My Leadership Philosophy:

Leadership Practice (LP): Demonstrate the ability to analyse, distill and solve practical organizational problems through critical evaluation and sound judgment.   

I think our organizational audit and organizational challenge projects in LDR 610 gave great insight into how to effectively analyse issues within a culture or organization and come up with practical solutions. Alongside this implementation of these skills and learnings, we also investigated a great deal of examples and case studies in our LDR 608 class.

Leadership Spirituality (LSP): Explain the importance and value of Biblically based Christian spirituality, which can provide a framework to examine and evaluate current leadership styles, principles, and ethics. 

Our Leadership and spirituality class was crucial for this learning outcome. Secular books such as leadership and self-deception gave a great insight into how we can create false images of others. Liturgy of the ordinary as well as various devotionals given throughout our ethics and personality development classes also demonstrated the significance and importance of scripturally focused leadership.

Leadership Development (LDE): Design personalized plans for Christ-centered servant-leadership development. 

I would say this has been more of a holistic process throughout the course. I would imagine in our Biblical foundations of leadership course we will learn more about this process as well. Whilst servant leadership does have a definition and is something that is spoken about a great deal at Taylor, I think it is much better viewed and experienced than read about. My assistantship with Jody Hirschy this year has been a fantastic example of this, I struggle to see someone who better embodies servant leadership.

Leadership Ethics (LE): Critically evaluate various ethical frameworks recommending best practices to the organizational leaders. 

What has been brilliant about our ethics class has been the debate and conversation surrounding ethical practices and how they relate to Christian ethics and values. We do agree on some things unanimously but often the truth lies somewhere in-between. It has been an excellent class for understanding the nuances of ethics and also determining how Kantian ethics as opposed to Utilitarianism may respond to a different organizational challenge.

Leadership and Cultural Intelligence (LCI): Analyze how diverse and global perspectives can enhance cultural intelligence for Christian Leaders. 

This has been a challenging and interesting course. Most if not all of my interactions at Taylor have been intercultural experiences. It has bee wonderful to interact with so many people from different cultures and learn the shortcomings of my own as well as its strengths. This course has enabled me to have a lot more grace for intercultural interactions and determine where I need to develop knowledge and understanding in certain environments in the future.

Leadership Strategy (LS): Critically examine the role of leaders in creating, implementing, and evaluating organizational strategy. 

Some of the books we have read in our strategic leadership class have been particularly effective in progressing this learning outcome. Ed Catmull’s creativity Inc has given me great insight into the importance of candor and how to create an environment of honesty. His brain trust recommendation I strongly connected with too. We also examined Simon Sinek’s start with why in detail in this course, and learning about the importance of culture, an organizations WHY and WHAT has opened my eyes to the way organizations should be run, and how ones I have worked for previously have suffered as a result of lacking clarity on their WHY.