Leadership is known as one of the top organizational values throughout my career experience in the corporate realm. During my first job in Japan, the leadership I experienced was traditional where a top-down style of leadership was preferred in a highly centralized and hierarchical context (Yokota, 2019). To fit in their transactional leadership culture, I recognized leaders as bosses who I had to respect and obey their instructions at the workplace because they possessed the authority to lead and instruct directions to their employees (Workman & Cleveland-Innes, 2012). Overtime, my perspective of leadership has changed through work and life experiences, and people who have influenced me as leaders such as managers, coaches, colleagues, and family members. I learned that leaders can be in different kinds of roles and managers are “paid to be accountable for results produced by others” as defined by Peter Senge (Sarder, 2015, 1:03). Considering this, my perspective of leadership in an organization today plays a critical role in providing strategic direction, guidance, support development, and empowerment for organizational success in both operations and people (BC Hydro, personal communication, February 3, 2023). This also affected my individual ranking of leadership attributes in activity two where “inspiring” came first then followed by “honest” and “forward-looking”. The ranking of these three leadership attributes was aligned with the research informed ones (Kouzes & Posner, 2011).
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