Myths About Leadership

Komives, S. R. (2013). Exploring Leadership : For College Students Who Want to Make a Difference. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/enewsletter.php?msgno=1304

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The following quote from this extract I believe holds influence as to why we see very few international students as group leaders in ENGG1100 and ENGG1200.

* Leadership is hierarchical, and you need to hold a formal position (have status and power) to be considered a leader.

From other readings I found that the heirarchical model is prevalent in many Asian countries. The article then mentions that leaders are made not born, reinforcing my idea of being able to change the current international student perceptions and possible see some more leaders in the long run.

It also talks about there being no single correct way to lead. It's context specific, then what is the right way we want our students to lead in engineering. Through democratic discussion? Definitely the way their parents and teachers have led them back in their home country will form what they consider is correct leadership.

Leadership vs. Management are 2 different things it seems. Where leadership focuses more on the ability for someone to inspire and motivate people to do things where as the manager is more about resource allocation and organisation. But at the same time both roles overlap. Can we get our students to understand the value of both, perhaps they cannot lead overall but make them see the possibility of Leadership in their strength, teaching and inspiring to learn a skillset that they might be particularly proficient in and learning how to manage their own work. Whilst they might not be the type of people to manage everyone else, there is still management responsibility in effectively communicating your work with the rest of the team, managing who gets what information at what time.

Leadership is developed. Events can catalyze this, maybe through EAC we expose more students to leadership and spark their interest, who knows.