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This task consists of writing an essay in Microsoft Word consisting of 1,000 words, without citations or references. The task involves exploring your own philosophy of team leadership.

Please describe and elaborate on your personal philosophy of team leadership. Organize this portion of the essay as you see fit, but leave out in-text citations, references, and quotations, as the essay should only consist of your own thoughts. Perhaps you see team leadership in terms of practical behavior. Maybe you have your own theory. Some people conflate team leadership with the task of maintaining order or authority. Others see it as the very opposite of exercising power. Some people are optimistic about the nature and value of team leadership. Others are mostly pessimistic about the prospect of successfully managing a team of people with different personal agendas.

Regardless of your perspective, write from the heart. Upon completion, be sure to formalize your work (i.e., remove contractions, jargon, colloquialisms, and informal phraseology), and proofread it carefully, as you must try to write correctly to enable me to give you feedback on your writing (see below, under Purpose). In this essay, scoring for mechanics and reasoning is diagnostic in nature and will have no impact on your grade.

Ideas to Consider

Here are some ideas to consider, in case you happen to encounter writer’s block. What are your assumptions regarding what works best in team leadership? What is bad leadership in the team context? How do people think and act to make them open or amenable to certain kinds of team leadership compared to others? Have you experienced a difficult challenge in leading a team or unit of some kind? Is team leadership a matter of power, charisma, courage, action, or benevolence? Is team leadership a process or a state? Does the quest to improve as a team leader end with perfection or lifelong learning? Are effective team leaders different from normal people? Are effective team participants leaders, or are they non-leaders by definition? Many perspectives are available through which to approach this essay topic.

Purpose of the Essay

Your essay will help me establish a baseline in your thinking. You may have taken other courses in leadership and organizational behavior or served for years in positions of authority, or you may be in an early stage of your experience as a leader of other people. Wherever you are in this sense, it is advantageous to the learning process to reflect consciously and lucidly on it and communicate it with as much active thought as possible.

The essay will also serve as a medium through which to clarify my standards of grading, especially on the matter of mechanics and reasoning. You will receive full credit for the essay if it meets the length criterion and is fully your original writing. I will deduct no points for defects of mechanics or reasoning for this particular essay. I will nevertheless offer summary feedback on your writing. Therefore, please strive to write formally and correctly (even if you must first express your thoughts informally and then post-edit). Proofread your work by reading it again after you have completed it. Otherwise, my feedback will be of limited use to you.

Why Worry about Writing?

Many of our graduate students in management have ample experience as leaders and managers. Nevertheless, few people conscientiously exercise their talent in writing in their careers, so their competence may erode over time. A significant part of leadership effectiveness is credibility, which leaders establish in large measure by how they communicate. Readers of your email messages routinely make positive or negative judgments about you based on how you write. Moreover, how we manage our writing informs how we manage our enterprises.

Aside from the practical matter of meeting graduate school guidelines, I therefore take the task of writing quite seriously. The way we write guides the way we think. The mental challenges that we regularly exercise in our writing strengthen our verbal self-expression homologously, so the right challenges help form us into leaders of greater impact. Conversely, if we pay scant attention to the correctness of our style or form, such as by filling our writing with loose metaphors and neglecting to proofread, we will tend to manage similarly, with a loose sense of vision and neglectful oversights in our decision making. The goal in this program is to refine our leadership acumen rather than merely to validate it. Self-expression in writing is one of the central vehicles through which to achieve this goal.

Criteria

This is a straight essay of 1,000 words, with a title at the top, followed by paragraphs. The essay should have no in-text citations, no references at the end, and no quoted material. It should have no title page or abstract. Just write correctly, originally, and sufficiently, and be sure to proofread your work afterward. Aside from these considerations, the exercise in reflecting on your leadership ideas is an optimal basis for starting this course.

Please review my writing standards, in the Start Here module, for further insight into achieving high levels of proficiency in writing. Grading of your main discussion board commentaries (i.e., excluding replies and participation tasks) will regularly include the mechanics of writing, adherence to rules of formatting (in-text citations and the reference list), and reasoning.