Personal Narrative: Lessons Learned In Leadership

I was lucky. A few months after I was given my first Division to lead, I was accepted in Superintendents’ Leadership Program (SLP) Batch 2. And years before that, I had worked with bosses who had given me opportunities to experience things that worked well and decisions that failed. So I had some mental models to start with and some training about leadership and management. More or less, I have a schema and theories and principles that intuitively guided me how to begin managing and leading more than 2 hundreds of schools and more than 2 thousands of people. Reality was both a source of apprehension and a motivation for a new leader like me. I could taste my jitters when I think of the magnitude of my responsibility …show more content…
It would include the application of what we have learned in each module. This was the third feature I liked in SLP. I looked forward for every last day of our weekly classes because I wanted to try out right away the thought experiments bursting in my mind. I did the brainstorming activity I learned in Module 2 (different from the one I knew) with the education supervisors, a novel experience for them. From it, they were able to conceptualize programs for their subject areas that they have not tried before. We sat down again together for five days to work on our Division Strategic Plan right after Module 4. Likewise, similar planning workshop was done with the school heads to craft our Division Technology Integration Plan (from Module …show more content…
This is a principle I have come to learn and share as I travel through my leadership journey. With the demand for greater results at the least possible time, one can only do so much. But one cannot just recruit any people to perform the job, they must have the competence required. Finding the right people or training them to be the right ones I want can help me accomplish what I cannot do alone. Passion begets passion. I have proven this overtime. By igniting fire and breathing compassion into anything from an idea, activity, project or a program, one is already halfway in making a buy in. The other half is what is required for marketing. Passion is contagious like measles. It spreads like epidemic in the organization as long as one is sincere and there is trust in the leader. Good relationship make things happen. Relationship is the bond that connects people in the organization. With broken relationships, there is a gap in the organization’s structure and it weakens. That is why I put premium on relationships by building them between me and my team and between each other. A lot can be done and with pleasure and less complaints with a good working team bonded by good relationship. In resolving conflicts I favor giving a second chance to an offender rather than immediate sanction or disciplinary action. I don’t think it is a sign of weak leadership because I have seen results that had proven it being effective. A