leadership experience Essay Examples

How to Write an Essay on Leadership Experience

Writing an essay gives you the opportunity to explore a subject and voice your own opinions. When writing a good quality essay, it's all about researching your topic and substantiating your arguments with good quality evidence or factual based opinion. Leadership is a great topic to write about because a good leader can guide an organisation or group of individuals with positive personal attributes. Whether you're a student or whether you're going to work for an organisation, people are always interested in leadership skills. As a topic, there's a lot that you can write about.

Leadership Essay Outline

An essay on leadership can provide you with a forum to talk about some of the leadership traits that you have explored and carried out in the past. You need to gather your thoughts before you start writing. Think exactly how you’ve lead a group of people. If you haven't been a leader, think about what would make a good leader. Once you've identified an area that you'd like to focus on, you can organise the rest of the essay around this topic. Most importantly, before you begin writing you'll need a coherent plan and essay outline, because without one your essay won't flow smoothly. To help plan, you’ll need to understand what makes a good leader and how you can discuss leadership within your writing.

What Makes A Good Leader?

Leadership is a fairly common phrase that can be difficult to define. Its definition is loosely based around a strong ability to get others around the leader figure to follow in their footsteps. All in all, questions such as “what are desirable leadership skills?”, are widely debated, however some characteristics styles and actions of effective leaders are based around a series of personal attributes. A good leader is somewhat dependent on context, for instance you could be a strong leader in both a formal or informal situation. You needn't always be appointed as a leader - a lot of the time the practice of leadership is circumstantial. There are various other qualities that demonstrate good leadership that you could discuss within the body of your essay.

1. Confidence - A good leader is one that arises to challenges in the face of adversity at the right moment and displays confidence to ensure that other people follow commands.
2. The ability to inspire others - It can be difficult at times to persuade people to follow you, so if you're an inspiring and positive person, you'll likely be able to keep motivation up and inspire others to follow you.
3. A passionate person - In order to gain the respect of your group and for people to be a 100% behind you, you will need to show that you are committed and passionate about your ideas. A good leader is a person who wants the group to succeed, no matter what.
4. Strong decision making skills - If you're being led in the army for instance, the last thing you want to be doing is worrying about whether you should go left or right. A strong leader will have strong decision making skills. Once a decision has been taken, others can stand by it.
5. An honest person - Without honesty, it is difficult for success. it doesn't matter whether you're the leader of a gang or a team leader the office environment, honesty is the best policy. If you’re dishonest, how can you expect the people who depend on you to believe in what you're saying and do what you say? It will be very difficult to be a good leader if you're dishonest because people will always find out that you’re lying in the end.
6. An innovative mindset - If you're not trying to think of solutions to problems, then you won't be innovative. One of the key attributes that separates a leader from a follower is the ability to creatively think. There's no point following someone who, once they exhausted their ideas, lead you towards a stagnant point.

The Introduction

In order to form a professional essay introduction, you'll need to grab the reader’s attention right at the very beginning. Think of a hook that you can use to really hone the reader’s attention in. A great way of doing this is to mention something about a prototypical leader from history who has been an inspiration to many people, or you could mention something about a leader that has inspired you personally. First and foremost, make sure that the information is interesting. After a great hook, the second part of your introduction can move forward, i.e. the thesis statement.

Your thesis statement should summarise the main points your essay and coherent and succinct manner. Like any statement it should be short and to the point, so no jargon or colourful language here. Everybody's got to be able to understand your thesis statement in order to understand your leadership experience essay.

The Body

Now that your introduction has provided the perfect entry into your essay, you can work on the main points that you would like to make. think about some of the qualities that determine good leadership. As a prompt to get your mind moving, take note of the following questions:

• What is leadership?
• What makes a good leader?
• What things do all the good leaders learn?
• What are some of the attributes of a strong leader?
• Is leadership inherent or can you learn to lead?
• Do leaders need to have strong social influence?

The main body of the text should comprise of around three or four paragraphs. Of course you can add as many as you'd like, but you won't want to go on forever. Keeping your readers interested is all about elaborating on a few key ideas. Once you have your key points, you should think about examples and evidence to substantiate each of them. Each key paragraph should only feature one of these points as you don't want to confuse the reader throughout. A great way of improving the flow of an essay is to use transitional words in order to help the reader flow between points easily. At the beginning of every paragraph, you can include a topic sentence that will focus the reader's attention on to one particular point. Once the reader has read the topic sentence, it will be much easier for them to gauge the rest of the paragraphs body. A well written essay is one that has a great and use of style. After this you can think about your evidence, arguments, examples and any other opinions that you can use to give your paragraph depth. In order to provide an interesting and personal touch, incorporate anecdotes if you can. Anecdotes show off a strong writing ability as you can easily use similes, metaphors, imagery and emotional vocabulary within them. If you want your reader to think of something specific, relate an idea to them with an anecdote. You may find it easier than you think to incorporate a good anecdote into your work. Think of the key leader that you would like to lead you or others. Perhaps there is somebody in your life that you’ve met who has outstanding leadership qualities - you can talk about an experience where they’ve displayed these in a short anecdote. It can be humorous as long as it’s tasteful.

A Captivating Conclusion

So now that you've got all of your body together, you'll need to summarise the main points of your leadership experience essay in a punchy and well thought out conclusion. The best conclusions are ones that can wrap up your essay and demonstrate to the reader that you've accomplished what you have set out to do. The conclusion is not the time to add any new ideas or to put specific information in that has not been previously mentioned - the essay’s body should serve this purpose. Instead, what you want to be doing is moving from the specific to the general. The conclusion is of course vastly different to the introduction, but make sure you relay the reader back to your thesis statement that you’ve provided at the beginning in order for a sense of closure to be achieved. Finally, you’ll want to end in the way that you started, i.e. leave your reader on a bang - give your reader something to think about with a final remark that can grab their attention. If you follow these steps, it's highly likely that you'll be able to provide a sophisticated and well structured leadership experience essay. Take note of the following ideas and help them lead you in the right direction. Soon you’ll be able to lead your audience’s mind through a well structured and coherent piece of text that arouses their imagination and gets them thinking.