My Credo

My Credo

• Positive Attitude: I will approach my day to day challenges with a positive attitude to help me achieve goals and be successful without giving up.

• Family and Friends: I will value and respect the commitments I make to my family and friends because they are always there for me whenever I need anything.

• Challenge: Never do less than my ability and always seek to challenge myself in all that I do. Nothing worth having comes easy so it is important to take challenges every day.

• My Values and Commitments: Enjoyment, family and friends, challenge, competence, freedom.


My Sentence:
He faces his day-to-day challenges with a positive attitude and enjoys living his life to the fullest.

How has your view of leadership changed?

Before taking this class, I didn’t think too much about leadership and how I could personally lead. I pictured a leader to strictly be somebody who is in charge of a group or organization. However leadership class has shown me that there are many more ways to lead in all different types of situations. At first I thought leaders were just born that way, but I now know that there are ways for anybody to learn how to lead. Ways to learn how to lead include taking a class, trial and error, and observing other leaders. Also, I already had some characteristics in mind of a good leader but we collaborated in class and came up with our class top 7 list of traits. A few that really stood out to me were perseverance, keeping cool, and lead by example. Perseverance stood out because a true leader must be 100% committed to his goal in order to effectively lead others. Keeping one’s cool is very important because the leader is who the followers look up to and if the leader loses his composure, that directly affects the attitude of all the followers. Last, I included leading by example as a very important trait because actions speak louder than words and a leader must do a good job of setting an example for their followers. Leadership class has made me put a lot more thought into how to lead and I plan on utilizing the information I have learned in this class in the real world.

Leadership Interview Reflection

I decided to do my leadership interview on Terry Brown. Terry is the Vice President of Commercial Services at Crosstex Energy and I got the chance to work with him over the summer as an intern. In observing the ways that Terry interacted with his employees and associates and the positive responses they had towards him, I could tell that he was a very effective leader. Terry touched on many of the things that we talked about in class, but he also had some very good input on things that we never talked about. When I asked Terry what are some traits he has observed of effective leaders he said effective communication, fairness, confidence, and planning. I thought fairness was interesting because although we didn’t talk about it much in class, it is very relevant. A follower will respond more positively to a leader if they feel like they are in an environment where everyone is treated equally, and Terry did a great job of creating this environment in his workplace. I also asked Terry what steps he took to reach his position of leadership and the main thing he talked about was competence. As he became more competent, he began asking for more responsibilities and challenges from his supervisors, which made him a more likely candidate for a leadership role. When I asked Terry what the hardest thing he does as a leader every day, he talked about maintaining consistency with actions and decisions, which we talked about a lot in class. He said that remaining consistent allows followers to anticipate needs of the organization and support of the leader to complete tasks with minimal interference. Terry expanded on many things that we talked about in class and introduced new things that we never talked about. He is a great leader and I look forward to learning more from him next summer.