leadership skills that I learned by holding the treasurer office, specifically. As treasurer, I had to create a budget for the sorority and make sure that all members paid their dues. These tasks taught me organization and confrontation skills. There were several instances in which I had to confront members who were late on their due payments. This is always a difficult task because money is a very sensitive subject with many people. This gave me a great amount of practice with my confrontation skills, and I was able to learn to confront people about sensitive issues without coming off in a mean or offensive way. Overall, Lixie

being on the executive board of Delta Tau Sigma was one of the experiences that has influenced my leadership skills the most.

After all of the experiences that have shaped who I am as a leader, I believe that the leadership approach that fits me best is the “Skills Approach” from Leadership: Theory and Practice by Peter Northouse. This book describes the skills approach as the following:

The skills approach takes a leader-centered perspective on leadership. However, in the skills approach we shift our thinking from a focus on personality characteristics, which usually are viewed as innate and largely fixed, to an emphasis on skills and abilities that can be learned and developed. Although personality certainly plays an integral role in leadership, the skills approach suggests that knowledge and abilities are needed for effective leadership.

(Northouse, 43).

I believe that this fits my leadership style the best because I like to focus more on people’s skills and knowledge than on personal characteristics.