What makes a leader? How does a leader lead effectively? What traits do leaders have? What do we look for in a leader? I was given the chance to discuss this with a group in Rose Main.

It turns out, what traits I desire for myself don’t make me a good leader of others, but makes me a good leader of my life, one with independence and the freedom to do what I want, directing my life in the way I choose. That is what makes a good individual leader, but not a leader of many.

I think for a leader of many, what we really look for traits that allow one to direct many people, resolve many issues, and create a safe feeling for their “people”. If I was unsure about the future of a company I worked for, I would probably be searching for another job elsewhere since I really can’t expect stability here.

Overall, it was a good discussion that let me really question my beliefs. I like discussions like that since they tend to always stick with me for years

This was definitely an interesting seminar. We first started by associating qualities we value and don’t value into categories. Then we narrowed it down to the 5 most important qualities to us. I noticed a lot of mine were centered around friends and family. Since coming to Cornell, I think my appreciation and respect for my friends and family back home and here has increased, because I often rely on them for support during difficult times in the semester. We then talked about important qualities of a leader and what we think makes a leader a good leader. I’ve always thought of good leaders as people that are respected by and inspiring to others. Some people that I think are good leaders are Tom Brady, Elon Musk and Michelle Obama. After our discussion, I realized that you don’t necessarily need to respect and love them on a character basis for them to be a good leader. Often, their ability to make good decisions and have enough forethought is enough.

We ended our discussion with 5 traits of an ideal Cornell student. It was interesting that the student we came up with did not seem like a fun student. Some of the main traits were passion, knowledge and responsibility. We ended up ruling out a lot of traits like humor, empathy and being adventurous. It was hard to narrow it down to 5, since people are a mix of so many more, but I think these are present in everyone.

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.

Greeted with 100 little cards and a bowl full of jelly beans, I didn’t really know what to expect when I walked into the Rose Conference Room to discuss “Leading Etiquette”. I had just been elected to a leadership position for an organization on campus, and I was eager to discuss the best way to be an effective leader and I was curious to see what others had to offer as advice. We started by sorting cards, all printed with a different value, into piles of things that we thought about “always”, “sometimes”, or “never”. As we discussed our values amongst each other, I began to realize how my core beliefs differed from other people, for example religion has never acted as a huge influence in my life, but for others it functions as a really important part of their daily lives, and their thoughts and actions. The most interesting thing we discussed was how the values we have as a person may or may not differ from the values we hold as leaders, and how different situations require different approaches. This is definitely something that I will keep in mind as I continue my journey through college and beyond.

Looking back on the applications I’ve done, essays I’ve written, interviews I’ve participated in, I think I can confidently say this question, or perhaps the more popular “Tell me about a time when you showed leadership”, has shown up 90% of the time. College is a time when we’re growing, constantly taking on more responsibility and pushing ourselves to try out new things. It’s a time when we’re supposed to develop those leadership skills every company out there seems to want from us, even if we don’t necessarily want to be a leader and not everyone can be one. In this seminar, GRF Sam challenged us to identify personal values mattered to us the most, and then connect those to the qualities we thought were the most important for leaders to have. When choosing my five most important values, it was fascinating to reflect on how those have changed over the years, and how those changes reflected on my personal development and what were my priorities. I definitely feel that I’ve changed for the better since my time as a freshman in high school and learned more about myself. During our discussion of the most important qualities for a leader in Cornell, most of our disagreements on values revolved around morality. The consensus agreement was that what made a good person did not always make a good leader because it would make a leader too “soft” and not strong enough to be a representative for the people. During these discussions, I realized that we might always want good people who act kindly and make moral decisions as our leaders, it may not always for “good” people to lead effectively.

Leadership can be a very abstract concept. What even constitutes a leader?

This is what the mini seminar attempted to define for us. However, we learned to define leadership in a variety of ways. Each of us had different ideas of what qualities a leader should have, showing that every person perceives effective leadership differently. What was even more interesting is that depending on the setting that the leader we came up with was in, the characteristics that were wanted or ideal varied. We had to come to a consensus about what characteristics would be embodied in our ideal leader, which further proved that everyone different thought on what characteristics were essential to a good leader.

When we started the Leadership seminar the first thing that GRF Sam did was hand out cards with valued printed on them; such values included Kindness, Genuineness, and Friendship. He then instructed us to organize these values into three piles: very important, important, and not very important, and to choose the five most important values. It was difficult to pick out five of the most important values; I kept modifying my initial list until only one original value remained. We discussed how these values change throughout our lives and situations. We then split up into two groups to talk about what values make a good leader. We included openness and work ethic but I was initially surprised how quickly authority was shot down. People explained that it created an unequal power dynamic, which could be detrimental to group work and leadership as it could limit openness to new ideas from non-leaders. Working with the cards was a interesting way of showing how leadership values can either run parallel to our own personal values, or against them. The level of interaction was welcome surprise from what I had assumed was going to be a power point on effective leadership.

I recently attended the seminar on leadership and how to be an effective leader.  We began with an interesting exercise – here are 100 traits/qualities, pick the top 5 that are most important to you.  It was really difficult to narrow it down to 5, but I ultimately got to the traits I felt were the best representation of me.  It was intriguing to hear the traits other people picked and how we differed; this led into a team discussion of which 5 traits are the most important for a leader.  Everyone’s perceptions of what make a good leader are shaped by our experiences dealing with leadership, which are abundant at Cornell.  People are always trying to take on leadership roles in extracurriculars, so there are a lot of opportunities to become a leader and learn from other leaders.  A lot of the same trait ideas kept floating around – compassion/empathy/caring/etc., trustworthiness/responsibility, etc.  We found that a lot of the traits were able to encompass others – for example, being responsible means you can be trusted to get things done.  My favorite part of the seminar was the discussions about leadership qualities because everybody had different experiences to bring to the discussion and ultimately helped create a more well-rounded idea of what a leader should be.

