what to include in a leadership essay

Essay Papers Writing Online

Learn the essential tips and techniques to write a compelling and impactful leadership essay that captures the attention of your readers.

When it comes to composing an outstanding leadership essay, there are several key insights that can greatly enhance your writing. By delving into the complexities of leadership, exploring its various dimensions, and weaving a compelling narrative, you can captivate your readers and leave a lasting impression.

Effective leadership goes beyond conventional definitions and involves a unique set of qualities and skills. A truly remarkable essay on leadership should not only provide a comprehensive overview of these qualities but also offer insightful perspectives that challenge traditional notions. By incorporating strong examples and relevant case studies, you can shed light on the intricate nuances of leadership and inspire your audience.

A truly exceptional leadership essay not only discusses the importance of leadership but also encourages self-reflection and personal growth. By exploring your own leadership journey and highlighting key lessons learned along the way, you can infuse your essay with authenticity and make it relatable for readers. Additionally, delving into the challenges and obstacles faced in your leadership role can demonstrate resilience and the ability to adapt, further enhancing the impact of your composition.

Identify your personal leadership experiences

One of the key aspects of crafting an impressive leadership essay is being able to identify and reflect upon your personal leadership experiences. These experiences can come in many different forms and may not always be obvious at first glance. It is important to delve deep into your past and consider all the times you have taken charge, made decisions, and influenced others.

Reflect upon your experiences in school, work, extracurricular activities, or any other area of your life where you have had the opportunity to take on a leadership role. Think about times when you have successfully led a team, solved a problem, motivated others, or made a positive impact. These are the moments that will serve as the foundation for your leadership essay.

• Consider any leadership positions or responsibilities you have held, whether formal or informal.
• Reflect upon any challenges you have faced as a leader and how you overcame them.
• Think about the values and qualities that you believe are important for a leader to possess and how you have demonstrated these traits in your own experiences.
• Consider any instances where you have been able to inspire or influence others to achieve a common goal.

By identifying and reflecting upon your personal leadership experiences, you will not only be able to provide examples and evidence in your essay, but you will also gain a deeper understanding of your own leadership capabilities. This self-reflection will help you to articulate your leadership style and philosophy, and ultimately make your essay more compelling and impressive.

Highlight your unique leadership qualities

When writing a leadership essay, it is crucial to showcase your distinctive leadership qualities and what sets you apart from others in a leadership role. Your essay should delve into the qualities that make you a standout leader and how you have demonstrated these skills in real-life situations.

One key aspect to consider is your ability to communicate effectively. As a leader, you must be able to clearly convey your thoughts and ideas to your team members. Your essay should highlight instances where you have effectively communicated your vision and goals, and how this has positively impacted your team’s performance.

In addition to communication, another important aspect of effective leadership is the ability to inspire and motivate others. Your essay should include examples of how you have inspired your team members to go above and beyond, and how you have motivated them to achieve shared goals. Whether it’s through leading by example or providing words of encouragement, showcasing your ability to inspire others will demonstrate your unique leadership qualities.

Furthermore, a strong leader is someone who can adapt to different situations and make sound decisions under pressure. Your essay should highlight instances where you have demonstrated adaptability and made difficult decisions that have positively impacted your team or organization. This showcases your ability to think critically and make rational choices, qualities that are essential for effective leadership.

A great leader is also someone who values collaboration and teamwork. Your essay should discuss how you have fostered a collaborative environment and encouraged your team members to work together towards a common goal. Highlighting instances where you have successfully collaborated with others and achieved results as a team will showcase your ability to bring people together and leverage their skills and strengths.

Lastly, don’t forget to include examples of how you have exhibited integrity and ethical behavior in your leadership role. A leader who acts with integrity and sets ethical standards for others is highly regarded. Your essay should highlight instances where you have made decisions based on moral principles and upheld ethical standards, demonstrating your strong character and unique leadership qualities.

• Showcase your effective communication skills
• Highlight your ability to inspire and motivate others
• Demonstrate your adaptability and decision-making abilities
• Emphasize your collaborative approach to leadership
• Illustrate your integrity and ethical behavior

By highlighting these unique leadership qualities, your essay will stand out and leave a lasting impression on the reader.

Use real-life examples to demonstrate your leadership skills

One effective way to showcase your leadership abilities in an essay is by incorporating real-life examples. Instead of simply describing your skills and qualities, providing tangible examples will make your essay more engaging and credible.

By using real-life experiences, such as situations you encountered in school, work, or extracurricular activities, you can demonstrate how you exhibited leadership qualities and successfully influenced others. These examples will give your essay a personal touch and allow the reader to better understand your leadership style and effectiveness.

For instance, you can discuss a time when you took charge of a group project and led your team to success. Describe the specific challenges you faced, how you motivated and coordinated your team members, and the outcome of your leadership efforts. This example will not only highlight your ability to take initiative but also demonstrate your skills in communication, teamwork, and problem-solving.

In addition to discussing your successes, don’t be afraid to mention times when you faced obstacles or even failure. Sharing these experiences and reflecting on how you tackled them can demonstrate your resilience, adaptability, and ability to learn from mistakes. It also shows that you are not afraid to take risks and rise to the occasion, qualities that are crucial for effective leadership.

When using real-life examples in your essay, be sure to provide enough detail to make it vivid and relatable. Use specific anecdotes, dialogue, and outcomes to paint a clear picture of your leadership skills in action. Additionally, make sure to tie each example back to the overall theme or thesis of your essay, highlighting the value and relevance of your leadership experiences.

In conclusion, incorporating real-life examples into your leadership essay can significantly enhance its impact. By providing tangible instances of your leadership skills in action, you can capture the reader’s attention, establish credibility, and showcase your unique qualities as a leader.

Focus on the impact of your leadership on others

When crafting an exceptional leadership essay, it is vital to focus on the influence and effect that your leadership has had on others. One of the distinguishing factors of a great leader is the ability to inspire and motivate those around them, fostering growth and success. Sharing how your leadership style and actions have positively impacted individuals and teams will not only showcase your effectiveness as a leader but also highlight your ability to create a supportive and collaborative environment.

Highlight instances where your leadership has empowered others to reach their full potential, overcome challenges, and achieve meaningful goals. Discuss how you have mentored and guided individuals, encouraging them to develop their abilities and become confident in their own capabilities. Additionally, emphasize the collaborative nature of your leadership, demonstrating how you have fostered teamwork, encouraged open communication, and facilitated the sharing of ideas and perspectives.

It is important to provide specific examples and anecdotes that illustrate the impact of your leadership on others. These personal stories will help bring your essay to life and allow the reader to understand the tangible ways in which you have made a difference. Consider discussing moments where you successfully resolved conflicts, motivated a team to exceed expectations, or supported someone through a difficult situation.

Furthermore, show how you have created a positive and inclusive culture that values diversity and respects the individuality of each team member. Talk about how you have celebrated the successes of others, recognized their contributions, and provided opportunities for professional and personal growth. By highlighting these aspects, you not only demonstrate your impact as a leader but also showcase your ability to create an environment that fosters the growth and development of others.

In conclusion, when writing your leadership essay, focusing on the impact of your leadership on others is crucial. By highlighting how you have empowered, supported, and inspired individuals and teams, you can showcase your ability to create a positive and collaborative environment that drives success. Use specific examples and anecdotes to illustrate these points and demonstrate the tangible ways in which your leadership has made a difference.

Reflect on your own growth and learning as a leader

As you delve into crafting an impressive leadership essay, it is crucial to take the time to reflect on your personal growth and learning as a leader. This introspective process allows you to explore your experiences and identify the ways in which you have developed and evolved as a leader.

Think about the challenges you faced and how you overcame them, the opportunities you seized and the successes you achieved. Consider the lessons you learned from your failures and the skills you acquired along the way. Reflect on the relationships you built and the impact you made on those around you.

It is important to be honest with yourself and recognize both your strengths and areas for improvement. Acknowledge the obstacles you faced and how you navigated through them. Highlight the moments of growth and the transformative experiences that shaped your leadership journey.

Identify the values that guide you as a leader and the principles that you consistently uphold. Reflect on the importance of self-reflection and continuous learning in your development as a leader. Consider the ways in which your leadership style has evolved and adapted to different contexts and challenges.

Sharing these reflections in your leadership essay allows you to demonstrate your self-awareness, growth mindset, and commitment to personal development as a leader. It showcases your ability to adapt, learn from experience, and inspire others. Emphasize the impact of your growth and learning on your leadership approach and how it has influenced your ability to lead effectively.

In conclusion, reflecting on your own growth and learning as a leader is an essential aspect of crafting an impressive leadership essay. By delving into your experiences, challenges, successes, and failures, you can showcase your self-awareness, adaptability, and commitment to continuous improvement in your leadership journey.

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Leadership Essay

27 August, 2020

12 minutes read

Author:  Richard Pircher

As a college student, you must write essays on a regular basis since the latter is one of the most common types of home assignments. All this means is that in order to get good grades and be successful with writing the papers, you need to have a sound understanding of the structure. Additionally, what you should never neglect is the variety of essay types. Indeed, your essay will significantly differ from one type to another: description essay will most likely have a structure that is slightly different from an argumentative one.

What you may have already encountered in your academic life is the work on a leadership essay. Although it sounds pretty complicated and vague, it is mostly possible to master an essay on leadership. Below is a guide for you to get an insight into this particular essay type.

What is a good leadership essay?

A good leadership essay is the one in which the essay writer has fully covered the topic of leadership and understood its core ideas. More specifically, to end up with a flawless leadership essay, you will need to indicate what makes a person a good leader. For achieving the latter, you will most likely need to conduct research and trace how a particular person reaches his or her goals. In other words, the task is to discover which actions the person undertakes, what their followers say about him or her, and how the person organizes the work. So, a leadership essay implies providing real-life success examples and further revealing them.

Above all, a good leadership essay is the one that follows a precise, clear, comprehensive structure. Structuring your essay about leadership in the most coherent way leads to a win-win situation: you have fewer troubles and barriers to writing a brilliant essay, and your teacher is able to comprehend the essay easily. This guide is what you will need to refer to to get an insight into how the flawless structure for a leadership essay looks like and how it will let you take a benefit.

How to write a Leadership essay?

To write a leadership essay that stands out, you first need to brainstorm all the ideas that you have and come up with a topic for your essay. If you are struggling with this step, you may think of some of the most influential people, read about them, and find out what makes them unique. Or, you can pick any topic which is mentioned at the end of this article. After you have chosen an issue, it is time to structure your essay appropriately.

As you already know, an essay constitutes three essential sections: introduction, main body, and conclusion. Below is the more detailed description of each of the parts.

Introduction

Of course, your leadership essay introduction will always vary depending on the topic of the essay. However, you can always begin by stating your vision of leadership regardless of the topic. Additionally, to motivate the reader and instantly catch his or her attention, you may use a quote of a famous leader, or simply a quote which you find relevant to the topic. Be aware that you should avoid outlining the essence and the role of the leadership in your introduction; leave it for the body paragraphs.

What you may also do in your leadership essay is ask a question, which will most likely intrigue the leader. Or it will at least give your reader an overview of what you will dwell on  in your essay.

Body Paragraphs

You will need to divide the main body into 3-5 paragraphs to make the structure more comprehensive. What you have to do at this point  is  give your reader a sound understanding of your ideas. Therefore, try to fit each idea in a single body paragraph so that you do not confuse your reader. Do not hesitate to indicate your examples to strengthen your arguments. For instance, you may explain a fact that makes a particular person you are writing about a real leader.

Also, always stick to your thesis statement and don’t forget that the body paragraphs should reveal the parts of your thesis statement.

As you may already know, you need to restate your opinion and briefly summarize all the points from the main body in conclusion. For instance, if you wrote your essay on qualities of an effective leader, state the most fundamental qualities and indicate why they matter the most. Besides, try not to copy what you have already written in the body – it is better to restate your opinion using different words. And, of course, beware adding any new and extra information; indicate only those points that you have already outlined in the text. Finally, keep in mind that it is always favorable to keep your concluding remarks short.

Leadership Essay Examples

Writing a leadership essay requires some research and time. In case you feel the necessity to go through an essay example, below is a leadership essay sample you can refer to.

Is leadership an inborn or an acquired feature?

Is everyone capable of becoming a leader, or is this ability innate? A lot of researchers have been struggling to answer this question. One assumption about leadership implies that the leader is the person who possesses particular characteristics. Another assumption claims that leaders are capable of acquiring specific features over their life span. As the evidence shows, leaders own many features that distinguish them among others and make more and more people become their followers. These might be cognitive abilities, psychological traits, professional qualities, and a lot more, and all of them will be either acquired or innate. Based on the importance of leadership qualities, such as commitment, stress resistance, and the ability to make quality decisions, it is reasonable to claim that leaders are made, not born. 

One can deem commitment as one of the top fundamental qualities of the leader. In essence, such a feature indicates that a person is passionate about the common goal, strives to be a team player, and makes every effort to reach a shared goal. As the history shows, none of the successful companies was uncoordinated by an influential, committed leader: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft – all of these companies are examples of dominant teams led by a dedicated leader. A committed leader also inspires his or her team to achieve common goals and put more effort into the shared activity. Besides, commitment is unlikely to be an innate feature; it instead comes with experience. This is so, since commitment implies dedicating oneself to the shared task, and one can reach it only via learning and continuous self-improvement.

Stress resistance is another incredibly important feature that every good leader should possess. This is because only a stress-resistant leader has sufficient capabilities to overcome any complexity and not let the anxiety and stress prevent him or her from making proper decisions. Besides, such a leader will most likely have a positive influence on the team, as long as leading by example will motivate the team members to attain the same emotional stability. What is so far familiar about stress resistance as an effective leader’s feature is that it can be either innate or attained. However, although some researchers admit that emotional stability is something one is born with, it is not entirely true; many people still put a great effort into self-improvement, changing the attitude to unfortunate situations, and so on. Therefore, being resistant to stress can be mostly attributed to a personality.

An ability to make high-quality decisions most likely determines the chances for an enterprise’s success. In particular, such quality is incredibly fundamental for a company of any size and professional orientation. Additionally, it is one of the top tasks of a good leader to make final decisions. What he or she should do implies brainstorming, discussing various opinions in the group, making forecasts, analyzing all the pros and cons. However, the leader is the one to make a final decision. Thereby, he is in charge of researching the market, discovering all the hidden truths, and analyzing the organization’s potential and capabilities to result in the most effective decision. As it flows logically from the latter, an ability to make sound quality decisions is purely a professional quality. This leads to the conclusion that one has to work hard to become a genuine leader and master the skill of making effective decisions. 

Overall, the leader may possess a multitude of different skills and master them perfectly. However, what has so far become transparent is that any leader, regardless of which team he leads, must possess three essential qualities. These qualities are commitment to the common goal, ability to handle and resist stress, and, finally, an ability to make effective decisions. All of the three qualities are most likely to be acquired over a lifetime. The statement below leads to the conclusion that even though some qualities can be innate, most are not the ones that leaders are born with. Hence, this answers an essential question: leadership feature is acquired, and not necessarily inborn.  

