Leadership Lesson #1

So today we started our second semester of LAUNCH, and this semester we're doing Leader Treks. So today for our first lesson we had to come up with a definition of leadership as a group. We also had a few quotes about leadership to help us along in the defining process. So our assignment for today was to ask three people outside of class read and tell us what they thought about our definition of leadership, pick one of the quotes that we didn't like and one that we did like, and thirdly, we had to choose a leader and tell why you like them.

First our definition of leadership is having influence over followers.

So I asked Judy, Steve, and Michelle in the office at camp. Judy thought that we might have wanted to include how you influence because people will be more likely to follow someone who leads through caring and compassion rather than through intimidation. Steve talked about whether you are having a positive or negative influence on someone, and Michelle really really liked our definition. She did say that we may have wanted to phrase it some other way than "followers" just to try and make people sound more like people.

I think that my favorite quote tht we read today was, "In order to be a leader a man must have followers. And to have followers, a man must have their confidence. Hence the supreme  quality for a leader is unquestionably integrity." -Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now I couldn't really find one that I disliked or disagreed with, so I just went with " Trust is the essence of leadership" -Colin Powell.

As for the leader I admire, I chose Col. Robert Gould Shaw, commending officer of the 54th Massachusets Volunteer Regiment in the American Civil war. Shaw was the commanding officer of the 54th Massachusetts, an entirely colored regiment. It's incredible to think that he agreed to lead these men when the President of the Confederacy had promised the death sentence to any captured white officers of a colored regiment. The volunteers signed up under the impression that they would be paid the same as the white soldiers. But when the colored volunteers were paid nearly half as much, Shaw led a boycott of payment until the government agreed to pay them the same as the white soldiers. Col. Shaw never saw the day that his men were paid equally because he was killed leading his regiment into battle at Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863. It was reported that Col. Shaw was killed leading the charge when his regiment hesistated in the face of heavy fire. His body was stripped and robbed before being thrown into a mass grave along with the rest of the soldiers killed at Fort Wagner. Usually an officer's body would be sent back for a proper burial, but because he was the CO of a colored unit, the Confederates buried him like a common soldier. This man possessed great courage and the willingness to face death to lead his men. If you like Civil war stuff and found this interesting then I would recommend that you watch the movie "Glory". It depicts the journey of Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts regiment.