This seminar got me thinking about what values I would like a leader to have and if I were a leader would my values play a part in the way I lead. This was the case for me last summer, when I worked on an a cultural anthropology team and my ethical values felt threatened. Considering that I had come up with the idea and implementation for the project, I felt like I had to keep other people on my team from violating the consent form our participants had signed. Since the seminar, I got to reflect on the way I let my values influence the way I lead during that project. I have also considered other values that a leader should have, such as decision making, being respectful, knowledgeable, and cooperative. These are characteristics we sometimes forget a leader should have, but are integral parts of making an effective leader.

Last week, I attended a seminar on how to improve one’s leadership. While I was expecting a “tips and tricks” sort of presentation, I found something both different and better. I had thought a lot about how to oversee other people, how to “get stuff done,” but the presentation made me think of another aspect of leadership I had not seriously considered before: in addition of thinking about what I (or my organization) desired, I needed to think about what I valued. In my time here at Cornell, I have served as a leader in several capacities, both in my personal life as well as in a disability advocacy organization on campus. In both of these, I now realize, my decisions and my leadership style have come (or should have come) as much from the exigencies of the current situation as my own personal values that I bring to the table. In cases where this has not been the case, I have further noticed, I have been noticeably less happy in leading, and less successful. In short, I am glad I went to this event, since it helped me realize an important lesson from my past leadership experience, which I  will apply in all me future endeavors.

This event was quite an interesting one given the amount of reflection that we did. I felt that the unconventional nature of the exercises was actually a great way to bring out the most accurate reflection of myself. Starting with a stack of terms, we were asked to sort them into piles of what values we hold most important, somewhat important, and unimportant values to me. As we explained why each value was important to our groups, I was able to decide what the most important pillars in which I try to live by in my life. But Sam then asked us to divide the room and determine what are the most important traits that we want in a leader of the Cornell student body. What surprised me most was that many of the traits I found most important in a leader were not synonymous with traits that I hold most important to myself. This led back to the topic of the night’s debate, how to lead effectively. An effective leader does not necessarily share the traits of his or her team but must be able to understand the needs of the group. This event was quite informative as I learned how to better manage teams that I am a part of as well as notice the traits that I appreciate about the leaders I already have.

I’ve always thought I’m not meant to be a leader. And that because I abhor confrontations, and avoid them as much as I can in favor of peaceful (even if less effective) solutions. I remember participating in the IYPT competition (the national phase in Brazil, not the international one). I had explored a problem about holograms, and was doing a “Physics Fight” against a girl who had explored the same problem. I had to ask questions and point mistakes in her presentation. It went horribly, as neither me nor the girl were feeling comfortable with the confrontation (even if it was expected and a part of the competition’s process) – because of that, most of the discussion ended up being moments of awkward silence hahahahah –  and one of my friends later told me I’m “too nice” to do something like that.
Because of despising confrontations, my biggest “no” for being a leader is the idea of having to execute practical solutions that may hurt people’s feelings. Accordingly, the five words I chose to best describe my thoughts had nothing to do with being pragmatic or with being an authority, or even with having power. They were: “hope”, “dependency”, “humility”, “contribution”, and “purpose”.
However, during the seminar, we went way beyond this stereotypical representation of leaders as “authority figures who make tough decisions constantly”. And that’s because making the decisions, although important, is only a small portion of what leading means. As we’ve discussed, leading also involves a myriad of other things, like planning, learning from mistakes, being as objective during conflicts, etc. And nothing in my personality impedes me from doing those well. So there’s no reason why I can’t become a decent leader in the future. It’s just that my kind of leadership would be nearly opposite from the usual stereotypical one.
At the end of the seminar, we were all asked to write down a leadership goal that is aligned to our values. My goal would essentially to be able inspire my peers so we could all have a clear vision and a clear purpose in our work. My team would probably be rather small, as I’d want to be personally involved and be able to help them with things as much as possible (I’d want my peers to know I care about them. If my group was big, there’d be literally not enough time to know them well enough and help them, so the idea of caring wouldn’t get across). I’d be a leader who avoids power relations as much as possible, and I’d want my peers to see me as an equal.

At the end of the day, I don’t know if I’d be a good leader or not. But I don’t have, anymore, reasons to assume that the answer is inherently “no”. So, right now, I guess only future can tell!

On Tuesday, I joined other Rose Scholars to attend a seminar on “leading effectively.”
The seminar started out with 100 cards, all with different virtues on them. These included things like “courage,” “honestly,” “passion,” “wealth,” things like that. We were asked to organize them based on what was most important to us, and to pick our top five. We were then asked how well our top five coincided with being a leader. I quickly realized that my top five, if they were the only virtues someone possessed, wouldn’t make the best leader. They included things like, “humility,” “simplicity,” “God’s will,” “compassion,” and “forgiveness.” (Yes, I am aware of how soft I sound.)
As a group, we then those the top five virtues of a leader. The main ones my group chose included “accomplished,” “knowledgeable,” and “responsible,” among others. Basically, the only one that matched up was “compassionate,” which we agreed was necessary since most leaders need to be good with people. The top five when focused on a leader’s mindset versus my top five from a moral perspective were completely different. I realize that sometimes people have to separate from their moral virtues in order to be an effective leader. Leadership may come naturally to some, but to others it is something that must be honed in on and worked on.