LE2: Be Visible.

 Hello, everyone!

 In this post, I hope to write about letting people see you leading. In this section, the author, Dennis Perkins, gave me many examples of CEOs taking actions to make their employees see them leading. What I learnt from this section is that in difficult situations, leaders should not be blaming someone or ordering their teammates to deal with the problems, but should be calm, and think of proper steps to meet the situations and work out the problems together, with their teammates. This whole example reminded me of my experience when I was a leader of the school team in The Hague International Model United Nations (Details are in the last blog post!).

 As I've talked about the MUN activity in my school in the last blog, we had a five-hour lecture every week after class, which was held by a supervisor called Mr. Watson. In the lecture class, we had a time to do the demonstrations of MUN, which means we had to do the discussions about some international issues. However, the members often get confused, because of tons of information given in the lecture, and they rarely spoke up. I knew it was very important to raise my hand and get an opportunity to speak up from last year so that I was the only one who spoke up. I often talked to the members about how rarely we can get a chance to speak in front people in the actual conference, and the fact it is very important to speak up, but it seemed very difficult to take actions for them. Mr. Watson, who seemed unknown about the fact I was trying to encourage them to speak up, finally got mad, and sent all of us an e-mail which said we were so foolish that we didn't have courage to raise our hands and didn't make efforts to state our opinions. He used quite harsh words this time. Members in the team were all panicking. That e-mail made me feel very sorry and at the same time, scared, too, because  Mr. Watson was known as a quite strict teacher in the school and when he got mad, he usually made a seriously scary face and gave students detentions. (Now I'm talking about him being angry this time, but he is usually very nice and very helpful to the students. He is one of my favorite teachers!!) Although I was scared, I thought I had to fix this situation. I wasn't thinking I had to be calm, but somehow I was very calm after deciding taking actions as a leader. I called all the team members and told them we were going to talk to him directly. We arranged an impromptu meeting and discuss what was wrong with us and how we could fix our problems. After that, we directly went to the faculty room and met him. And talked about how sorry we were and reported what we decided to solve the problems after the meeting. Then he stopped making angry face and said the reason why he sent that e-mail was that he knew we all were capable of overcoming the problem. He was smiling. From the next lecture, members were quite faltering in the beginning, but discussion finally became active. Some of the members talked to me later and said they got courage from my action, and they were able to face the problem since they saw me talking to the teacher, being angry at first, bravely.

 This chapter, "Symbolism and Personal Examples" gave some ideas to be leading a team such as giving speech when in necessary or working together with teammates to solve the problems after the leader himself / herself make a decision, how to approach the problems they had. For the leaders, before taking any of those actions, what leaders really need are trust from team members and leaders' respect towards the members. Otherwise, teammates won't listen to the leader if he / she makes a speech or suggests what to do to solve problems. Establishing close relationship based trust and respect for each other makes it possible for leaders to take actions for the team. That's what I learnt from this chapter.

Bye!