20 leadership essay topics

When coming up with your next leadership essay topic, it is imperative to brainstorm ideas and think of what leadership might be related to. If you are struggling with a topic of the importance of leadership essay or any relevant type of essay, you may quickly take a look at some of the possible topics we prepared for you:

• What are the main qualities of the leader?
• Successful Time Management as a feature of an effective leader
• The role that rhetoric plays in leadership
• The most exceptional leader in the history of the 20-th century
• The role of female leadership
• What are the challenges of the leader of the 21-st century?
• How college helps students develop leadership skills?
• Qualities of the leader that motivate people to follow them 
• Top things to avoid doing to become a team leader
• Examples of effective and ineffective leadership in the history
• Top techniques for developing leadership skills
• The interconnection of creativity and leadership 
• Is a university’s role fundamental in developing leadership skills?
• Dictatorship as an anti-example of leadership
• Liberal vs Authoritative leadership: which one works better?
• The influence of the leader’s role model on the followers’ mindset
• Main difficulties that the new leader may face in a new team
• Leadership of today vs leadership of the past: what has changed?
• Reasons why I want to become a member if the leadership program
• The role of cognitive abilities for the leader 

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A Full Guide On How To Create Good Leadership Essay

Attempting a leadership essay isn’t such a daunting task, provided you have a grasp of the necessary information needed for a leadership paper. To write this special essay, you’ll need to redefine what exactly an essay on leadership is, how to choose the perfect topic, what should be in the content, and how to organize and structure the paper. Let’s delve deeper!

What Is A Leadership Essay?

A leadership essay is a well-formatted, organized and specialized type of formal writing which elaborates on a generic leadership topic or a superior human figure exercising a great influence on people and transmitting desire and optimism to achieve goals.

What Makes A Good Leader Essay?

There are some peculiarities needed to infuse in your write-up if, for example, you’re trying to learn how to write a leadership essay about yourself.

Also, if you’re just trying to produce leadership essays for college, then you’d first and foremost, learn  how to structure an essay , among other skills needed for this type of essay. Here are some qualities which can be found in a good essay about leadership.

• Choose a creative topic
• Avoid the passive voice (the active voice sounds stronger)
• Search for and study leadership essay examples
• Follow the appropriate essay style
• Focus on the essay structure
• Review the essay

How To Choose A Topic And Make A Great Title?

To choose a topic for a paper on leadership, you need to do some research on the concept of a leader (whether in the corporate industry, political society or even in the criminal world). You have to know the current leadership tendencies in organizational groups or society. You can choose to make a leader the point of your reference by explaining the consequences of their leadership abilities or inabilities.

In the body of your essay, don’t forget to mention several types of leadership styles and point out which one the subject portrays. Finally, you should not rule out making comparisons of famous leaders in the modern world or in history. An example of a great prompt for a leadership essay that deploys the comparison technique would be the leadership styles of President Trump and The Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte as both leadership styles have been subjected to political reviews in recent times since their emergence as president of their respective countries.

Outline For A Leadership Essay

When writing a college or professional essay such as -long and short essays on leadership, planning is the key to perfection. The general outline for any essay, including leadership papers, include an introduction, the body paragraphs (which must be properly linked with transition words and/or phrases) and a recapitulating or finding-based conclusions. Here’s what your outline should look like:

Introduction

Knowing how to start a leadership essay depends on your introduction writing ability. The introduction is the gateway to the essay. Aided by punchy opening words, which are the hook, the purpose of the introduction is to draw the reader’s attention. The introduction presents the thesis statement and leaves the body paragraphs to sustain the reader’s interest.

Body Paragraphs

Having informed the readers of the topic of the essay in the introductory paragraph(s), the body paragraphs follow immediately.

Here, you can elaborate on the concept of leadership and do a meaningful interpretation of the subject – the topic or the thesis statement. Don’t forget to talk about your leadership philosophies and leadership experience in whatever capacity you might have found yourself in. Remember, people are more interested in personal experiences. They are great in helping to sustain readers’ attention.

Remember to state a thesis or hypothesis in the opening paragraphs – which is the intro. In each of the body paragraphs of the essay, try to relate your points to the thesis and use each point to prove its validity.

The conclusion is the end part of any well-structured essay. Its purpose is a no-brainer. You don’t want to leave your reader hanging by ending the essay cold turkey. Any standard essay without a conclusion is just as useless as an essay with no purpose. However, be careful not to present new ideas not mentioned in the body.

As mentioned, the conclusion serves to summarize the developed points, restate the thesis and/or present the findings. It is your last opportunity to create an impression on the reader, and this is where they take the message away. If your conclusion is weak, then we might say the essay’s objectives are not achieved.

What To Include In A Leadership Essay?

Here are some tips on what your leadership essay should include.

Your Definition Of A Good Leader And Why He Or She Is Important

Since your essay revolves around leadership and the traits of a good leader, you’ll need to define what it takes to be one. You may also take this opportunity to trash some common myths on what a leader is (i.e., a manager being confused for a leader).

For reference purposes, the concepts of leadership and being a good leader are explained:

Leadership is the quality of a leader and is that person capable of exercising a great influence on people and transmitting desire and optimism to achieve goals. A leader is a guide; someone with ideas and goals that can spread to a large group of people who still believe he or she can lead them in the right direction.

There are many types of leaders and therefore, of leadership since people generally always look for a person or group that shows them a direction to follow. You can find religious, political, social, or philosophical leadership. Leadership can be exercised in a traditional way. In many countries, there is a monarchy. The king or queen is a leader with limited political power, at least in western democracies, but still have the respect and consideration of the people. Their words continue to be heard and taken into account, especially in problematic times. There are other types of leadership that are not given by birth, such as legitimate leadership exercised by, for example, political leaders freely chosen by their people, or charismatic leaders.

In a way, charismatic leaders are what many understand as leaders since they are people who, by their way of behavior and characteristics, get many people to follow and adhere to their ideas. Some charismatic leaders can become legitimate leaders if they choose the path of politics. A traditional leader can also be charismatic. There have always been kings loved by his people more than others. But it can also be a person who prefers independent movements outside of power.

Charisma is the personal magnetism a person has. It is something very difficult to define but makes one capable of convincing others without too much effort, making people follow and trust the leading figure. Charisma can be used positively or negatively. The leaders of the most destructive sects are very charismatic people that are capable of convincing their followers of the eeriest ideas, including donating all their belongings or committing collective suicide.

Examples Of Your Leadership Style

In the content of your essay, you may consider giving an interpretation to your (or your chosen leader’s) leadership traits. Below are some examples of leadership qualities that separate a good leader from a bad leader.

What qualities are necessary for leadership

• Communication
• Emotional intelligence
• Strategic thinking
• Commitment and passion
• Knowledge and experience
• Leading by example
• Active listening
• Ability to enhance talent
• Setting goals and expectations
• People investment
• Discernment
• Concentration
• Positive attitude
• Problem-solving
• Self-discipline

Leadership Essay Example

To know how to do essay fast, you’ll need some ready-made essay examples for the sake of guidance and inspiration. You may find below a leadership essay written by Oliver Smith useful in your leadership paper.

Writing a leadership essay should be easy. A good essay on leadership starts from the hook, and the thesis statement in the introduction. The points developed in the body paragraphs help affirm the hypothesis. Finally, the conclusion offers the reader a summary through the restatement of the essay’s main idea.

As required for every essay type, your essay on leadership has to follow a definite style and format. Examples are MLA, APA, Chicago and AP styles. Take your time in choosing a creative but new topic and also in writing the content. By following this guide, everything should be as perfect as possible.

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Your Complete Guide to Writing a Compelling Leadership Essay

True leadership lies at the heart of human well-being and success. Every positive step humanity ever took required great and responsible leadership. Therefore, people have studied leadership for many edges to unravel its different underlying factors. 

But how do you write a great essay that demonstrates your grasp of this sacred call? This post shares practical insights on how to write a leadership essay . Keep reading it to sharpen your skills in this assignment niche. 

What Is a Leadership Essay ?

Before proceeding to see how best to draft a perfect leadership essay, let’s answer the big question, “ What is leadership essay ?” A leadership essay is an assignment that falls under student application essays. This paper provides student admission officers with insight into your previous leadership experience. 

While this assignment appears to be specific, it acknowledges that the nature and perception of leadership can greatly vary depending on context and individuals. 

Leadership Essay Ideas and Topics

Selecting the best topics for your essays on leadership is vital. When composing this paper, you will focus on two main areas revolving around your leadership style and the memorable moment when you demonstrated leadership. Please note that these two areas usually overlap because while recounting that moment you demonstrated leadership, you will also show your leadership style. 

Whichever area you choose to focus on, use anecdotal evidence that proves the idea. Here, you can freely go with what feels best for you. Just ensure that the instance you use to demonstrate leadership is a real-life experience. This way, you will be best placed to choose a topic that makes your readers enjoy your paper.

How to Write a Leadership Essay

While this paper might sound like an introduction on leadership essay , it doesn’t mean you aren’t a leader or can’t lead people. So, how do you compose a killer leadership essay that impresses student admission officials? Here are ideas on how to write leadership essay that fetches good grades and makes a positive impression of your leadership potential. 

• As earlier hinted, you must research to choose a good topic that will impress your readers and portray you as an upcoming great leader.
• When writing about a leadership concept, take notes of some credible sources of information. Find out what others have written about that topic.  
• Outline your essay to organize all the details you want to include. This way, you won’t forget to include anything your readers need. 

Alternatively, you can check out past papers written on your chosen leadership topics. This way, you will have a strong basis for further expansion of your arguments and incorporating relevant ideas into your paper. However, remember to follow intellectual property laws to avoid plagiarism.

Formatting Your Leadership Essay

Your essay about leadership requires correct formatting to ensure everything flows well. Like other types of papers, leadership essays follow a five-paragraph pattern. It has an introduction, a body section, and a conclusion, depending on its word count or page limits.  

• Introduction: This section captures the reader’s interest, defines good leadership in relation to you, and directly addresses the given prompt.
• Body paragraphs: The body section gives some background information using anecdotes to describe your leadership style or moment.
• Conclusion: This finishing section is a compelling statement about your leadership attributes and capabilities. It also shows how you hope to apply them to your life and solve other people’s problems.

Tips for Writing a Leadership Essay

Do you want tips to help you write the best leadership essays that will garner good grades? Here are tips and insights to help you compose excellent leadership essays .

Define Good Leadership First

It would be best to define good leadership before proceeding. Take time to think about the best attributes that make one a great leader. Of these qualities you have figured out, which ones do you have? Outline the qualities you demonstrated in your memorable leadership moment. These attributes could be, but aren’t limited to:

• The ability to motivate and inspire others.
• Valuing others.

Lastly, review your list and select the traits you would wish to focus on. 

Moderate Your Humility 

Humility is an invaluable virtue that needs to flow through your papers. However, don’t overdo it when highlighting your leadership moment. So, draw the line between humility and self-humiliation. Just let your readers know what you did to benefit other people’s lives—period.

Don’t Use Another Person’s Voice and Style

When highlighting your leadership abilities and experience, remember to use your personal style and voice. Admission officers want to hear your voice and “see you” in the essay. Thus, allow them to see your personality in the paper the best way you know how to put it. You can use your reasonable sense of humor without overstepping boundaries. 

Tell a Story About Your Journey 

When addressing college admission officers, use your storytelling skills to describe your leadership journey. Give them an engaging story that shows them your true leadership potential. Your story should exhibit the traits you believe are instrumental in helping you lead others. The narrative should tell the readers about the following:

• That you faced a real-life challenge.
• How you solved the problem. 
• How your leadership style and potential have grown over the years.
• Any specific challenge or moment that has helped you grow in your leadership. 

Choose a Case in Which You Played a Key Role

Your leadership doesn’t necessarily mean you are always at the help of things or people. Instead, it means that you helped solve a problem that affected others. Thus, don’t fear highlighting a moment just because you were not calling the shots. Why? Because the officials are looking for the results you helped bring to the table and not necessarily the position you occupied in the story. 

Thus, you should focus more on the improved position others found themselves in after your intervention instead of the position you occupied. Also, don’t mind more about the story’s title, especially when brainstorming. If you tell an impactful story, the title will automatically fall in place. 

Acknowledge Other People’s Contributions

We said in previous sections that you should tell the reader more about your leadership skills and journey. Up to this point, so good. However, you shouldn’t become so egoistic that you assume you aren’t an island. Your personal statement should indeed be personal, but it’s better to remember that other people still have a stake in your journey. 

So, give other people their deserved credit wherever they contributed to your success. Credit others for their loyalty, hard work, and any insights they offer. This way, you will portray your leadership as inclusive and not a one-man army that gives all the credit to one man. 

Solve Problems

Lastly, your essay should focus on solving problems. There is no point in telling a long story if it doesn’t bring out this element. Why? Because leadership essentially solves other people’s problems. If this element is missing, then you were not leading. Most likely, you were merely occupying a position or exercising authority but not leading. 

Do you remember how you solved that issue on your team amicably? Did you negotiate peace between team members whose rift was threatening to tear the team apart? Then, tell it out because that is all the admission officers are looking for in the narrative. 

Leadership Essay Example

Nothing will power your leadership writing skills like a perfect example of leadership essay . This section has three excellent excerpts from the introductions, bodies, and conclusions of leadership papers. 

• Introduction 

The floor was full of press cameras and microphones ready to capture a critical event. The venue was filled with different types of furniture, leather seats, and the who-is-who in the media industry that could change the entire media industry. Until then, I never saw myself as a leader, although I knew that this event was bigger than me, a moment that I could positively influence for the benefit of everyone present.

Gaining experience is one of the pillars of growing up in one’s leadership journey. The reason is that leadership isn’t a theory or concept captured in the heads, arguments, or counterarguments of so-called leadership gurus. Instead, it’s about practical life engagements that solve people’s problems in the real world. Thus, experience is the best tool to provide leaders with the opportunities to face and solve problems, make sound decisions, and learn from their failures and successes. All great leaders cherish such experiences and use them to grow and develop their leadership. 

• Conclusion 

In my view, leadership is about solving problems and meeting people’s needs, period. That’s the big picture, and the rest are minor details. My ability to empathize with others and give them a helping hand instead of pointing fingers at them summarizes my leadership philosophy. I hope to use this drive to be on the solution side of life, to prescribe solutions instead of just describing and decrying problems. 

Final Word 

Do you want to boost your writing skills on the topic of leadership? We’ve created this post to give you valuable and practical insights to accelerate your leadership research and writing journey. We hope you will use them to compose a perfect essay on effective leadership .

• Academic Writing Guides

• How to Structure a Leadership Essay (Samples to Consider)

Leadership is a complex concept, but it’s essential for boosting your career. That’s why a leadership essay focuses on applying the theoretical models and concepts of successful management to real-life situations. 

If you don’t know where to start writing such a paper, please read on for professional tips!

What Is Leadership Essay?

A leadership essay is a paper that analyzes leadership concepts and their application to real-life situations that may involve everyday business management, crisis situations, and other scenarios. 

