The purpose of this course is to help you discovery and develop your leadership. I would like you to begin now to consider your everyday experience as a laboratory to experiment with and learn from leadership concepts discussed in class and in the readings. Once you recognize that leadership is positive influence, opportunities for leadership are all around you. As with any capability, mastery comes with practice and over time. Because this is the first time that many of you may be practicing some of these leadership concepts, I am asking you to select one fundamental state of leadership (purpose-centered, internally directed, externally open, other focused) experiment with it and report on your experience.
Note: the experiment needs to take place during the timeframe of the course. This is not a reflection exercise regarding experience that pre-dates the class.
A high quality experiment will include:
- Description of one of the fundamental states of leadership.
- A thoughtful experiment: The situation, your strategy, what you did, how others responded and the result (e.g. finding purpose during my club meeting, practicing empathy (or other-focused) with my roommate, practicing being internally driven when I was faced with a decision).
- What you learned from it (what worked and what did not).
- How you would modify your approach in the future.
