Learning to lead

I was in Kolkata my freshman summer as part of a DukeEngage group that worked in a non-profit organization called Future Hope in a number of different roles including teaching students, providing homecare assistance, and promoting athletic opportunities for a large group of impoverished children in India. I remember working with another member of my group in a particularly unruly English class with a number of 10th graders, all of whom refused to speak English and resorted to the native Bengali language. I had approached the students in a friendly way, asking that they practice their English with us in the class and use Bengali outside of the class with mostly successful results but one student refused to let up. Finally, my teaching partner became tired of his rebelliousness and yelled at him to get out of the class.

I could see that he was visibly offended by the remarks of my partner and I understood that his public humiliation would prevent us from effectively teaching for the rest of the class so I made a tough decision to counter what my teaching partner had said. Instead I reasoned with the student, firmly but kindly, that our job was to get them to learn as much English as possible and that we were only trying to help and encourage them. This seemed to work quite well and the student did not act out again in class.

After the class was over, my teaching partner actually thanked me for countering her and admitted that although she was initially angry, she realized that patience and collaboration with the students was a better course of action to take. Together we were able to actually teach the students which was our primary goal.

That day, I learned three important lessons about leadership. The first was that an effective leader understands the cohesion and integration within a group and can dynamically adjust his or her leadership skills to address issues within a group. The second is that a leader must be able to have the courage to counter what others, even influential others, might say, if that is not in the interest of the entire group as a whole. In this case, it was important to realize that punishing a student in front of the class would neither teach the group a lesson nor the individual and it would disrupt group dynamics much more. Finally, I recognized that the importance of keeping the primary goals of leadership in mind always when making decisions. Here, if we had kicked out the student we would have sacrificed his ability to learn and mitigated the effectiveness of our own teaching and so it was important to avoid that.

Leadership is important because it is a sustained and propelling force for action and change. Though we may glorify those who found the strength to make a difference, a true leader is one who brings out in all of us the will to make a change. Leaders are not simply those who command their followers but actually those who can inspire a group to achieve more than it could otherwise do on its own. This ability to make a group more than just the sum of its parts is why true leadership is essential not only for promoting a cause but for effecting action. What separates a coordinated protest from an unruly mob is its ability to organize and play on the effectiveness of each of its members.

Leaders can facilitate the cohesion of a group and cause change through the sheer strength of a unified group of activists. For me, leadership is not just telling people to do something because it is the right thing to do, it is getting people to do the right thing because they believe it is the right thing to do. In a world of chaos and uncertainty, leadership is the essential foundation for making change happen through the will of the people.