Every essay on leadership is about defining a concept. Then, it’s either comparing it to similar management tools or proving that it’s useful (or not).

While some students enjoy writing such papers, other learners hate them. The below samples will come in handy, no matter which group is yours.

What Does Leadership Mean to You? (Essay Sample)

It is one of the most popular topics for a leadership essay. If you need to write a paper like that, ask yourself:

• Who is a good leader?  
• What style do they use?  
• What are the situations when they might switch styles?

You may take a more personal approach to such an essay if your professor allows you to. In the example below, you will see the academic approach to this topic. It analyzes three leadership styles to discover which one corresponds to the meaning of leadership if one thinks of it as guidance and support.

Why I Want to Participate in a Leadership Program (Essay Sample)

It’s another example of a popular topic. Such papers often have a meaning beyond the classroom since they may decide whether you plan to participate in a specific program. It’s critical to make them as effective and compelling as possible.

A personalized approach is the best when it comes to essays like this. In the example below, you will see the paper that relies on individual beliefs and a personal life story to explain why it’s so important for the specific student to participate in the chosen program.

How to Write a Leadership Essay

Like every other essay, this paper has an introduction, several body paragraphs, and a conclusion summarizing your thoughts. (1) The most important part of the introduction is the final sentence,  aka  a thesis statement. That’s where you state your claim to prove or develop in your leadership essay.

Each body paragraph should correspond to the purpose of your essay. To ensure you don’t stray from the aim you’ve established in the thesis statement, write the topic sentences for all your paragraphs in the outline . In simple words, write the first sentence of every paragraph to define its development in advance and see if you cover everything you need.

And now, to the conclusion:

Its most essential element is thesis restatement or the first sentence of that paragraph. It’s not just paraphrasing your thesis; it’s also considering the new information you’ve discovered while writing the essay.

Structure :

• Introduction (End it with a thesis statement.)
• Body paragraphs (Each one starts with a topic sentence.)
• Conclusion (Start it with a thesis restatement.)

Understand the purpose of a leadership essay

When starting to write, think about why you’re creating this paper. Before you sit down and type the words, think about the ideas you want to convey and their meaning in your life:

Can this essay teach you to take responsibility? Or maybe will it help you understand how to be a leader in crisis situations? When you’ve answered the “why” question, begin outlining.

Build a strong thesis

Always start with your thesis statement. It will help incorporate your answer to that notorious “why” question into your essay. Once done, you can plan out the rest of the paper and start working on the body paragraphs as soon as you finish the introduction.

There’s another important tip —don’t rush into writing the conclusion before you finish everything else!

It might seem like a good idea to create a thesis statement and thesis restatement right off the bat. However, you’ll find yourself with more refreshing ideas after completing all the research and thinking necessary for the introduction and each body paragraph.

Decide on a structure; format accordingly

Even if your essay about leadership seems not so formal, and you can use personal pronouns, you still need a clear structure.

The best way to write any academic paper is to keep your introduction and conclusion as short as possible. (But no shorter than three sentences and four lines of text). 

Another important tip is to try making all your body paragraphs equal in length. That way, you’ll give the same attention to all the vital points of your essay.

Ready to Write Your Essay on Leadership Now?

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand the most critical elements of a leadership essay. 

Remember the structure, grammar, and appropriate academic style to create a top-level paper. Please don’t forget to answer the “why” question and remember  why  you’re writing. Then you’ll impress everyone with your results!

References:

• https://lsa.umich.edu/onsf/news-events/all-news/directors-blog/writing-leadership-essays.html
• Essay samples
• Essay writing
• Writing tips

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A Blue Print for the best Leadership Essay

Leadership encompasses a variety of tenets. It includes leadership approaches or styles, leadership development, types of leadership, leadership principles, leadership values, and leadership theories. These are but a few concepts that any college student must be acquainted with to be able to complete an essay on leadership.

As complex as writing a leadership essay sounds, it is simple when you know how to write an essay about leadership. You must begin by understanding who a leader is and the entire concept of leadership.

When writing an essay about a leader, it is akin to writing a profile essay about a certain leader or yourself. Leadership essays for college require a special type of keenness. While there are many scholarly sources you can use, it takes expertise to knit together a great leadership essay introduction.

This guide helps you write the “what is leadership” essay effectively. It also enables you to write the best nature of leadership essay. If you are stuck with choosing leadership essay topics, our guide has over 89 essay topics on leadership and ideas that you can use to brainstorm. From today on, write the best leadership essay conclusion. And if it is a leadership essay for a scholarship, admission, or personal statement, we have experts that can help. We also have proofreading and editing professionals to help edit and proofread your leadership thesis and dissertation.

Read on and see what we have for you.

What is a Leadership Essay?

A leadership essay is somewhat a unique assignment assigned to college and university students. It can be part of the admission or scholarship essays or part of the coursework. Naturally, it is an assignment assigned to students pursuing different courses such as business, management, human resource, organizational behavior, economics, psychology, or political science, among others. A leadership essay encompasses exploration:

• The concept of leadership
• Nature of leadership
• Stories on prominent leaders
• Leadership traits and qualities
• The link between leadership and development, success, performance, and improvement
• Leadership abilities
• Facts and events of an individual’s leadership experience

To write a good leadership paper, a student must begin by reading the essay prompt and the rubric. A student should then think critically and logically on what to include in their paper. Like other exceptional essays, a good essay on leadership must have credible facts from scholarly sources. The instructor/professor is always testing for your evaluation, assessment, analytical, and presentation skills.

Tips when Writing Leadership Essays for College

Creating a perfect leadership essay is easy when you follow these predetermined success-assured steps.

1. Choose a leadership Topic that interests you

When assigning leadership essays, most professors and instructors alike give prompts with a list of topics to choose from. Go for topics that impress you and ones that you can find great information from books, journals, credible websites, and other scholarly sources.

2. Research Online and Get enough insights

After selecting a particular topic, ensure that you go a step higher to conduct research online. Gather as much information from the available literature as possible. The research process, when writing leadership essays, helps in generating ideas for the introduction, body, and conclusion of the essay. It also helps define the scope of your essay and come up with a thesis.

3. Create an excellent thesis statement

Your thesis statement in your essay on leadership should reflect the outlook of the entire essay. Format it to feature your major argument in an intelligent and reasoned way. An excellent thesis statement defines a good essay any day.

4. Draft the Leadership Essay Outline

Every great essay begins with an outline. Creating an outline for your leadership essay helps you draft a blueprint for the entire essay. Outline what will go to the introduction, the thesis statement, and the background information.

5. Write your First Draft

With the arguments reflected on the outline, you can choose to use any format for the body paragraphs. A common approach is to use the PEEL writing strategy for coherence in your paragraphs. You can also use the Schaffer strategy. The choice is yours. Above all, ensure that facts from scholarly sources are cited in-text in MLA, APA, Harvard, or Chicago formats.

6. Edit, Proofread and Revise your Essay

After writing your essay, it is always great to edit and proofread. If you have no confidence in your leadership essay, you can hire someone to edit your leadership essays . If you are an MBA student, we can help you correct mistakes on your paper. Always submit a paper you are confident will pass Turnitin and get you great grades.

How to Begin a Leadership Paper - The Introduction

You are probably reading this because the question of “how do I start my leadership essay?” is bothering you. Well, even though the question seems ambiguous, we have an answer for you right here.

Every great leadership essay has an excellent introduction. Your introduction should be well-written to the extent that it grabs the attention of the reader and entices them to stay through the end. Ideally, the introduction sets the mood of the entire paper.

As with other types of essays, a leadership essay can commence with a great essay hook or a grabber . It could be an anecdote, a statistic, quote, phrase, or a catchy word.

The hook should be preceded by a few sentences that act as the background to your essay. The aim of the background sentences, in the introduction, is to set the context of the essay.

The background is then followed by an excellent thesis statement . The thesis statement gives a sneak peek into your essay in a snapshot. It can either be one or two last sentences in the introduction. The thesis differs depending on whether the essay is descriptive, classification, narrative, argumentative, or persuasive essay.

If you follow these steps, you will write an outstanding essay on leadership. Make it count right from the beginning.

How to Ace a Leadership Experience Essay

When writing application essays, scholarship essays, or school transfer essays, you can be asked to write an essay about your leadership experience. It is always imperative to make your essay as unique as the Costco application essay. Here are some tips to use when writing your leadership essay:

• Begin by reading the leadership experience essay prompt to understand exactly what you are being asked to write about.
• Come up with an excellent essay hook for your essay. It could be an anecdote, a quote from a great leader, a simple statistic, or an observation’.
• Write the thesis of your leadership experience essay, which should cover the gist of the entire essay.
• Write the introduction of the essay as though it is to be published among the best sellers.
• Make sure each of the paragraphs outlines your leadership experiences. Each of the paragraphs should have leadership experience, illustrations, and examples.
• Keep the flow within the paper by using appropriate transitions.
• Avoid using jargon in your leadership essays. In most cases, simplicity wins the day, and after all, a successful leader expresses themselves in just a few words.
• If there are references used, be sure to cite the essay in APA, MLA, Harvard, or Chicago.
• Make the conclusion count. Restate the thesis and write a summary of the entire paper.
• Most leadership essays can be anything between 150 words to 2000 words. Depending on the essay prompt, always be sure to meet the word count.

Remember, if the leadership experience essay is a scholarship essay, personal statement, statement of purpose, or an admission essay, it should be written in the first person. Otherwise, you must stick to the third person, which is a preference in academic writing.

Leadership Essay Topics and Ideas you can choose for your Paper

Are you wondering about the best leadership essay topics? We have your back on this. Here are some essay topics on leadership to kick start your topic choice process. We answer the question of “what are some essay topics on leadership?”

• The ability of women in leadership to successfully steer progress and success in organizations.
• Role of leaders in the community
• Charismatic, transformational, and transactional leadership
• Characteristics of a good leader
• Features of supportive leadership
• Leadership and Power
• Women in leadership
• Breaking the glass ceiling
• Role of ethics in leadership
• Gender differences in leadership
• Importance of team leadership in virtual teams
• Role of leaders in group formation
• How leadership brings diversity in an organization
• Corruption among public leaders
• Are leaders made or born?
• Can situations define a leader?
• Leadership succession and its importance in organizations
• Do you consider yourself to be a leader or a follower?
• An example of a 21 st -century exemplary leader
• Challenges leaders face
• Importance of listening for leaders
• Are transformational leaders better than transactional leaders?
• How to improve leadership skills
• Great leaders should be great communicators
• Who do you look up to as a leader?
• Importance of self-confidence among leaders
• Which leader do you admire? Please write a letter to of gratitude for their influence on your life
• The importance of leadership in schools
• Historical leaders
• Think of a leader you admire and list three of the qualities that make him or her a good leader. Which quality do you share with him or her? Which quality could you improve upon?
• How can you improve your own leadership skills?
• Role of military leadership
• Do entrepreneurs need to be leaders?
• An integrative theory of leadership
• The impacts of national culture on corporate and public leadership
• Leadership and organizational development
• How leadership affects the morale of employees
• Does leadership competence define the organization of choice for employees
• The link between leadership and organizational citizenship behavior
• Leadership and organizational loyalty
• Variation of leadership behavior depending on the culture
• Leadership processes and self-identity of followers
• Leadership style and organizational commitment
• The prospective of future leadership
• Role of strategic leadership
• The Influence of democratic leadership on Employee performance: A case in Saudi Public Sector
• Business leadership and culture
• The normative approach to business leadership
• Comparative analysis of the world’s greatest military leaders
• Understanding combat leadership
• Role of military leaders in strategy and policy implementation
• Meyers Briggs Type Indicator best for military leadership
• Understanding the art of command in military leadership
• How school leadership works
• Does the leadership styles of a school principle define the success of a school?
• Are collaborative school leaders successful?
• The role of power, culture, and people in educational leadership
• Leadership and policy implementation
• Leadership style of educators
• School leadership in the 21 st century
• Teacher leadership for professional resilience
• Qualities of exceptional school leaders
• How professional school leaders deal with dilemmas
• Leadership and the glass ceiling
• The performance of indigenous communities in political leadership
• Sustainable environmental leadership
• Corporate leadership
• The psychology of leadership
• African-American women executives and organizational leadership
• Ethics as the heart of leadership
• Servant leadership
• Leadership challenges in virtual teams
• Leadership development and growth
• Evolving human resource practices in succession planning
• Contemporary issues of leadership
• Leadership investment
• Importance of leadership for nurses
• Are leadership traits inherent, or can people be molded into good leaders?
• Are meetings the only effective way for sound leaders to disseminate information?
• Compare and contrast the effectiveness of dictatorial and servant leadership
• Explore the church leadership approach
• The foundation of biblical leadership
• Compare business and political leadership
• The bureaucratic structure of government and their impact on leadership in the public domain
• Best leadership styles for diverse teams
• Impacts of technology and social media on the leadership style of millennial leaders
• Compare and contrast formal and informal leaders
• The leadership philosophy of great leaders
• Critical analysis of leadership styles and organizational culture that enables the implementation of a proposed local project of advancing the Nursing practice

Contact us for the best topics and help with your MBA leadership essays or essays for school on leadership. Our professional essay writers can always help.

Top 30 Leadership Qualities to Include in a Leadership Essay

As a student undertaking a leadership course, completing an essay, term paper, or a research paper on leadership is mandatory. When asked to write an essay on leadership, it would be best if you used some of the leadership traits.

The common traits include

• Transparency
• Conscientious
• Excellent communication
• Decision-Making Skills
• Problem-solving capacity
• Accountability and responsibility
• Delegation and empowerment
• Emotional intelligence
• Creativity and innovation
• Decisiveness
• Unselfishness
• Dependability

These are some of the powerful traits of successful leaders . Of course, there are many other traits that you can research and include in your leadership essays. Effective leaders need to be very tactical when influencing their followers. They need to foster teamwork where necessary and use their wisdom to solve conflicts among the followers. It is great to have empathy or fit in the shoes of a leader when writing your leadership essay. Sometimes, even as simple as a biography essay, a leadership essay needs to be well-organized such that there is flow and a good explanation of the traits is inevitable.

Help with Writing Leadership Essay for College

You might have read the entire article but still cannot comprehend how to write a leadership essay. It is always time to get a great leadership essay sample to understand how one is written. If, even with the leadership essay example, you cannot write the essay, you need help.

Related Reading: Descriptive essay writing process and topics .

Luckily, we have writers for hire who write various types of essays on leadership. The leadership essays we can help with include: narrative, how-to, compare and contrast, classification, exemplification, descriptive, persuasive, argumentative, and reflection essays on leadership.

You can pay our paper writers to write the best leadership essays for school. If you are doing an MBA leadership essay, you can always consult with our writers for the best insights and advice.

Even with this ultimate guide for writing a leadership, things can get thick. Getting help with writing college essays is not illegal. Get a great homework helper or an assignment helper from our website to help you write a custom leadership essay, today!

Gradecrest is a professional writing service that provides original model papers. We offer personalized services along with research materials for assistance purposes only. All the materials from our website should be used with proper references. See our Terms of Use Page for proper details.

