The project weeks have officially started and it is time to start working hard again!
The last couple of weeks before the Christmas break always feel like the hardest ones of the year. It’s the time to hand in all assignments, study for the exams, and clean your room so that it’s save to leave in untouched for the next three weeks. But when the vacation is finally there, it is a perfect time to be with family, enjoy some free time, and most importantly for us students a time to catch up on all the sleep you missed during the semester!
But now, three weeks later, the project weeks have officially started and it is time to start working hard again. We, the second year students, have a course of three weeks called ‘Sustainable Leadership’, which is a course in which we try to find out what a true leader is or needs to be and how we can become one ourselves. Everyone has a certain idea of a good leader of course, but what exactly is it that makes this person such a great leader? This is the question we hope to answer at the end of these three weeks.
After some discussion and through preparatory questions we answered before the start of the class, we were asked to come up with some examples of good leaders. My group chose someone that might be a bit obvious, but seemed to us like the perfect embodiment of a good leader: Nelson Mandela. The characteristics that made him such a great leader according us were his courage, charisma, warmth, credibility, life story, and his ability to unite a nation that was once completely separated. Although this is only a three week course and becoming all of these things take far more effort and hard work than we could even begin with in such a short time, I hope that at the end of our studies, when all of us have to go into the world and become leaders (managers) ourselves, we will remember these characteristics and try to live up to them the best we can.