Students' Articles: Leadership

LAM Chi-tat, Chi House

When I was still in junior form, I was a member of an uniform team. I am glad that I met several good leaders in that time. They taught me a lot. Later, they gave me a chance to be an assistant patrol leader. That was a great opportunity to learn to be a leader. From then on, my leadership has started building up from nothing.

I have learnt a lot about leadership from those good leaders. What is leadership? From my experiences, leadership is the ability of a leader to lead his teammates to complete tasks. But, how can a leader lead his team successfully? The most important thing is his teammates are keen to work for him. The leader has to act as a role model to let his teammates believe in him. At least, the leader should be responsible or otherwise he is not qualified enough to take the role as a leader. Being responsible can let the teammates know they have chosen the correct leader and will be willing to work with him.

However, only being responsible is not enough. I know that a leader has to deal with a ton of stuff and probably face many challenges because I also came across many problems even I was only a assistant patrol leader. Obviously, not giving up is just the basic criteria for a leader. Besides that, a leader should be able to think of some ways to tackle the problems and lead his team to fight against all the challenges in order to turn the situation around. In other words, a good leader should have excellent problem solving skill and this is related to the adversity quotient.

Apart from having high adversity quotient, a high emotional quotient is also important. As teammates are easily affected by leader’s emotion, he should be able to control himself. For example, if a leader always gets angry easily with his teammates just because of some minor issues, his teammates will not be happy and the morale of the team will be lower or even cause them to leave the team. So, a leader with high emotional quotient can maintain good relationships with his teammates and the team can work within a harmonious atmosphere. Also, he can make a more sensitive decision as he is not affected by his feeling.

In addition, a leader should equip himself with good organization and management skills so that the whole team will not be in a mess and will run smoothly and systematically.

All the criteria above can help building the leadership of a leader but this is not the whole picture of it. This implies that what I have learnt is not enough and I still have loads to explore. I will make use of the opportunity of being a house captain to dig further and learn to be a better leader. I know that being a leader is not easy and being a good leader will be even more difficult. But, I will try and embrace all challenges. No one gets all the talents naturally. I believe I can finally approach to success because I am willing to learn and willing to learn is also one of the requirements to be a good leader. All things are easy that are done willingly!