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Leadership Essay: What To Write To Put Your Best Foot Forward

EssayEdge > Blog > Leadership Essay: What To Write To Put Your Best Foot Forward

Because schools are looking for applicants who will make a contribution, it is becoming increasingly common for programs to specifically ask for essays on leadership. In this type of essay, the admissions officers are asking you to go beyond your resume, CV or activities list and provide them with a meaningful example that not only demonstrates your skills as a leader but reflects your values, ability to manage setbacks, and resilience in overcoming dilemmas. Therefore, I created these tips to guide you in writing the kind of leadership essay that will help you get noticed in the admissions process.

Table of Contents:

Choose an anecdote where you played a significant role

If you haven’t decided how to write a leadership essay. Your best anecdote may not necessarily be one where you were at the helm. Just because you didn’t have the title of President, Coordinator or Leader doesn’t mean that you didn’t take a strong leadership role in the project. The admissions officers are looking for results, and that means a situation where you were able to ensure outcomes, overcome obstacles, foster team cohesiveness, and exceed expectations. When brainstorming for your leadership essay, think more about the criteria of leadership rather than the title. The title and introduction to leadership essay will come up in your mind as soon as you understand what you want to write about.

Tackle dilemmas

An essay where you were in charge and everything went smoothly doesn’t make for the most compelling narrative. Instead, focus on anecdotes where you had to face tough choices. This could refer to interpersonal situations regarding assigning tasks, making budgetary decisions that might have displeased certain team members or even superiors, navigating contract negotiations between parties that did not trust each other or even dealing with unethical behaviors. Show the admissions officers that you can persevere despite setbacks and find a way forward to realize success in your endeavors.

Acknowledge the contribution of others

This is the most common pitfall that I see in leadership essays. Yes, a personal statement should be personal. However, when writing about leadership, it is impossible to demonstrate this if you write as if no one else was part of the situation. Be gracious in giving praise to team members for their insights, loyalty, and hard work. Let the admissions officers envision you as someone who can inspire others to collaborate and work as a cohesive whole to achieve common goals.

Need help? Check out EssayEdge editing services:

Highlight organization skills and interpersonal acumen

Depending on your personality type and individual leadership style, applicants tend to focus on either the technical aspects of leadership or the more interpersonal ones. In creating your leadership essay, remember to include both in a way that is as balanced as possible. Usually, I will recommend applicants write an opening paragraph that sets the stage, a paragraph about technical aspects such as assigning tasks and coordinating resources, a third paragraph that discusses obstacles encountered in the project, and then a concluding paragraph. The two middle paragraphs should be approximately the same length. By following this basic outline, applicants are sure to cover all bases and formulate a leadership essay that has a strong logical flow from start to finish.

Check some leadership application essay examples to understand what exactly has to be written in your paper.

Reflect on what you would have done differently

If, given the opportunity to do it again, you would have done everything exactly the same, I would advise writing about a different situation. Anecdotes where everything works out perfectly don’t typically provide the admissions officers with the information that they need to help them make a choice about your application. They will want you to engage in self-reflection either in the penultimate paragraph or the concluding paragraph. The admissions officers want to see both growth and willingness to grow. For this reason, be sure to discuss ways that you would like to continue to develop your personal leadership style so that you will be a more prepared and effective leader in the future.

Make a difference. That’s what you should do to be sure that your essay will be noticed by the admissions board. The combination of your writing skills and our guidelines must help you craft a winning paper. Keep in mind that you can always find an assistant on our essay proofreading service, trust proofreading them, and submit a high-quality leadership essay.

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August 8, 2022

Writing a Powerful Leadership/Achievement Essay [Sample Essay]

Essays that ask you to write about significant achievements fall under the category of

what are known as behavioral or experiential questions . The basic assumption behind these questions is that past behavior is a great predictor of future behavior . They are all varieties on the theme of “Tell us about a time when you…” These questions are meant to take the measure of your managerial potential.

Let’s look at how one candidate effectively addressed this essay question from  Stanford GSB  (*this question is not from the current application):

Tell us about a time when you made a lasting impact on your organization.

This writer avoids writing about leadership in any generic way and zeroes in on the specific aspects of his contributions and their impact:

Leadership essay example: The Change Agent

When I was invited to become the Vice President and General Manager at Third Way Associates (TWA)* two years ago, the company was in financial and administrative disorder. Employee retention was poor, and TWA took too long to pay vendors because of poor communication and accounting processes. Cash flow was managed based on immediate needs rather than by the logic of budgets planned by project and city. Sloppy expense reports that were turned in with no receipts were reimbursed to employees.

TWA founders Scott W ____ and Glenn L ____ had good intentions, but spent most of their time selling sponsorships and getting new clients rather than directing and managing the company. As we begin 20XX, TWA is much healthier in every way. Under my direction, vendors are paid in an average of 20 days from date of invoice, instead of 60 days or more. Our cash flow is better administered since I introduced very specific detailed area budgets with over 125 budget lines per city. Because I can give the company founders much better stability and macromanagement vision, the three of us are able to look more to the future rather than simply put out fires.

Despite the difficult economy in 20XX, we not only retained our same clients but also signed several new client agreements for three years or more, including a two-year contract with Big Shoe Company worth $1.3 million. I’ve brought fresh accounts and industries into TWA, including ____ Airlines and Drink Y, among others. Combined, these accounts generated more than $500,000 in 20XX, and we estimate close to $1 million dollars in the following year.

Since my arrival, we have a much wider and broader sales menu which has been crucial to generate more revenue. I’ve expanded our most popular sports events to 25 cities, giving our clients new investment opportunities. These events range from recreational soccer clinic tours to professional soccer games broadcast on TV.

I also expanded our field staff, and at present we have 25 strong and reliable managers who report directly to me from each city. Despite the economy, 20XX was not a bad year for TWA, and this year promises to be even better if we continue our current strategy and continue to work as a team.

Leadership essay analysis

In every paragraph, this writer mentions concrete measures he took to introduce order to a chaotic company that was trying to grow. From instituting budgets with line items, an improved accounts payable system, and recruiting additional big-name accounts, the writer proves how his efforts strengthened the organization.

How can you maximize on your thought leadership experiences?

As you choose among your own experiences as essay material, think about these questions to help you frame answers of substance:

• What was the obstacle, challenge, or problem that you solved in this accomplishment? A tight client deadline? A complex merger transaction? A new product launch amidst fierce competition?
• What did you do to rise to the challenge you are writing about? Motivate your team to work overtime? Sell senior management on the deal’s long-term upside? Identify a marketing profile for your product that no competitor can match?
• What facts demonstrate that your intervention created a happy ending? Did your team submit the project deliverables three days early despite being 20% understaffed? Your client approved the $500 million merger, the largest ever in its industry? Your new product has 20% market share after only one year? What was the impact of your leadership?

Don’t forget about your people leadership skills

What we’ve spoken about until this point revolves mostly on skilled problem-solving, or “thought leadership.” But respected businesspeople need to be equally or even more talented at something we didn’t have a formal name for: people leadership. By effectively leading the thinking of client firms’ problems as well as motivating them to work long hours to develop solutions to these problems and collaborate with clients on implementing them, these businesspeople prove to have what it takes to be exemplary leaders.

So don’t forget to include strong elements of people leadership in your essays. Here are several to keep in mind:

• Rallying others around a vision. Did you convince your team or group to follow a specific path/solution? How did you do it? Successful clients have talked about handling dissenting opinions diplomatically or presenting their teams’ detailed quantitative evidence for a recommendation. The more you can show that you understood your audience and tailored the content and form of your message to them, the better.
• Harnessing others’ strengths – and expanding them. Did you provide team members tasks they could handle comfortably based on their capabilities, as well as opportunities to broaden their skills? For example, you may have handed your quant jock teammate the most complicated operations analysis as well as responsibility for leading a key client meeting. In this way, you leverage teammates’ strengths while helping them develop new ones.
• Getting through tough times. Did you model for your team enviable cool in pressure-cooker situations, maybe helping them keep the big-picture goal in mind or lightening the mood with humor? Did you reward teammates with praise, pizza, or both for working long into the night? Did you pitch in on others’ responsibilities as deadlines loomed? Helping your team handle stress while managing your own is a cornerstone of strong leadership.

Use your words

Another tip: Look for opportunities to incorporate strong verbs that illustrate your strengths in these areas. Good examples of leadership might incorporate several of the following:

• Establishing a goal or vision
• Obtaining buy-in
• Taking responsibility

The old adage, “Show, don’t tell,” remains a classic bit of wisdom in the writing process. Make that a guiding principle not only in your leadership/achievement essays, but throughout your application.

For personalized advice tailored just for you, check out our MBA Admissions Consulting & Editing services and work one-on-one with a pro who will help you discover your competitive advantage and use it to get accepted.

Related Resources:

• School-Specific MBA Application Essay Tips • Tone Up Your Writing: Confidence vs Arrogance • “I’m Smart, Really I Am!” Proving Character Traits in Your Essays

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A Professional Guide to Writing an Inspiring Leadership Essay

Quick Navigation

• 1. Leadership Essay – What it Means?
• 2. What Makes a Good Leadership Essay?
• 3. Topics You Can Explore for Writing Leadership Essays
• 4. How to Write a Leadership Essay – Pre-Writing Stage
• 5.1 Introduction
• 5.3 Conclusion
• 6. Leadership Essay Topic Ideas
• 7. Write an Essay That Inspires!

The power of leadership stems from its ability to make an impact on people, earn respect, and put words into action. As a result, students in schools and universities are often tasked with writing leadership essays to recognize the importance of leadership in both personal and professional realms. This assignment not only helps improve writing skills but also challenges critical thinking abilities by encouraging reflection on personal experiences or evaluating the leadership qualities and styles of prominent figures.

This leadership essay writing guide offers suggestions and tips for mastering the craft of leadership essay writing, including focusing on essay structure, clarity of arguments, and content quality. Additionally, this guide provides appealing essay ideas, topic choices, an outline example, and other resources to assist in crafting a thoughtful leadership essay. In case you have no time to write your essay, you can give us a nudge by saying ‘ write my essay ‘ and get well-researched authentic papers crafted by our accomplished writers on any topic.

Leadership Essay – What it Means?

A leadership essay is a type of academic or personal writing that focuses on analyzing, evaluating, or discussing the concept of leadership, its various styles and theories, and the qualities and characteristics of effective leaders. The purpose of a leadership essay may vary depending on the assignment or context, but it typically aims to provide insights into leadership, its importance in organizations and society, and its impact on personal and professional development. A leadership essay may also require the writer to reflect on their own experiences as a leader or evaluate the leadership qualities and style of a prominent leader.

To write a perfect essay on leadership, the writer must define and apply the main concepts of leadership to real-life situations. This involves researching the history of the term and the various leadership styles employed worldwide. The essay must also evaluate the researched information and its application to human behavior and attitudes. Personal strengths and weaknesses in communication and daily interactions with others should be assessed. This format is commonly required for entering a business administration major in college, with the goal being to understand personal traits as a leader and explain them in writing. Remember, the key to writing a good leadership essay is to write about something that will inspire your readers.

What Makes a Good Leadership Essay?

A good leadership essay should have a clear and concise thesis statement that outlines the main argument of the essay. It should also provide relevant and credible evidence to support the argument, such as real-life examples and data. The essay should be well-organized, with a logical structure that guides the reader through the argument.

In addition, a good leadership essay should demonstrate the writer’s critical thinking skills and ability to analyze and evaluate information. The essay should also showcase the writer’s writing skills, including their ability to use appropriate language, grammar, and style.

Finally, a good leadership essay should offer insights and perspectives that are unique and thought-provoking. It should encourage the reader to think more deeply about the concept of leadership and its significance in personal and professional contexts.

Topics You Can Explore for Writing Leadership Essays

A leadership essay can cover a wide range of topics related to leadership. Here are some examples of potential topics:

• Leadership styles and theories: Explore the different styles and theories of leadership, such as transformational, situational, autocratic, and democratic leadership, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.
• Qualities of effective leaders: Discuss the key qualities and characteristics that make an effective leader, such as integrity, empathy, vision, communication, and decision-making abilities.
• Diversity and inclusion in leadership: Discuss the importance of diversity and inclusion in leadership, and analyze the impact that inclusive leadership can have on organizational culture, productivity, and innovation.
• Leadership and ethics: Analyze the relationship between leadership and ethics, and discuss the importance of ethical leadership in creating a positive impact on society.
• Women in leadership: Discuss the challenges that women face in leadership roles and analyze the impact that increasing gender diversity in leadership can have on organizations and society.
• Leadership and innovation: Analyze the role of leadership in promoting innovation and discuss the qualities that effective leaders possess to foster a culture of innovation.
• The role of leadership in change management: Discuss the importance of leadership in managing change within an organization, and analyze the strategies that leaders can use to effectively implement change.

These are just a few examples of potential topics for a leadership essay. Depending on your interests and experiences, you can choose a topic that resonates with you and allows you to showcase your knowledge and insights on leadership. Additionally, you can talk about your personal experience in your leadership essay. Here are some examples of how you can do that:

• Using personal experiences to illustrate your points: Here you can discuss how personal experiences can be used to illustrate key points in your essay. For example, if you are writing about the importance of effective communication in leadership, you can draw on a personal experience where you witnessed or demonstrated effective communication skills.
• Reflecting on what you have learned about leadership from your experiences: You can talk about the importance of reflecting on what you have learned about leadership from your personal experiences. For example, if you are writing about the qualities of an effective leader, you can reflect on how your own experiences have taught you the importance of those qualities.
• Tying personal experiences back to the broader topic and argument of your essay: In this section, you can discuss how to ensure that your personal experiences are tied back to the broader topic and argument of your essay. For example, if you are writing about the role of leadership in promoting diversity and inclusion, you can use personal experience to illustrate how a leader’s actions can impact diversity and inclusion in the workplace or society.

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How to Write a Leadership Essay – Pre-Writing Stage

The first step in composing a leadership essay is to understand what leadership means. Leadership can be defined as the ability to influence others toward a common goal. A leader is someone who inspires, motivates, and guides others toward achieving success.

Step 1: Define Good Leadership

Before beginning to write an essay online , take a moment to contemplate the defining characteristics of exceptional leadership. Consider the essential and impactful qualities of a great leader, such as the ability to inspire and motivate others, lead by example, and possess integrity, empathy, accountability, responsibility, humility, resilience, vision, influence, and optimism. If you are writing about yourself, reflect on your qualities as a leader. On the other hand, if you are writing about a prominent leader, conduct thorough research on the individual to gain insight into what makes them a great leader and why they are so effective in their role. Additionally, when writing about a successful leader, be sure to analyze the various leadership styles they employ.

Step 2: Select an Inspiring Topic

The key factor in creating a good leadership essay lies in selecting an appropriate topic. If you are writing a biography of a successful and prominent leader, it is crucial to focus on their leadership qualities and on what makes them an effective leader. The topic should align with the objectives of the essay and highlight your writing strengths. Conducting thorough research and reflecting on your leadership traits can help you identify a suitable topic.

