Hierarchy is key in ensuring the normal functioning of our increasingly complex society. Here in the US, we have an enormous variety of industries, professional branches, specializations, and other domains of human activity or interests. So, competence is valued here, and opinion influencers or experimental pioneers have an important role to play. In fact, leadership evolves as a necessity virtually in any realm of human activity/ thinking, especially where more people are involved.
Thus, it isn’t hard to understand why, even in academic institutions throughout the US and worldwide, students are given leadership essay assignments. Most students will take on leadership roles with various degrees of responsibility and impact in their lives; hence, becoming familiar with typical challenges, solutions, or skills required is essential. Writing a leadership essay requires understanding key qualities and examples, which can also be effectively applied when discussing leadership in your nursing paper.
Definition and Importance
One could define a leadership paper or essay as a written work that helps identify and focus on many problems or challenges faced by leaders, such as efficiency, overcoming skepticism or distrust from subordinates, ensuring the personal evolution of subordinates, and inspiring motivation. In addition, it concerns potential solutions or strategies for addressing these issues, vital qualities required by leaders, and how to develop certain skills. It also may be considered the same as writing a profile essay.
In fact, understanding what a leadership essay is is simpler than understanding what leadership is because much knowledge related to the latter comes from directly experiencing a leadership role. Nevertheless, the importance of leadership essay assignments cannot be undermined as they help create a future leader’s mindset, help understand underlying values, and prepare him/her for real-life challenges by arming with valuable knowledge condensed from more experienced and knowledgeable actors.
Steps Involved in Writing Such Essays
Writing a leadership essay reminds of writing other essay types with some peculiarities. Here are some basic steps involved:
- Think about potential topics for your essay. If you already have some positive (or negative) leadership experience, it could be beneficial to reflect on it, choose a topic derived from challenges you faced or successes you achieved. Another strategy could be analyzing, dissecting leadership cases borrowed from other people.
- Research this topic or reflect on it thoroughly, understand whether you truly want to delve deeper, whether you’ll deliver an inspiring, original story, or whether enough high-quality information is available. If you are confident about your topic, start gathering evidence.
- Create a thesis statement that would comprehensively describe/ summarize your paper’s essence, argument, position, idea, message, and information piece.
- Complete an outline—plan your content in detail. This will ensure that the entire paper is structured logically, that all information pieces go to an appropriate section or paragraph, and that you keep your word count for each section in check as you write.
- Write the first draft. Let ideas or arguments flow and develop while leaving editing for later. Include solid evidence supporting your arguments, mentioning sources. Make sure you have a clearly delimited introduction, main body, and conclusion, in addition to other required sections.
- Edit your essay, revise, proofread, and repeat. You might decide to have someone else read it to highlight any mistakes.
10 Qualities of a Good Leader
Essays about leadership focus heavily on highlighting, exploring, and analyzing important personal qualities leaders possess. Among these qualities are:
- Self-confidence is highly cherished in US society. It allows one to implement and defend visions even when facing major obstacles or serious failures.
- Competence. Obviously, self-confidence is only valuable when coupled with competence. Many leaders, however, might have heard the definition of the Dunning-Kruger effect – confidence that one’s own cognitive ability or competence is greater than it really is. This is a great risk in dealing with the illusion of knowledge, which is even more dangerous than its absence altogether.
- Empathy. Nowadays, more than ever, the importance of emotional intelligence is acknowledged in Western societies – the stereotype of the productive but nervous, uncompromising, cold-hearted boss, as portrayed in Hollywood movies from earlier decades, is largely outdated. By contrast, showing understanding or empathy to an employee or subordinate facing a difficult situation may earn their loyalty, devotion, trust, and appreciation - things that are particularly important in the long term.
- Charisma & charm – like it or not, some people are influenced not only by the message or quality of your propositions but also by your charm – this is not limited to looks but includes more aspects, like speech manner, gestures, mimics, friendliness, reaction to an opponent’s objection, emotional side, even vulnerabilities might play in leader’s favor.
- Motivation—The importance of motivation can never be overstated. It’s a driving force everywhere. Motivation can allow one to go through hell and achieve the impossible.
- Visionary—true visionaries are rare, but the ability to anticipate hardships, expected event development, or future problems distinguishes effective leaders from average ones.
- Justice and impartiality—If we are talking about leaders who overview the activity of their subordinates, then the latter must see leaders who fairly reward good behavior while punishing bad behavior. This gives a clear message regarding expectations and prevents chaos in an organization or group.
- Dedication – seeing that a leader is ready to sacrifice effort, time, money, and other things to see visions implemented or goals achieved is one of the most moving things from a subordinate’s or follower’s perspective.
- Responsibility: Promises must be kept, problems must be faced rather than avoided indefinitely, and a true leader should be involved and present during the darkest hours. They should be fully aware of the consequences of their actions and face them.
- Negotiate & convince. Circumstances are not always favorable, opportunities are not always ideal, people are often doubtful even talented ones – bringing all elements, people, or circumstances to work together requires persuading power or ability to negotiate and compromise.
These are some important qualities every leader should have, and you may use them as topic ideas. Edubirdie has many topics for any paper, even social media essay.
Leadership Essay Example
Check an essay example completed by our expert. You may use it as a template or inspiration while writing your own essay on leadership!
Confucius was an influential figure of his time and one the most powerful thought leaders in human history. The fact that he became China’s greatest teacher for ages in just five years of professing this activity speaks for itself. He was a devoted preacher of morality, of correctness, sincerity, justice in social and family interactions.
Philosopher was dedicated, receptive, adaptive to his students’ needs, approaching each of them individually, qualities that describe both good teacher and emphatic leader focused on personal growth of this students and on deep personal ties with them – kind of leadership that elicits not only respect/ reverence but also attachment on a human level.
It is probably the suffering he endured as a young person that shaped his humanitarian worldview. He wanted to empower ordinary individuals through education and social reform in order for them to become masters of their own lives, as well as to identify with and take charge of society’s fate, demonstrating such leader qualities as responsibility, dedication, readiness for sacrifice.
Confucius has the allure of visionary highly devoted to the idea of making this world better but also of curious scholar thirsty of knowledge and in constant exploration, which are predictors of intelligence/ competence and open-mindedness among others. Being pragmatic thinker, he valued knowledge mostly for its potential to be used in practice to the benefit of society despite the fact that this implementation often proved challenging.
At the same time, he lived in a society that was disintegrating, objectives he was fighting for were often disregarded as utopist. If it were not for his persistence, he could be defeated by life many times over. Even despite multiple hardships, he managed to pass his legacy to the following generations achieving worldwide recognition for millennia.
Leadership Essay on Point!
The information provided above should be helpful when writing your next essay on leadership or approaching other leadership-related tasks. Writing a leadership essay requires clarity and insight, so if you're struggling to articulate your ideas, seeking essay writing help can make a significant difference in the quality of your work. Please note that our professional writers at Edubirdie come to help with various types of tasks. Thus, we can not only write your essays about leaders from scratch but also assist you with multiple steps of your writing project, creating an outline, editing, proofreading, writing an introduction, conclusion, and abstract for an already written leadership essay also at completing other career goals essay.
We allow clients to transparently choose our writers after placing their order, communicate and guide writers throughout the project, receive intermediary results, and perform unlimited revisions until full satisfaction with the results is achieved. Besides, we highly value anonymity, privacy, and unique content – you should trust that our collaboration will be confidential, secure, and productive.
