Leadership...

What is leadership? What is the difference between vocal and performance leadership? Which one is your strength and why? Are leaders born or made? Why?

To me, leadership is knowing your roles and what your job is, following through with it and assisting others will being successful in their roles also. A leader does whatever they can to make their team successful.

Vocal leadership is when you have a leader who is very encouraging, positive, loud, and also comunicating with you, letting you hear what you need to do in order to achieve a goal. Performance leadership is when your leader is not as loud, but instead they lead by example. They always know how to get their job done. They work hard in practice and they show you what goal you want to achieve by actually showing you. They make it their priority to do what they think everyone needs to be doing.

I believe that my strength is being a performance leader, because I lead better by example than I do vocally. Recently, my vocal leadership has been getting stronger, because I realized that both are equally important and I needed to heighten my abilities in both of these areas. In one of the first packets that we read in this class, which was Chapter 1 of "The Team Captain's Leadership Manual", it explains that "leaders by example lead not by what they say but more in how they conduct themselves." It also states that "vocal leaders display the same commitment, confidence, composure, and character of leaders by example, but they go a critical step further in that they are willing to step outside of themselves by verbally encouraging, motivating, challenging, and holding their teammates accountable." This is implying that vocal leadership is just as important as performance leadership, however, vocal leadership goes that "critical step further".

I believe that leaders are made, not born. I think this because a person is shaped by how they are raised. They grow and learn by seeing those around them and what those people believe. They need to have the leadership qualities shaped into them. For example, a person can only learn commitment if they learn the importance of it. They gain confidence by seeing those around them and deciding how how they want to view themselves. Character is gained by learning from your parents what morals and values are "right", and then you can decide from there how you want to live your life.