To make your essay more compelling, you can compare and contrast different leadership styles, such as authoritarian and democratic approaches. It is essential to choose a topic that emphasizes the importance and relevance of your essay. The essay should also focus on practical strategies that can be applied in real-life situations to develop effective leadership skills. Providing examples of how your essay can be used to support future practice and study can also be beneficial.

Step 3: Researching Your Topic

Once you have chosen your topic, the next step is to research it thoroughly. This will help you to develop a deeper understanding of the subject and to identify key ideas and arguments that you can include in your essay.

• Determine your research question: Before conducting research, it’s essential to determine your research question. This will help to focus your research and ensure that you gather the information that is relevant to your essay topic. Your research question should be specific, clear, and concise.
• Use credible sources: You can research your topic by reading books, articles, and other relevant sources, as well as by conducting interviews with experts in the field.
• Consider multiple perspectives: When conducting research, consider multiple perspectives. This will help to provide a balanced view of your topic and ensure that you consider different opinions and viewpoints.
• Take notes: Take notes while conducting research. This will help to keep track of the information you gather and ensure that you don’t forget any critical points.
• Organize your research materials: It’s essential to organize your research materials to make it easier to access and use the information you gather. Some effective strategies for organizing research materials include creating an annotated bibliography or using a citation manager like Zotero or EndNote.
• Review and analyze your research: After gathering your research materials, review and analyze the information. Identify key themes, arguments, and evidence that support your essay’s main points.

Step 4: Create an Outline and Write the First Draft

Once you have gathered your research materials, it’s time to organize them in the form of an essay outline . To organize your thoughts and prepare for writing your leadership essay, it’s essential to create an outline. This involves summarizing and arranging all the information you’ve gathered into an organized structure that will guide your writing. The essay can follow a standard five-paragraph format or have additional body paragraphs as required. The outline should include the following sections:

• Introduction: Start with a hook to capture the reader’s interest and provide a clear thesis statement that highlights the main argument you’ll discuss in the essay.
• Body paragraphs: Include three to four paragraphs, each presenting a unique perspective that supports your argument. Use examples, evidence, statistics, anecdotes, and other supporting details to connect each paragraph to the thesis statement.
• Conclusion: Wrap it up by summarizing the key points discussed, reiterate the thesis statement, and with a strong statement that reinforces your opinion on what good leadership is and the importance of developing leadership skills.

Once you have organized your thoughts into an outline, you can begin writing your essay. In the next section, we have provided a thorough structure and an idea of how to write the introduction, body, and conclusion of a leadership essay.

Step 5: Editing and Proofreading

Once you have written your essay adhering to the outline, the next step is to edit and proofread it. This involves reviewing your essay for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors, as well as for clarity and coherence.

Crafting a Leadership Essay – Complete Structure

Introduction.

• The introduction of a leadership essay is critical as it sets the tone for the entire paper and establishes the reader’s expectations. To make it engaging and persuasive, a hook sentence is essential. The first two sentences of the introduction should demonstrate the quality of the content and captivate the reader’s attention. It’s crucial to personalize the text by connecting it to your knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Incorporating a story in the introduction can also pique the reader’s interest by providing a background that will be further explored in the body paragraphs of the essay.
• If you are wondering how to title an essay , keep in mind to choose a title that is both attention-grabbing and informative. You may include a hook phrase that accurately reflects the content and avoid clichés.
• The introduction of a leadership essay should provide background information on the topic and set the stage for the rest of the essay. One way to do this is by providing a brief history of leadership and its evolution over time. This can help the reader understand how leadership has changed and developed, and how it is viewed in different contexts and cultures.
• The thesis statement in a leadership essay introduction should clearly state the main point or argument that will be discussed in the essay. It should be concise and specific, providing a roadmap for the reader to understand what the essay will cover.
• Example of a hook statement in a leadership essay:

Quotation hook: As John C. Maxwell once said, “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”

Interesting Fact Hook: Did you know that Martin Luther King Jr. was only 26 years old when he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and became one of the most iconic leaders of the civil rights movement?

Statistic Hook: According to a recent study, companies with a gender-diverse leadership team are 21% more likely to outperform their peers in profitability.

• Background information on leadership:

The study of leadership and its evolution can be traced back to the ancient philosopher Socrates, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that scientists began delving deeper into its development and impact.

• Thesis statement example for a leadership essay:

“Effective leadership requires a combination of personal qualities, such as integrity and empathy, and practical skills, such as communication and decision-making, to inspire and guide individuals towards a common goal.”

This thesis statement sets up the argument that leadership is a multifaceted concept that involves both personal and practical elements.

The body paragraphs of a leadership essay should contain the main arguments or points that support the thesis statement. Each paragraph should focus on a single idea and provide evidence, examples, facts, or statistics to support the argument. It is important to organize the body of the essay logically and clearly, such as through chronological order, cause and effect, or problem and solution.

Some possible topics for the body of a leadership essay could include discussing different leadership styles, examining the qualities of effective leaders, exploring the challenges of leadership, or analyzing a specific leader and their impact on their organization or society. Discuss respective topic sentences in individual paragraphs along with supporting statements and evidence and make sure to stick to the thesis statement.

The conclusion paragraph of a leadership essay should effectively summarize the main points of the essay and restate the thesis statement in a different way. It should also provide a final thought or message to the reader, leaving them with a lasting impression. The conclusion can also include a call to action, encouraging the reader to apply the leadership principles discussed in the essay to their own life or work. Additionally, it can suggest areas for further research or discussion on the topic of leadership. A well-written conclusion should leave the reader feeling satisfied and informed, with a clear understanding of the importance of good leadership.

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Leadership Essay Topic Ideas

Some various topics and sub-topics fall under the broad subject of leadership. If you are looking for some inspiration for your leadership essay, then here are some brilliant ideas that are worth exploring:

• Authentic Leadership: What it Means and Why it Matters
• A Comparative Analysis of Leadership Styles: Democratic vs. Authoritarian Leadership
• Servant Leadership: A Model for Effective Leadership in Modern Organizations
• The Importance of emotional intelligence in effective leadership
• The Impact of Leadership on organizational culture and employee satisfaction
• The challenges of ethical leadership in modern organizations
• The Role of Resilience in effective leadership
• The Impact of Diversity on Leadership and organizational success
• The relationship between leadership and innovation in the workplace.
• Overcoming Adversity: Lessons from Great Leaders Who Have Faced Challenges
• Examples of effective and ineffective leadership in the history
• The Role of Effective Communication in Leadership
• Exploring Transformational Leadership in the Workplace
• American Civil War Strategy and Leadership
• Contemporary Issues in Management: Gender and Leadership
• Impact of Gender Differences on Leadership Styles
• Authentic leadership: being true to yourself while leading others
• The Impact of Globalization on leadership practices
• Cross-cultural leadership: adapting to different cultural norms
•  A time when you displayed your leadership skills

Write an Essay That Inspires!

A well-crafted leadership essay should be inspirational and relatable. Writing such an essay requires a deep understanding of the subject matter and a careful selection of words and phrases that can effectively convey your ideas. At PenMyPaper, we understand the challenges of crafting a compelling leadership essay, and we are here to help. Our team of professional experts is dedicated to delivering high-quality essays that meet your specific requirements, exceed your expectations, and are delivered within your desired timeframe and budget.

Guide to Writing a Stellar Leadership Essay (With Essay on Leadership Examples)

Apr 5, 2024 | 0 comments

Apr 5, 2024 | Blog | 0 comments

 Writing a leadership essay can be daunting for many students, as it requires a deep understanding of what makes a great leader and how to effectively convey those characteristics to a reader. To excel in this type of assignment, one must first understand the qualities that make a good leader, such as communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and the ability to inspire others. Additionally, it is important to provide specific examples and anecdotes supporting your claims and demonstrating your leadership experience. This article will explore the key components of a successful leadership essay, including how to structure your essay, develop a strong thesis statement, and effectively incorporate evidence to support your arguments. By following these tips and guidelines, you will be well on your way to crafting a compelling and persuasive leadership essay that showcases your unique qualities as a leader. 

How To Write A Leadership Essay: Step-by-Step Guide

Crafting a standout leadership essay requires a methodical approach that covers key stages, from understanding the prompt to polishing your final draft. In the sections below, we’ll guide you through the step-by-step process of writing an impactful leadership essay that showcases your unique perspective and qualifications.

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Step 1: Understanding the Essay Prompt

When crafting a standout leadership essay, the first step is to understand the prompt or instructions given thoroughly. Whether you’re writing a college application essay, a scholarship essay, or a general essay on leadership, it’s crucial to analyze the prompt and identify the key points and requirements.

What exactly are the admissions officers or evaluators looking for? Are they interested in your leadership abilities, experiences in a leadership position, or your idea of leadership in general? Carefully dissecting the prompt will help you determine the focus of your essay and ensure that you address all the necessary elements.

Once you have a solid grasp of the prompt, it’s time to start brainstorming ideas. What are the most significant leadership roles you’ve held? What examples of leadership best showcase your kind of leadership and leadership style? Jot down any relevant experiences, skills, or insights you can potentially incorporate into your essay.

Step 2: Research and Preparation

With the prompt in mind, it’s time to dive into your research and preparation. Start by gathering relevant information and sources to help you build a strong foundation for your essay. This might include academic articles on leadership and management, biographies of influential leaders, or even interviews with team members who have witnessed your good leadership in action.

Consider conducting your interviews or surveys to gain first-hand insights into your leadership abilities. Talking to members of the team you’ve led or colleagues who have observed your ways of leading can provide valuable perspectives that you can weave into your essay.

As you gather your research, begin organizing and outlining your essay. This will help you structure your thoughts and ensure that your essay flows logically from one point to the next. Consider the key elements of a well-structured leadership essay: the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

Step 3: Structure of a Leadership Essay

Introduction

The introduction of your leadership essay is your chance to hook the reader and set the tone for the rest of your writing. It’s important to start strong and grab the reader’s attention from the first sentence.

One effective way to begin is with a compelling hook. This could be a thought-provoking quote about leadership, an anecdote that illustrates your unique leadership style, or a startling statistic highlighting the importance of good leadership. The goal is to pique the reader’s interest and make them eager to learn more about your perspective on leadership.

After the hook, you’ll want to provide some background information on leadership. This could include a brief overview of the concept of leadership, the key traits of a leader, or the significance of leadership and management in various contexts. Aim to give the reader a solid foundation for understanding the core themes and ideas you’ll explore in your essay.

Finally, you’ll want to introduce your thesis statement. This single sentence should clearly articulate your essay’s central message or argument, setting the stage for the rest of your writing. Your thesis should reflect your unique idea of leadership and the specific leadership abilities or experiences you plan to highlight.

Body Paragraphs

The body of your leadership essay is where you’ll explore your examples of leadership and leadership experiences in more detail. Each body paragraph should focus on a specific aspect of your kind of leadership, using concrete examples to support your claims.

Begin each paragraph with a clear topic sentence introducing the main idea or argument you’ll explore. From there, use vivid details, anecdotes, and evidence to paint a picture of your leadership style in action.

For instance, you might dedicate a paragraph to discussing when you had to lead a group and inspire others to achieve a common goal. Describe the situation, the challenges you faced, the actions you took, and the outcomes you achieved. This will demonstrate your leadership abilities and give the reader a deeper understanding of what your leadership means.

Another body paragraph might explore the leadership theories or styles that have influenced your own kind of leader. How have these ideas shaped your approach to problem-solving and decision-making? What examples of leadership can you draw upon to illustrate these principles in practice?

Throughout your body paragraphs, maintain a clear and logical flow. Use smooth transitions to guide the reader from one idea to the next and ensure that each paragraph builds upon the previous one to create a cohesive and compelling narrative.

The conclusion of your leadership essay is your final opportunity to leave a lasting impression on the reader. Here, you’ll want to synthesize the key points of your essay and reinforce the significance of your leadership in essential experiences.

Begin by freshly restating your thesis statement , reminding the reader of the central message or argument you’ve been exploring. This helps to bring your essay full circle and solidify the main takeaway for the reader.

Next, summarize the most important examples of leadership and leadership abilities you’ve discussed throughout your essay. Highlight the key lessons you’ve learned and how your idea of leadership has evolved. This demonstrates your leadership ability and commitment to continuous growth and improvement.

Finally, conclude your essay by reflecting on the broader importance of good leadership. How do your personal experiences and insights relate to the larger concept of leadership? Why is it crucial for individuals to develop strong leadership skills to inspire people and accomplish the task? By connecting your essay to a larger societal or global context, you’ll leave the reader with a deeper appreciation for the value of leadership.

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Dos and Don’ts of Writing a Leadership Essay

As you craft your leadership essay, keep the following dos and don’ts in mind:

• Maintain a professional yet engaging tone throughout your writing.
• Provide specific, real-life examples of your leadership roles and experiences.
• Demonstrate your emotional intelligence and ability to solve problems effectively.
• Highlight your personal growth and how your leadership style has evolved over time.
• Proofread your essay thoroughly to ensure it is free of grammatical and spelling errors.
• Avoid using clichés or generic statements about leadership.
• Refrain from making unsupported claims or exaggerating your experiences.
• Don’t simply recite your resume or list your achievements; focus on the why and how behind your leadership abilities.
• Steer clear of overly personal or irrelevant information that doesn’t directly support your main argument.
• Remember to address any potential weaknesses or challenges you’ve faced as a leader and how you’ve learned from them.

Tips for Writing a Successful Leadership Essay

• Be Authentic and Genuine in Your Writing: Avoid sounding like you’re trying to fit a certain mold or meet expectations. Let your unique leadership style and personality shine through in your writing. Share personal anecdotes and reflections that showcase your leadership abilities. Demonstrate your emotional intelligence by being vulnerable and self-aware. Your writing allows the reader to experience your leadership roles and various leadership experiences.
• Show Rather Than Tell Your Leadership Qualities: Use vivid descriptions and specific examples of leadership to illustrate how you’ve exhibited effective leadership qualities. Avoid generic statements or clichés about what it means to be a successful leader. Demonstrate your ability to lead by showing the impact of your actions and decisions. Incorporate data, statistics, quotes from essay samples or other credible sources to bolster your arguments. Provide specific details about the challenges you faced, your actions, and the outcomes you achieved as a leader.
• Use Concrete Examples and Evidence: Support your claims about your leadership abilities with real-life anecdotes and experiences. Use vivid language and sensory details to help the reader visualize your leadership experiences. Avoid vague or generalized statements that lack substance or ability to make a strong impact. Highlight the leadership abilities and styles most relevant to the role model or opportunity you’re seeking. Demonstrate how your use of my leadership experiences and qualities make you the ideal candidate for the leadership position or application essay you’re pursuing.
• Tailor Your Essay to the Specific Audience or Purpose: Research the admissions officers or business environment you’re writing for and understand their idea of leadership. Align your essay with the specific requirements or type of essay outlined in the prompt. Adjust your tone, language, and focus to resonate with the intended audience and their leadership is often expected. Demonstrate how your leadership abilities and unique leadership style can contribute to the organization or institution you’re applying to. Emphasize the specific leadership qualities and traits of a leader most valued in the type of leadership you’re pursuing.

