I have been a leader in many different aspects of my life.\u00a0 I was the captain and leader of sports teams through my athletic career.\u00a0 I was the leader, sometimes voted and sometimes volunteered, throughout my academic career.\u00a0 I am the leader, owner, of an accounting firm.\u00a0 I am a University Instructor.\u00a0 I am a parent.\u00a0 My approach to leadership is different depending on each situation and each environment I am in. For example, I teach online and face-to-face courses.\u00a0 Teaching online, I use a very different approach for my students than I do if I am face-to-face.\u00a0 I provide recordings and many different communication outlets, as well as online office hours and additional online support networks for students who need assistance.\u00a0 For my face-to-face courses, they must be in class to submit assignments and receive lecture material.\u00a0 I provide office hour support for students, which require a face-to-face meeting.\u00a0 In order to teach a course online online, I needed to adapt and redesign my course for online distribution, as well as the support being provided.<\/p>\n
Understanding that leaders must adapt to their environment, seems like an obvious concept.\u00a0 Where there seems to be a loss, is what adaptation means.\u00a0 To me, adaptation is understanding the surroundings, understanding the issues that come with a certain type of environment, understanding what pitfalls may lay ahead or how to cope when hitting challenges.\u00a0 Being a leader is a tough job, but preparing to lead is where you can really make a difference for others’ experiences.<\/p>\n
Khan speaks to two different types of leadership, adaptive leadership and transactional leadership (Khan, 2017).\u00a0 Adaptive leadership takes into account the environment and external factors, versus transactional leadership which stresses on the relationship between the leader and follower (Khan, 2017).\u00a0 It’s interesting to view these two types of leadership separately.\u00a0 Personally, I feel like you would be an adaptive leader to enhance the relationship between the leader and follower.\u00a0 It makes sense to me that a leader should incorporate external environmental factors and change accordingly to ensure a better reaction, response, and experience for the follower.<\/p>\n
There are several leadership values or attributes that I would like to highlight including: competence, intelligence, and supportive.\u00a0 Competence is defined as “the quality or state of having sufficient knowledge, judgment, skill, or strength (as for a particular duty or in a particular respect)” (Merriam-Webster, 2020).\u00a0 A leader must be competent in the duty or skill that they are asking or requiring others to complete, no matter the environment, this value holds true.\u00a0 “To do this, leaders must understand the origins of fear and misconceptions that often surround the use of technology, such as social media and mobile devices” (Sheninger, 2014).\u00a0 Understanding how students interact with the learning platform, how to ensure engagement, how to check responsiveness to messages or assignments are examples of being a competent leader.\u00a0 Intelligence can often be misunderstood for having the same meaning as competence.\u00a0 I think they differ by one major concept, the ability to grasp information.\u00a0 By this I mean, reading and understanding information, thinking on one’s feet, and the ability to change and grow as you move through an activity.\u00a0 This is intelligence.\u00a0 This idea of grasping information can mean the difference for a follower or students experience.\u00a0 Instructors must prepare and understand how the materials will be received by students and how the students can submit those materials.\u00a0 The last value I would like to touch on is supportive.\u00a0 So often, as instructors, students look to us for advice and guidance.\u00a0 I have students meet with me on a regular basis to ask about professional careers and opportunities.\u00a0 There is another aspect to support as well, supporting students or followers through a course.\u00a0 As leaders, we must have the ability to support the learners and help them grasp the knowledge we are trying to distribute.\u00a0 Our job is to teach, yes, but we are leading a classroom full of young minds looking to soak up and understand the content.\u00a0 How we do that and the support we provide in doing that, is so important.<\/p>\n
One of the issues I have found with incorporating technological advancements into programs or courses, is the number of resources.\u00a0 There are so many different types of platforms and resources, that it is easy to get overwhelmed as both a leader and as a learner or follower.\u00a0 Narrowing down communication outlets, how and where leaners get the information, has become vital to ensure a stronger experience for learners and followers.<\/p>\n
References:<\/p>\n