OB Assignment

Student Leadership
Being a student, is it the ideal setting for you to grow and gain experience in leadership. Is student leadership possible? What is your leadership style? How do you know about your leadership style? What you think should be the desirable style. What ways you could attempt to achieve it?

Under humble guidance of: Dr. Malay Biswas

9/14/2013 Submitted by: Praveen Kumar Prabhakar PGP04028

Student Leadership
Que: Being a student, is it the ideal setting for you to grow and gain experience in leadership. Is student leadership possible? What is your leadership style? How do you know about your leadership style? What you think should be the desirable style. What ways you could attempt to achieve it?

As we know that leadership is ability of a person to lead a group of people towards a common goal or vision and the person who posses this quality is known as leader. As per this definition we students are having numerous opportunities to lead our friends, college as well as community. During this process we also have opportunity to learn and enhance our leadership skill. Many of us are already leader in one form or other form. As for example I am student council co-ordinator therefore my prime job is to act as link between management and student, in this place a use to coordinate will all my friends on various issues like safety security, academic issues, social initiatives etc. here in I am leading all students with common objective of excellence of students as well as college. Similarly other friends are also leading us in form of class representatives, committee members, expert of particular domain, class and group participation. Therefore student leadership is quite possible. Being a student in a college is indeed an ideal setting for us to grow and groom our leadership skill. In college we get lots of opportunity to work in a group as a team that inculcate habit of team work and also provide us opportunity to lead that team. As for example we are organising HR summit, Management Conclave, Marathon, Infusion etc. these events provide us an optimum setting for our leadership skill to groom and grow under the humble guidance of learned faculty and colleague. During these activities we enhance our lots of leadership skills like: Team Work: This will occur during every group assignment or managing any event. Relationship Building: As we dont have power to delegate orders to our friends to do any work therefore most of time we take our relationship oriented approach to get the work done. Communication Skill: During this event we have to address groups and other people very often that enhances our communication skills. Self-Direction: Our faculty or senior will be monitoring our progress throughout the program, but it will be up to us to sign up for classes and get the work done on time at a proper level of quality. Project Planning: While doing these activities we plan lots of activities and action that ultimately helps us to plan our future course of action to achieve our goal. Conflict Resolution: During managing these activities lots of conflicts rises and it also help us to learn how to resolve these conflicts in convenient way.

Since, these activities help us to develop leadership skill in our self to become a true leader.

Leadership style of a person varies from person to person and condition to condition. We should always be having a style of leadership that wills homogeneously gelling with our personality, type of group or audience and power that we have. As in case student as a leader we dont have much power to delegate our commands and audience are our friends only therefore they too enjoy same level of power, therefore in this situation we cannot dictate orders rather we would prefer to have relationship based approach to combine and motivate them together to attain our common goal. I would like to follow participative style of leadership as here input and co-ordination between all students are important however I would like to assign job responsibility to all my friends distinctly and will follow up them for progress at regularly. Since, they all will be my friends therefore I would like to have relationship based motivational plans. We should also help them in their job assigned so that there could be sense of responsibility would be achieved. Supportive leadership style would be best leadership style as it encourages them to come up with their own solutions in accomplishing their tasks at work. But this style is only appropriate when the direct report has moderate to high levels of competence and mostly needs encouragement to develop the confidence to become selfsufficient. What about the other times when people are brand new to a task, disillusioned, or looking for new challenges? In these three cases, just being supportive will not provide people with the direction they need to succeed. In fact, just being supportive will often delays or frustrates performance. We need to change our way of leadership when the job is new and nonconventional. For example, if we are having a new even like fashion show then, a successful student leader will use a highly directive styleclearly setting goals and deadlines. If a team member is struggling with a task, the student leader will use equal measures of direction and support. If the member is an expert at a task, a student leader will use a delegating style on the current assignment and focus instead on coming up with new challenges and future growth responsibilities. We can achieve this kind of support from our team members and group by clearly stating the common objective of our plan and then facilitating them a step by step procedure to achieve that goal. Student leader also has to show them the benefit from the success of project. Student leader should clearly assign distinct job to each individual and form smaller groups for better management. Leader has to ensure constant follow-up and direction to their team in order to move in proper direction that will help team to achieve common objective. At last leader has to keep their team motivated throughout the way. So, we can say that being student also we can become true leader.

References:
http://leaderchat.org/category/situational-leadership-ii-2/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_writing http://www.sans.edu/research/management-laboratory/article/leadership-essay
myweb.wit.edu/brownw4/w4(leader).pdf