Leadership Essay Examples

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How To Write A Leadership Essay FAQs

How should i start a leadership essay.

To begin a leadership essay, define what effective leadership means to you. Consider what qualities a true leader must possess and how you have experienced or observed leadership. A captivating anecdote or leadership essay example can grab the reader’s attention and set the tone for your essay.

What is the structure of a leadership essay?

A typical leader essay should have a well-organized structure. Start with an engaging introduction introducing your thesis statement about what makes a strong leader. Then, support your argument with specific examples and detail different leadership styles. Conclude your essay by summarizing your main points and reinforcing your stance on leadership development.

How do you write an introduction for leadership?

When crafting an introduction for a leader essay, grab the reader’s attention with a compelling hook related to leadership. Clearly state your thesis on what qualities make an effective leader. You can also tease some of the main points you will discuss in your essay, such as leading by example, leadership allows, and bad leadership.

How do I write about my leadership?

In writing about your leadership experiences, focus on specific instances where you demonstrated leadership qualities. Reflect on how you could look inward and recognize areas for improvement. Explain how you were able to inspire others and develop your leadership skills. Avoid vague statements and instead provide concrete examples.

What makes an effective leader?

An effective leader possesses strong technical skills and can develop people and teams. A true leader should lead by example and inspire others through their actions. Understanding different leadership styles and adapting to situations is crucial for a successful leader.

Through my engaging and informative blog posts, I aim to provide helpful tips on topics such as essay writing, research skills, and academic planning, empowering students to thrive in their academic pursuits.

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How to write a High-Quality and Powerful leadership Essay

We consider creating an essay on leadership a noble task, yet that’s not the same for everyone. Some find it complicated, while others find it enjoyable. The secret lies in the mastery of leadership essay writing dos and don’ts, which we share in this article.

One of the common requirements for admission to the most prestigious colleges is a leadership essay. In addition, college admission boards sometimes require applicants to submit a well-written leadership essay. The purpose is to assess the leadership qualities of applicants to shortlist only those who have the right leadership skills.

In most cases, you will be requested to write a short essay on leadership. For instance, you can be asked to write either a 250-word or 500-word leadership essay.

Aside from admissions, there are courses such as religious studies, management, political science, nursing, and social work that will require you to complete leadership essays.

In the real sense, even if you have never been in a direct leadership position, you can still write an attention-grabbing leadership essay. This article is all about showing you how to do this. By the time you are done reading it, you should be able to write a convincing leadership essay.

Let’s begin.

What is a leadership essay?

A leadership essay is a standard academic essay where you explore the different aspects, attributes, perspectives, and leadership topics either as a class assignment or for college admission purposes.

A good leadership essay incorporates all the elements of an academic essay, including title page, introduction, body paragraphs, transition words, citations, references, and conclusions. In addition, it should be clear, concise, and competent enough to answer the essay prompt.

A leadership essay is a remarkable essay that you should expect at least once in your college life. You will either be asked to write it as part of your college admission application or as an assignment when pursuing a business, political science, economics, or management course.

Most of the time, when a professor asks you to write a leadership essay, they will give you all the instructions you need to write the essay. About 90% of the time, your professor will mark your essay based on your understanding of leadership as well as your writing, presentation, organization, and analytical skills.

Therefore, to ace a leadership essay, you must write a serious essay showing your understanding of leadership and academic writing skills.

Related Reading: How to write a five-paragraph Essay.

How to approach a leadership essay

You can approach a leadership essay using many angles or perspectives based on your essay prompt.

• From a personal point of view – this is usually the subjective view of leadership based on your leadership attributes, styles, and characteristics. This approach is commonly taken when writing personal statements or admission essays based on leadership.
• A social leader perspective is a common approach when writing about leaders who have demonstrated outstanding leadership skills. You can focus on political, business, religious, and professional leaders.
• Real-life examples – you can approach your leadership essay from the perspective of real-life examples of leaders. For example, you can talk of your friends, family members, teachers, and acquaintances who appear as leaders depending on their qualities.
• Based on leadership styles – you can write a leadership essay based on the leadership styles preferred by the leader (s) in question. In most cases, you will single out a leader and explain why they fit a leadership style, say servant leadership or democratic leadership.
• Leadership theories – same as leadership styles, you can also formulate your arguments in a leadership essay based on the theories of leadership that best explain the leadership approaches of a specific leader. Here, you will view the leader from an external perspective, determine what makes them great, and relate their leadership style and approach to a specific theory. Leadership theories include transformational, charismatic, transactional, situational, behavioural, contingency, great man, and trait theories.

Understanding the approach of your essay on leadership based on these perspectives or angles of analysis usually helps frame your paper and limit its scope to answering the essay prompt. 

The best Leadership Essay Outline or Structure

Writing  an essay outline must always start with research and then organizing your main points in a structured manner.

Your leadership essay outline should include the introduction, body, and conclusion.

1. Introduction

When outlining what you should include in your leadership essay introduction, at the very least, make sure you have a hook statement . This will make them want to read the rest of your essay. Try as much as possible to ensure the statement is related to leadership. It can be a statistic, quote, anecdote, leadership fact, or rhetorical question.

You must also include a thesis statement. The thesis statement is your main argument, which features in your essay as the last sentence of your introduction paragraph. It is what you will be supporting throughout the essay with supporting claims, data, and evidence.

So, under the introduction part of your outline, include a hook, background information, and a thesis statement. Sometimes, you can also include an outline of how you argue your points of present ideas in your essay.

Related Articles:

• How to write an Essay Introduction
• Words to use at the beginning of an essay introduction.

When outlining what you will include in your leadership essay, you need to detail what you will discuss in your body paragraphs. The typical leadership essay will consist of between three to five body paragraphs . You must write what you will include in each body paragraph. Short leadership essays can sometimes have two to three paragraphs, depending on the word limit and the essay question.

Each body paragraph should start with an argument supporting your main argument or thesis. So, when outlining body paragraphs, you should begin by stating your supporting argument and then highlighting the main points you will use to support the argument. Do this for all three or five body paragraphs. Ensure you carefully select the linking words to ensure a good flow of ideas.

Also Read: 

• Number of Paragraphs in an Essay
• Parts of a body paragraph
• How to write an essay in 1000 words
• Making good paragraphs

3. Conclusion

Your leadership essay will need a powerful conclusion paragraph to be complete. Therefore, make sure you include it in your outline. Your conclusion should begin with a restatement of your main argument plus the key supporting arguments. You should never include new arguments or information in the conclusion paragraph. This will confuse your readers.

What you want to do after summarizing your essay is to make a statement that leaves an impression on the reader. A good closing statement will also ensure you get all the points for the essay.

Related Read: Words to use instead of "in conclusion" or "in summary."

Steps to follow to write a good leadership essay

Now that you know how to outline or structure a leadership essay, it is time to learn how to write a quality leadership essay.

Step 1: Read and re-read the question or prompt

When writing a leadership essay, the first thing you need to do is understand the question correctly. It is essential to do this before you do any research. Reading and re-reading the question and thinking carefully will help you know what is needed.

Leadership essays typically require you to reflect on your leadership traits or qualities. If you are required to write about your leadership traits, list all your leadership positions in the past. And then, list all the traits you demonstrated in those positions.

If you cannot easily do this, you should Google example leadership essays. These essays will help you to uncover your leadership traits.

Step 2: Write an outline 

Once you have understood the question and listed your leadership positions and traits, it is time to write an outline.

You can quickly write an outline if the leadership essay asks you to discuss yourself. But, again, this is because you have already written about your previous leadership positions and traits.

Suppose the essay asks you to focus on a particular leader or aspect of leadership. In that case, you will need to do more research before writing an outline.

A typical leadership essay outline will include an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Check out the section above on how to write a leadership essay outline. A good outline will provide your essay with structure and flow.

Step 3: Write the leadership essay introduction

The first section of the outline is the introduction. You need to start your introduction with an attention-grabbing statement. This is known as a hook. A hook is a statement that will hook your reader and make them want to read the rest of your introduction and essay.

It is especially important to have a hook as your first sentence when writing a leadership essay for admission to a university or college. This is because admissions staff do not have time to consider each application carefully. So, make sure your essay stands out by writing a spellbinding hook.

Perhaps the easiest way to write a hook is to rewrite the peak of your leadership story. This could be the most exciting thing that has happened to you or that you have achieved as a leader. Write it as the first statement in your essay to draw in your readers. Then, use this statement to set up your story.

The last statement in your introduction should be your thesis statement . The thesis statement is your main point or accomplishment as a leader. Therefore, it is what your entire essay should focus on.

Step 4: Write your body paragraphs

After the introduction, the next section is the body. The body of the essay is made up of body paragraphs. Depending on the essay requirements, you can include three or five body paragraphs. Make sure each paragraph focuses on a specific leadership trait.

To discuss each trait, mention it at the beginning of the paragraph and then support it with evidence. Share how you think the trait makes you what you say you are. For example, if you said you are honest in the introduction, mention honesty to introduce a body paragraph and then tell your readers why you are an honest leader and its importance.

Make your writing as descriptive as possible, and use examples everywhere in your essay.

Step 5: Write the conclusion

The conclusion of your work needs to be strong. You use it to create a lasting impression on your reader’s mind. You should begin your conclusion by restating your thesis and then tying all the main points together. You should then talk a bit about the impact of your leadership. You should do this without introducing any new information.

After writing your conclusion, you should edit and proofread your work to ensure it is flawless before submitting it to the college admissions board.

The five steps above show that writing a leadership essay is not difficult. Of course, it is challenging, but it is certainly not very difficult. If you find it challenging to write a leadership essay, contact us now to get all the help you need. 

Step 6: Edit and Proofread your essay

Submitting a compelling leadership essay is a beautiful experience everyone looks up to. However, before submitting the essay, take some time and review the essay. Read through the essay more than once to identify and correct the mistakes. Then, hire a professional proofreader to check whether your essay is a hit or miss. Based on their feedback, you can further perfect your essay to appeal to the admissions essay or your professor.

Use editing software to assess your essay for spelling, syntax, language, grammar, and punctuation errors. Correct these errors and read through the essay again and again. Then, before turning in the essay, re-read the essay aloud to yourself and make necessary tweaks.

If it is for admissions purposes, make it as subjective as possible. But, on the other hand, it should be relatable and honest, and never lie. And if it is a leadership essay, consider using evidence, examples, and illustrations to support your thesis.

Five Tips to write a good leadership essay

Follow these leadership essay tips to ensure your long or short essay on leadership is as good as it can be.

• Research online to get plenty of points – Researching online and earning points on whatever you want to write will make your essay more interesting and convincing.
• Take time to create a good thesis statement – Your thesis statement is probably the one thing that will determine if the reader will be interested in reading the rest of your essay. So, make sure it is detailed and exciting.
• Create an outline – Make sure you create an outline before writing your long or short essay on leadership. Doing so will make your essay structured and coherent.
• Create the first draft – After creating an outline, write your essay. After writing the essay, review it and edit it repeatedly until it feels right. Doing this will ensure the final draft is well-polished and very easy to understand.
• Check your essay for plagiarism – Checking your essay for plagiarism will help you identify non-original parts of your essay and eliminate them. Remember, most professors consider plagiarism a great sin.

Top 7 Qualities of an excellent leader to include in an essay

The best leadership essays focus on good leadership qualities or traits. The most useful leadership traits are listed below. The importance of each point is also highlighted.

• Empathy – The best leaders feel for others and always try to understand rather than force their methods and ways.
• Determination – Showing commitment and discipline is an effective way for leaders to guide their followers.
• Competence – Having expertise and doing the work correctly is essential to leadership because it helps leaders lead.
• Confidence –Leaders must show that they fully believe whatever they are planning, preaching, or doing to get buy-in from their followers.
• Honesty – Honest or straightforward leaders quickly build trust and get people to believe in their vision.
• Communication – Clear messaging of the vision and the objectives of one’s organization will help to ensure both are achieved.
• Vision – Leaders must be forward-looking to avoid predicted risks and take advantage of predicted opportunities.

A typical short essay on leadership or the qualities of a good leader essay will include three paragraphs focusing on one leadership trait.

Types of leadership styles to include in an essay

There are several types of leadership styles that you can talk about in your essay. The main ones are listed below.

• Democratic leadership style – This style is also known as participative. At its core, it is a leader who engages and involves team members in decision-making. It results in employees feeling valued and motivated.
• Laissez-Faire leadership style – At the core of this leadership style is a very laidback and almost lazy type of leader who does not offer a lot of direction or guidance. While this can make some employees feel free, it is also known to cause confusion and chaos occasionally.
• The transactional leadership style is characterized by a leader who creates and maintains a structured environment where everything moves like clockwork. This leadership style often improves efficiency and helps attain short-term and mid-term goals.
• Transformational leadership style – This leadership style is characterized by a leader who acts as a role model to get the change they desire from others. A transformational leader also works hard to motivate employees and show them they are valued.

If you feel that a leadership style reflects who you are, you can state that in your thesis and then try to support your thesis with arguments that support you are who you say you are.

35 Leadership Research Essay Topics and Ideas to Consider

Because in most cases, you will be required to choose a good topic for your leadership essay, research it, and write an essay. The topic ideas we list below can come in handy. Here is a list of leadership essay topics to consider:

• The impacts of charismatic leaders on teamwork
• How leadership differs from management
• Are leaders born or made?
• Is leadership an acquired or innate trait?
• Are transactional leaders more effective than transformational leaders?
• The best leadership style for school principles
• Qualities of a great leader
• The leadership qualities of Mahatma Gandhi
• Bidden vs Putin Leadership Styles
• Historic leaders that influenced today’s leadership approaches
• Impacts of democratic leadership on organizations
• Best leadership styles for high-performance work teams
• Do females make better leaders?
• Why liberal leaders make better presidents
• Leaders should have higher cognitive abilities
• Qualities of a good nurse leader
• Benefits of leadership development courses
• Should employees be trained in leadership?
• Role of college environments in fostering leadership
• Does college leadership raise future leaders?
• Why should leaders be earnest?
• How leadership creates an enabling environment for employees
• The link between leadership and organizational performance
• Relationship between leadership and employee engagement
• Leadership fosters positive organizational citizenship behaviour
• HR managers should possess soft leadership skills
• Leaders who failed and rose again
• Role of higher education institutions in developing leadership
• Leadership traits of Queen Elizabeth
• Leadership characteristics of President Obama
• World leaders who have adopted dictatorship as a leadership approach
• Quality leadership and turnover rates in public health organizations
• Role of hospital leaders
• The link between leadership and stress levels of employees
• Are leaders constantly under pressure

Final Remarks

You now know everything about leadership essays. You know how to write a leadership essay outline and the steps you need to follow to write the actual essay. You can use the information in this leadership essay guide to writing a 250-word or 500-word essay on leadership.

When asked to write an admission essay based on your leadership qualities and experience, it is sometimes challenging. Well, you are not alone. Because most college applicants usually have minimal meaningful leadership experience. The majority are generally not very excited about writing a leadership essay.

