This semester, I decided to explore leadership more deeply. I took a three-credit course called Foundations of Leadership. In honor of the course ending, I attended this Rose Scholars event to compare and contrast the lessons learned through this course to the lessons learned from this event. I was excited to discover similarities in the characteristics of good leaders explored during this event and the ones introduced in this course.

My leadership course and this seminar emphasized the importance of vision, an openness to learning, and an alignment with values. Both the lectures throughout the course I took and this seminar introduced other characteristics of good leaders as well. However, I have chosen to focus on discussing these ones here. Also, to avoid redundancy and confusing syntax, I will refer to my hypothetical leader as “her.”

A leader with a strong vision motivates her mission and centralizes the people she works with. A vision provides a clear path and description of an ideal future for her team and offers a goal for her and her team to strive toward. When I think of vision I often think of Elon Musk and the startups he leads. For instance, SpaceX’s mission is to make mankind multiplanetary. This vision is beyond a single person and has helped motivate the engineers who work for him. He emphasizes this vision by mounting paintings of mankind on Mars visiting the largest volcano in the solar system (Olympus Mons) and touring other sites on Mars on the walls of SpaceX’s development sites. These images and his vision are so powerful that they inspire others to wonder about his work and imagine futures that were previously unimaginable. This is a clear example of a strong vision.

An openness to learning allows a leader to be adaptable, to choose the best (not necessarily the initial) path, and to grow both herself and the mission that she is leading. I remember one of my computer science projects in CS 3410 pushed me to be open to learning. My partner and I had worked intensely for several days to build a fully pipelined RISC-V processor for our third project. We decided to attend midnight office hours before the project was due to double check our work. About five minutes before the office hours were over, I noticed another group had mentioned something about one specific implementation not working. Even though I really did not want to ask about the problem (because it was midnight, and I wanted to submit our work as the project was due the next day), I did. It turned out that our implementation would not have passed a very specific test case. This problem was discovered in a past office hour session. Despite the late time and the work we had already put into our project, my partner and I were open to learning how to fix the bug. We stayed up all night modifying the processor so that it worked, and we successfully turned in our project and earned a very high score. If we had not been open to learning about a new implementation and had stuck with our initial one, we may have failed several test cases. Our path was much more difficult than turning in what we had, but we had to be adaptable if we wanted to produce a product that truly worked. Our teamwork and decisions demonstrated our openness to learning and how this adaptability and quick turnaround can lead to success in both teamwork and good leadership.

Finally, alignment is an important characteristic of leadership. What this means is that a leader makes decisions that are aligned with her values and hires people/chooses people to work with who also believe in those values. This idea stems from the concept of vision. Both the leader and her teammates should somehow be invested in the mission and the values upheld by the project. This helps the team produce the most genuine and successful product and inspires powerful motivation and true interest in the success of the project.

These are my opinions on leadership I developed after the seminar. I enjoyed comparing and contrasting what I had learned in my course to the lessons learned in the seminar. I also really liked choosing my most important values during the card sort activities.