Leaderships and Roles

Leaders are not leaders without followers, this is a fact. Last week I believe is when our class showed good leadership and followership examples during physical conditioning and class activities. Contributing to the followership side is the role I took last week. Our team needed followers and I chose to be one. Usually, I never have a problem filling both leader and followership roles when appropriate. Even if I feel more passionate toward something I will follow if I feel someone is a better leader than I would be.

Never really noticing this, it was my “Aha” moment. We will all be leaders sometime in our Air Force career. Sometimes it is self-directed, situation directed and other times just directed from your leadership. Many times people that I have been around try to be a leader when they should have followed, just because of some kind of an alpha complex. But it is great to see many people step up and try to lead that have not filled that role before. You just don’t see that in the civilian world. The Air Force knows how important it is to produce leaders today for our young Airmen.

I’ve never been strong in the leadership roles, because I would prefer to hear opinions and go with the strongest approach. This doesn’t necessarily make me a follower but it opens it for a group to be formed and of course each group needs a leader, but not self-proclaimed. I guess this class has taught me that we are people first and it gives a good in depth look at each other as human beings. We are a different and yet we work together, that in itself is amazing to me.

Different perspectives are always needed. That is something I learned during UM02. C.A.R.E creator, advancer, refiner and executor, which incorporated the four lenses’ into the process of team building. Not to sound negative but it seems the Air Force especially in the maintenance field you don’t see this often because of the “this is the way we have always done it.” I have seen A.F.A.I.L more than the...