We have guided you on the specifics to focus your leadership essays on, even if you have no prior leadership experience. However, if you need help writing a leadership skills essay, hire an expert essay helper now to get all the help you need. Our essay tutors can help you create an outline or produce a complete leadership essay within days or even hours.

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A number of national scholarships and fellowships ask applicants to write about their leadership experiences.  Here are a few prominent examples:

• Truman Scholarship - “Describe a particular example of your leadership.” 
• Marshall Scholarship - “Describe a situation in which you recognized and responded to a need for leadership.
• Udall Scholarship - “Describe a leadership experience in which you made a difference on your campus or in your community.” 

The most extensive prompt comes from the Schwarzman Scholars Program and could be used as a guide to reflection for leadership essays for many other scholarships:

• The intellectual/analytical abilities to identify and understand challenges and opportunities, and envision solutions
• The initiative to act and communicate why 
• Interpersonal skills to inspire a team effort 
• An ability to push through resistance and/or challenges to reach positive results/change for the better. 
• What was the problem or issue you identified, and why did you choose to act? 
• What was your plan of action? 
• What obstacles or challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
• What were the outcomes and impact on the community or purpose? 
• What did you learn and/or what lessons would you pass on to others? 
• How has this experience shaped you as a leader and how does it connect with your vision for future leadership aspirations?

The following suggestions are intended to help you reflect upon and express your own leadership experiences.

Answering the Prompt

Pay careful attention to what the prompt asks you to describe.  A common pitfall to avoid is explaining your “theory” of leadership.  It may be very helpful to articulate this in your preparatory work, but the final essay should directly address the information requested in the prompt.  To get started, ask yourself: what are the subtle differences in the above prompts?

Definitions of Leadership

What is leadership?  While there are lots of definitions out there, they tend to emphasize two main aspects: (a) the creation of shared vision and (b) collective motivation toward the achievement of this vision.  Here are two illustrative examples:

The process of “influencing the activities of an organized group toward goal-setting and goal-achievement” (Stogdill, 1950)

“A process of social influence in which a person can enlist the the aid and support of others to achieve a common goal” (Chemers, 1997)

The common thread here is that leadership is about accomplishing through a group what we could not have accomplished as individiduals.  For each of the various examples that you might choose to write about, ask yourself: What was your vision? How did this vision come about? In what context (e.g. needs, opportunities)?  How did you communicate this vision to others?  How did you invite them to identify their own interests/values with this vision? How did you inspire them to action?  How did you marshall the common resources necessary to make this vision a reality? How did you enlist the support of others inside or outside your organization?

Leadership vs. Authority

One of the most common mistakes is to conflate “leadership experiences” with “leadership positions” - i.e. positions of authority within an organization.  Merton (1969) defines authority as “the legitimate rights of a position that require others to obey.” It is an attribute of a social position.  Leadership, on the other hand, “is an interpersonal relation in which others comply because they want to, not because they have to” (Merton, 1969).  Leadership, as defined above, can be found at every level of an organization.  So expand your list of possible experiences beyond the list of executive positions you’ve held in organizations.

Some Common Functions of Leadership

How have your leadership experiences demonstrated one or more of these common functions (selected from Merton, 1969)?

Leaders facilitate the adaptive capacity of social systems to internal and external pressures and opportunities.  

Leaders are future-oriented as well as present-oriented.  In the context of student leadership, it is particularly important to institutionalize processes in ways that will outlive a particular student generation.

Leaders enunciate the values and ideals of the group. Whether assigned the task or not, leaders represent the group to the larger community.

Leaders evaluate available resources and cope with the problem of their allocation.

Leaders express aspirations that evoke resonance among members of the group (i.e. shared vision).

Leaders mobilize, guide, coordinate, and control the efforts of group members. When effective, they deepen the motivation and enlarge the output of members beyond what would be achieved without them.

Leaders arbitrate and mediate the inevitable conflicts that emerge in social interaction in such a fashion that most group members most of the time feel that justice has been done.

Maintaining Focus

The word limit for these essays is typically very short.  As with any personal statement, the particular experience you discuss should be an illustration of your abiding character traits.  Provide the essential information about the context, but keep the focus on examples of how your traits interacted with the context to produce a leadership experience.  It might be helpful to organize your notes for the essay under three headings:

• Problem (or Opportunity) - What is the essential problem or opportunity that your group's action sought to address?
• Action - What did you (as an individual and as a group) do to address this problem or capitalize on this opportunity?
• Results - What were the tangible results of your action? How did it solve the problem or benefit others?  Can you provide numbers to demonstrate the impact of the action?  Is the solution ongoing and sustainable?

Remember you don’t have include every detail.  In many cases, the example that you discuss should be coordinated with the writer of your “leadership” letter of recommendation who can provide additional information.  Suggested Reading

Robert K. Merton,  "The Social Nature of Leadership"  (1969)

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How to write an essay about leadership

Leadership essays, or essays where you are asked about your work as a leader in your school or community, are not as common as you might imagine. Given all of the emphasis schools and clubs put on leadership roles and titles, essays asking students to dive deeply into this work are actually pretty rare in college applications. That said, it is important to consider leadership very broadly! You do not need to be the President or Founder of a club to write an effective essay for one of these prompts. In fact, sometimes the less common considerations and definitions of “leadership” can make for more compelling essays.

Example Leadership Essay Questions:

• U of California: Describe an example of your leadership and a way that you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes, or contributed to group efforts over time.
• U of Texas: How do you show leadership in your life? How do you see yourself being a leader at UT Austin?

LET'S BREAK DOWN THE ESSENTIAL POINTS YOU NEED TO HIT WHEN RESPONDING TO THIS SUPPLEMENT:

Leadership is more than titles – it is important, when you consider questions like these, that you reflect on activities where you have contributed to an accomplishment and learned something (about yourself, about your community). In fact, it would be a more powerful essay to reflect on a leadership contribution that was not connected to a title of leadership, but where you learned something important, than to reflect upon your activity where your leadership title is big “in name only.”

Sometimes leadership happens within your family – you do not need to limit your focus to leadership that happens during your school day.

You can consider this essay happening in two distinct ways: narrative structure – where you present a challenge you faced in a leadership role, actions you did that had an impact, and lessons you learned (skills you gained); OR montage structure – where you take on two different activities that both taught you a common lesson about leadership. Don’t muddle these together! Decide whether you want to write linearly (and chronologically in time) about one activity or if you want to write non-linearly about one leadership lesson.

THINGS TO AVOID:

Try to stay away from topics where your leadership takes the reader on a familiar journey. If you want to write about your leadership on an athletic team, that is wonderful, but try to avoid an essay about how your leadership of your team during The Big Game contributed to (winning/losing) The Big Game and the team becoming closer and being “one-strong-team.” Does that feel familiar to you? That’s because college admissions folks will have read thousands of essays that tell this type of story. If you select a common team to lead, take your essay in an uncommon direction.

Avoid lengthy introductions that take away from your word count and don’t actually support your essay response.

Avoid overemphasis on one aspect that detracts from your ability to talk about the other aspects of your story. In other words, if you spend half of your words outlining the challenge you faced, you only have ¼ of the remaining words to discuss your actions and ¼ to discuss the lessons you learned. This is not a good balance!

ADDITIONAL TIPS AND TRICKS:

• What did you do?
• What problems did you solve?
• What lessons did you learn?
• What impact did you have?
• How have you applied these lessons?

Answering these questions (and in this order) actually builds you an outline for this essay!

Do you have an extracurricular activity where the character count really limits you in terms of describing your work and impact? Consider using this essay to further highlight your contributions!

Do you have an extracurricular activity that speaks directly toward your intended major or field of study? This might be a great time to make your application stand out by sharing your leadership and contributions to this field! What problems have you solved? How can you use this prompt to share these solutions?

Elise holds a BA in Political Philosophy from Williams College and an MEd in Administration & Social Policy from Harvard. She has spent the past twenty years working in top-tier independent schools.

Related Content

How to Effectively Demonstrate Leadership in MBA Essays

May 14, 2021

UPDATE: This article was originally posted on April 12, 2019. It has been updated with new information and tips below. 

Sitting down to compose your MBA admissions essays, you may be wondering what you should write about in the first place. While there are many different strategies that can lead to an effective essay , there is one thing that you definitely need to include: a will and capability for leadership .

Leadership, more than almost any other single quality, is one of the top things schools look for in their candidates. Some schools have even decided to dedicate an entire essay to their value of strong leadership. Take Kellogg’s essay A prompt, for example, which reads:

“Kellogg’s Purpose is to educate, equip & inspire brave leaders who create lasting value. Tell us about a time you have demonstrated leadership and created lasting value. What challenges did you face, and what did you learn?” (450 words)

Other schools, on the other hand, specifically ask about leadership as an element of essays or understand leadership to be an implicit part of the answer they are looking for, like Chicago Booth’s essay 2 prompt: 

“Chicago Booth immerses you in a choice-rich environment. How have your interests, leadership experiences, and other passions influenced the choices in your life?” (250 word minimum) 

This means that it is absolutely imperative that you clearly demonstrate your leadership capabilities in your essays . 

Your essay may be a masterful piece of writing, but only with the element of leadership is it likely to be successful and land you a spot in your top MBA program. 

Why is demonstrating leadership so important for elite MBA programs?

All business schools value leadership in their candidates. However, leadership has many different facets and forms , a fact that becomes clear when looking at schools – and what they value – in depth. 

Berkeley Haas, for example, connects leadership with their value of innovation . Specifically, Berkeley’s full-time MBA program features four Defining Leadership Principles . These include Confidence without Attitude, Question the Status Quo, Students Always , and Beyond Yourself . Berkeley sees each of these as an integral part of good leadership.

London Business School , on the other hand, sees leadership as an inherent and essential value for a global outlook,  one of their most important values. They write : 

“We nurture our students to challenge the status quo, to question the norm and to develop the skills to become the world’s best business leaders. Over the years we have adopted a truly global outlook tackling challenges faced by international businesses and their leaders.” ​  

For LBS, the qualities of leadership and having a global mindset go hand-in-hand.

This list goes on and on. IESE sees leadership as an essential prerequisite for impact , one of their greatest focuses; Wharton specifically offers training for global leadership capabilities through their Leadership Ventures ; Booth – a school heavily focused on community – views leadership as a fundamental element of that value . 

Given the different forms of leadership that each school values, how you showcase your own will change depending on which application you’re completing. So be sure to choose stories and lessons learned that align with the school you’re applying to. 

Of course, not only do these schools look for leadership in their candidates, they also offer explicit opportunities for developing and polishing leadership skills in their students. 

It is clear that leadership is extremely important in MBA programs, the work you do post-MBA, and of course, to the MBA admission committee. 

Leadership comes in many different forms

As you can see from above, there is no one definition of leadership that schools adhere to . In fact, because leadership can be tied into so many different values, there are many different ways to demonstrate it effectively in your MBA admissions essay. 

Here are some ideas about how to show leadership:

1. Innovative ideas

Leadership can be shown through an ability and desire to innovate . This can be coming up with a new product at a company, developing a new idea for a business, or helping an existing company capture a market opportunity that may not have been obvious before. By coming up with a creative new idea, you can show that you took the lead to help a company become more successful. 

Take a look at this example. Here, in his essay for Harvard Business School , our client Bruno demonstrated his capacity for leadership by applying data: 

“While working on a marketing and sales project for a large telecommunications company in Brazil, I was responsible for translating all the knowledge we had created with machine learning into segmented offerings, client retention actions, and up-selling initiatives. Combining industry expertise with the insights generated, I identified a 10% margin increase in the company’s mobile business, a market that is highly competitive and usually seen as margin-deteriorating. This experience made me realize that corporations need people who can guide them to make intelligent use of data.”

As you can see, identifying an opportunity to grow a business can be used to help show off your potential as a leader, especially as an entrepreneur. 

2. Helping others

This can be applied to both personal or professional situations. Maybe there was a time when your family was struggling financially, so you stepped in to offer your support? Maybe you had a colleague who couldn’t get their work done on time, so you helped them organize their priorities better and grow as a professional? Both of these instances show how you guided others through challenging experiences by relying on your leadership skills. 

This value can also be strongly related to impact and community , ideas that are becoming increasingly important within MBA programs . In many instances, leadership skills can be connected to a professional endeavor that helped a company create value for others. This is a great way to show how helping others revealed or helped you train your own leadership skills. 

Take a look at this example from a client’s application to Wharton last year:

“To escape Rio de Janeiro’s perilous, impoverished favelas, education and employment are the only way out. During university, I came to understand this while mentoring a group of underprivileged students. Despite wanting to attend school, my students often missed class due to active shootouts between gangs and police, on top of the many other challenges of living in favelas. Through this experience, I became aware of my role in society and how I could directly impact other’s lives.”

Here, our client Conrado used his experiences of mentoring others to understand his ability for impactful leadership. Not only does this help you underline the impact of your achievements, but also reveals a deeper aspect of your personality.

3. Taking initiative

Showing your desire and ability to be proactive can easily overlap with either of the two suggestions above. Often, recognizing a problem – either in your personal life or professional environment – and deciding to do something about it is a great way to demonstrate leadership. 

This is especially true if the problem was something nobody else had identified – or even blatantly denied existed. Here, your will to take the steps to fix it might be the perfect way to show your potential as a leader and self-starter while highlighting your drive and motivation.

4. Community and teamwork

A sense of community and working in teams is an essential value for many top MBA programs. Highlighting your leadership role does not mean you were working individually or only at the head of a team. Leadership can be also demonstrated through your ability to promote teamwork and collaboration. 

An important part of teamwork is being a team member who is not afraid to speak up, proactively solve problems, include others, or put new ideas on the table . 

By taking on a leadership role, even a minor one, within your community or team, you help further collective success and often multiply your impact. This is an awesome quality to demonstrate in your MBA essay. 

This can be a great opportunity to utilize extra-professional examples in your MBA essays. Take a look at another strategy Bruno used in one of his Columbia Business School essays:

“We’ve just stopped to catch some air, a scarce resource above 6000 meters. All members of the expedition are feeling mental exhaustion, but we fight it with team spirit. I nod heads with each member, making sure signals are clear. Each and every one of us is responsible for encouraging the others not to give up and for knowing when to tell a teammate to stop because going forward might risk their life. Lucky for all of us, now is not that time.”

Here, Bruno does an excellent job utilizing storytelling to help show how he is a leader within the group. As you can see, leadership can be evident even in stories of personal and group achievement.

5. Taking a leap of faith

Good leadership is not just about making data-backed decisions. Much more, it entails taking risks and using your intuition to navigate the complicated worlds of interpersonal communication, timing, and networking. 

This can not only highlight your courage but also your ability to push the envelope and create new solutions and possibilities.

For example, you could demonstrate leadership by telling the story of how your confidence in a subordinate helped them grow to become a more mature professional and enrich your team as a whole. It may also manifest itself through the idea to start a new business, despite not knowing if you will reach success. 

6. Getting out of your comfort zone

Leadership can also be recognized in the desire to get outside one’s comfort zone. Adcoms are looking for individuals who are ready to take full advantage of their MBA programs, which requires a willingness to learn and grow. This is an especially good tactic if you want to show attributes of global or international leadership, a characteristic that is especially valuable for European schools like LBS, INSEAD, or IESE. 

For example, spending a year in a foreign country can help you understand intercultural connotations of business in ways you could never have experienced before or how to communicate in completely new ways. 

Demonstrating leadership by getting out of your comfort zone can be expanded to experiences about polishing foreign language skills, helping international colleagues understand your home region, or expanding a business internationally. All of these can reveal and train global leadership skills and intercultural competencies – something all schools are looking for in their candidates. 

7. Straightforward leadership positions

Of course, we cannot forget the most obvious way to demonstrate leadership. If you have taken on an explicit leadership position within your company or organization, this is a great way to express this value to the admissions committee. 

Professional leadership positions can include leading teams, guiding clients through transformation processes, presenting results to senior leadership, or taking on a senior leadership position itself. If you have had experiences like this, be sure to include them – and the challenges you faced – in your MBA admissions essay. 

These ideas not only help you demonstrate leadership in your MBA essay, they might also give you bonus points for connecting leadership to other values a school might share, like community, innovation, teamwork, creativity, and a drive to make an impact. 

Tips for demonstrating effective leadership

Naturally, just explaining one of the above situations in your essay will not cut it. There are a few other things that you should keep in mind and try to apply when focusing on leadership in your MBA essay. 

Use the STAR method

Telling a story that thoroughly highlights your leadership role does not automatically mean it will be compelling. Often, candidates fail to show how leadership was necessary – in other words, what the problem was that required them to take on a leadership position in the first place.

That is where storytelling – and specifically the STAR method – comes in. The STAR method will help you highlight not just the problem that you faced, but also your specific role in solving it that led to success. 

STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action , and Results . If you want to make your story about leadership convincing, you must include all of these elements. This translates to:

Situation – clearly presenting the context for your story.

Task – demonstrating that there was a problem to be solved or a challenge to be faced.

Action – showing exactly what you did to solve that problem or overcome that challenge.

Results – the outcome of your actions. This can range from personal growth to helping other individuals to producing company-wide results. 

In this example, our client Karen effectively used the STAR method in her Kellogg essay to show leadership initiative at her mother’s store:

“I learned the value of hard work early, as a child helping in my mother’s gift shop, serving customers and wrapping gifts. (Situation) Once the boom of social media started, I saw the opportunity to leverage this technology to improve our business – this could attract more customers, increase revenues, and keep our financials organized. Simultaneously, I realized I wouldn’t be able to help in the store once I left for university (Task) , so I taught my mom to use the computer to manage our Facebook page and financials (Action) . The fulfillment of providing my mother with the tools and skills necessary to run and improve her business – increasing sales by 10% – is indescribable (Results) .”

Using STAR is a great way to make your leadership role very clear throughout your essay and utilize storytelling strategies successfully. 

At Ellin Lolis Consulting , we believe that one of the keys to a compelling essay is effective storytelling. This technique transforms your example of leadership from a stale image that adcoms have heard a thousand times to a colorful journey that highlights you as unique and valuable to their community.

Highlighting your role

Your MBA essay is the place to discuss your personal achievements . Don’t sell yourself short in your essay! Telling a story about leadership that does not thoroughly explain your part will not be a good demonstration of leadership. 

This means that it is important to show the admissions committee what you specifically did in your story. Just saying that you were part of a team that produced fantastic results will not achieve this. Instead, you must show them how your work – what you did and how you did it – was essential for collective or individual success. 

Even if a success was only possible due to the work of your entire team, it’s still important to show how your actions complemented those of your colleagues. Not only does this allow the readers to see your contributions, but also demonstrates your capacity for collaboration!

Combining personal and professional examples

We have already established that leadership can manifest itself in many different forms, and that admissions committees see it that way, too. 

This means that the adcom is not only looking for your professional leadership experiences – or that they will condemn you for demonstrating leadership in your personal life. In fact, a good mix helps the adcom understand that you have a well-rounded, flexible understanding of what leadership means. 

For example, last year, our client Thais wanted to show leadership via the theme “grow by growing others”. To do so, she included the following stories in her Berkeley Haas essays :

• Teaching fellow children how to read as a child
• Mentoring younger students during university
• Professionally mapping NGO efforts to coordinate the distribution of their impact more evenly throughout Brazil

Don’t be afraid to include personal examples of leadership – this may help to reinforce your multi-faceted capabilities as a leader even more in your MBA essay. This is also a great way to show a clear pattern of leadership.

Show a pattern of leadership

When writing your MBA essay, it is good to not just show a single instance of leadership, but instead to demonstrate how your tendency for leadership is part of your brand using multiple stories. 

Of course, this only applies to prompts that do not ask for only a single experience (unlike Kellogg’s essay B!)

For example, you could show how you led a school club as a teenager, started a project at an NGO during college, and went on to lead recruiting initiates at your current consulting firm. This way, the adcom has a number of examples to go on to understand that you will make for a good leader in the future. 

Often, the greatest way to demonstrate a pattern of leadership is by establishing it via your central theme .

Leadership and theme

A theme is a great way to connect your message to your reader. A theme is a central topic that is reinforced throughout your essay via one or more stories. If you are curious about how to effectively apply a theme in your MBA essay, check out this article .

Many candidates decide to use leadership as their central theme in one or more of their essays. This is a great strategy and is definitely a winning possibility. However, you can also choose a theme with a bit more subtlety and still create an effective argument for leadership. 

To demonstrate, let’s take another look at Kellogg’s essay B. Their question specifically asks candidates to talk about a (single!) past leadership experience.

Last fall, our client Carolina began her essay with: 

“While the choreographed movements of a ballet dancer are polished and graceful, the journey to reach this result is full of setbacks. Although I no longer practice ballet, I have benefited from the discipline and determination I developed as a ballet dancer, applying these strengths to my professional and personal life.”

Here, Carolina uses ballet to help the reader visualize discipline and determination. She goes on to explain that she later used these traits to successfully demonstrate her leadership capabilities to overcome hurdles while implementing a membership program at her company. 

She ends her essay like this: 

“Although the membership program was successful, it required overcoming many setbacks through a rigorous execution process. Like ballet dancing, the completed project shows little of the work that went into it or the learnings I acquired along the way. Ultimately, it gave me the opportunity to lead a very diverse team, learn about a new industry, and strategically collaborate to achieve impressive results.”

As you can see, she uses the theme ballet to focus the reader on specific leadership qualities (discipline and determination) that helped her succeed in her career.

This strategy will work for other schools and essay prompts just as well. If your answer to Stanford’s What Matters Most to You and Why is quality leadership, you may be able to express that best with a metaphor. 

Our client Isabella, for example, began her essay like this: 

“What matters most to me is watering plants. Not any plant, but the ones that insist on growing, even when lacking nutrients and sunshine.” 

She continues her essay by explaining how, by overcoming bias and obstacles in her own life, she was able to grow into a leader who helped others overcome their own obstacles as well, thus “watering plants that insist on growing.”

As you can see, it is possible to demonstrate leadership in your MBA essay indirectly and implicitly – and even in unique, creative ways. Choosing your theme like this may even help reveal a new side of your personality that the admissions committee might not have otherwise been exposed to.

Don’t be afraid of conflict

In life, we work hard to avoid conflict as much as possible, yet when it comes to stories, conflict and tensions are not only important, but essential to captivating attention. 

Would Breaking Bad have been as interesting if Walter White was already an established drug lord when the show started? Probably not. Watching him take the news of his cancer diagnosis and find an unusual way to drum up the money for treatment is just what makes the show so addictive. 

Conflict and how our “hero” (in this case, you!) solves the challenge is at the core of any good story, so make sure you use the STAR method to clearly set up the conflict you needed to navigate and then show how you took steps to turn this roadblock into one of your standout moments. 

Let’s take this essay for example. In an early version, the story was conflict-free. 

Upon joining MBB after graduation, another experience inspired personal growth. While abroad, I participated in recruiting processes for top consulting firms, and saw firsthand that MBB lagged behind in recruiting students pursuing dual degrees abroad. After joining, I created a dedicated process to recruit these top performers. Four months later, we had the first online connection event, which attracted more than 40 interested students. The program has since become an essential recruiting tool. I am proud to lead this internal team in contributing to MBB’s long-term success as we attract the talent we need to deliver high-impact results to clients.

Though this shows initiative on the applicant’s part, it is far less compelling than this version of events:

After graduating, I joined MBB, as it allowed me to channel my intellectual curiosity, explore various sectors and be an agent of change. While abroad, I participated in recruiting processes for other top consulting firms, and saw firsthand that MBB lagged behind in recruiting dual-degree students. After joining, I spoke with several partners about creating a program to solve this issue. The partners were hesitant, however, concerned they could not adequately evaluate candidates remotely. After demonstrating the implications of overlooking these high-potential candidates, I received permission to create a dedicated dual-degree recruiting process. Four months later, I had mobilized 10 colleagues, leading them in organizing BCG’s first online connection event. The program has since become an essential recruiting tool, bringing in more than 10% of our hires since inception.

Here, not only does she show initiative, she also shows she has an ability to clearly communicate and add value to her firm , even when the odds are stacked against her. This tactic shows development and engages the reader, making your story more memorable.

So, when writing your leadership essays, make sure to give your stories some much-needed drama to really demonstrate how much impact your actions generated!

Still struggling with leadership in your MBA essays?

There are many factors to consider when deciding how you will demonstrate leadership in your MBA essay. 

On the one hand, it is good to consider the multi-faceted nature of leadership. You will want to demonstrate multiple environments and ways in which you have been able to create impact. And just because you have never managed a team or become the leader of a school club does not mean you cannot show your leadership capabilities to the admissions committee. 

In fact, you may be able to prove to them that you are a leader through a number of other situations, like taking the initiative or innovation, and even simultaneously connect those situations to other things the school values. 

On the other hand, just selecting a story that demonstrates leadership is not enough – you must also present it in a way that is convincing . Using strategies like STAR, a mix of professional and personal examples, and reinforcing the message through your theme, you can make sure that the admissions committee remembers your unique value as a leader. 

Of course, understanding these concepts and applying them is not the same thing. 

Even more importantly, we can help you effectively highlight your desire to grow as a leader in your top MBA program and the global world of business beyond. After all, as Kellogg’s admissions point out , growth is a challenge confronted by every organization – and every leader. 

If you still find yourself struggling with these issues, we are happy to help! Our MBA essay editors at Ellin Lolis Consulting have the expertise you need to identify the right stories and approaches to discussing leadership for each school you’re applying to. We can help you polish your essay to really make your leadership experiences shine. 

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How to Write Leadership Essay in College

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If there is one skill that is revered across educational institutions and organizations, it is leadership.

Being the boss or in a position of power is not enough to make you a good leader. Effective leadership comes from the impact you have on people, the respect you garner, and how you manage to walk the talk.

Owing how important the role leadership plays in our personal and professional life, it’s no surprise that students are asked to write leadership essays in college.

The purpose of this assignment is to get them to understand the concept of leadership, reflect on their own experiences, or even assess the leadership style of a prominent leader. Apart from writing skills, this assignment also puts students’ critical thinking skills to the test.

This article will tell you what goes into a good leadership outline, along with 12 practical essay writing tips.

12 Tips on How to Write a Good Leadership Essays

If you think you can go ahead and write an essay on your favorite leader, you are mistaken - grade 5 is long gone.

Leadership essay writing is a lot more layered. It requires you to demonstrate your understanding of the concept excitingly and back it up with solid examples and research.

Don’t panic. Here are 12 tips to help you write powerful and effective leadership essays.

Brainstorm interesting topic ideas

If you are fortunate, you will be given a specific leadership essay topic to write on, but most of the time, students are given the flexibility to come up with a topic of their choice.

Leadership essays need to be personal. By the end of it, the reader needs to understand your leadership abilities. Now you can throw light on that aspect of yourself by recounting your leadership experiences, relating it to the leadership style of a prominent leader, or even comparing two leaders. Regardless of your chosen topic, it’s important to connect it back to yourself.

So, start with enlisting potential topic ideas that would help you throw light on your leadership abilities. Don’t rush through this step - take your time to pick a suitable topic.

Think out-of-the-box

Surprise your audience by thinking of innovative topics and ideas for your leadership essay.

Plain and dull essays are predictable and can get boring after being overused by multiple students for their multiple essays. Your professors can also feel that you are trying to play it safe by not thinking outside the box and giving you an average grade for your essay.

Extraordinary and new ideas get the attention they deserve, and your readers are more likely to find them interesting and get hooked on your essay right at the beginning.

Hook the reader

The introductory paragraph is a crucial one as it lays the foundation for the rest of the essay. Does your introduction entice the reader to know more, or does it induce yawns? It all depends on how you choose to begin your essay.

It’s essential to start with a bang and write an interesting hook from the first sentence. A good hook is written in 1 - 2 sentences and manages to get the reader interested. You can start with a funny experience, raise a startling question, or state an interesting fact - there are various ways to begin your leadership essay and capture the reader’s attention.

Use active voice

“I performed the task with great precision” vs. “The task was performed with great precision” - what is more impactful in the context of leadership essays? The former one.

Unlike an essay or any other academic paper, leadership essays are meant to be personal. They are supposed to be about you. As you share your perspective or experiences, you should use an active voice to make a more significant impact and ensure your message reaches the reader.

Follow the format

Adhere to your academic institution's standards for formatting and styling your leadership essay because, first and foremost, your professors would want to see that you have tackled how to format your essay.

Secondly, it is always good practice to format your essays for an excellent structure and a good presentation of the content in the essay. Some institutions are very strict about their formatting standards and can choose to cancel or give unsatisfactory grades to students who do not follow their specific formatting guidelines.

Avoid cliches

Generally, in leadership essays, cliches are most commonly used to describe the person in the essay at large. Avoiding these set cliches will do you and your essay good.

Cliches like “leaves no stones unturned,” “ahead of the curve,” etc., have been used so much by students that they have become weak, lost their meaning, and have minimal effect on the essays.

Your professors are looking for originality and creativity, whereas an essay full of cliches will appear lazy and uncreative.

Select good references

Leadership holds a variety of sub-topics that addresses the quality of leadership, the style and attitudes that leaders have, historical references of the lifework of distinguished leaders, or how certain leaders influenced events.

That’s why researching is key for a thorough leadership essay. With credible sources and references to take inspiration and quotes from, your leadership essay will gain authority and stature. Each method, skill, or event can be further detailed through helpful resources such as Google Scholar, JSTOR, etc.

Ask questions

Ask yourself questions while re-reading your essay to identify any missing pieces you may have overlooked.

Asking questions also address your essay's efficiency and will help you figure out what your readers could ask while reading your essay. You can then confront each of these questions and create a more precise understanding for your readers.

Share anecdotes

Another element that can really strengthen your leadership essay and take it from good to great is anecdotes.

Yes, don’t shy away from sharing anecdotes and personal experiences related to leadership. It adds credibility to your writing and justifies the points you have made. It can be humorous or life-changing, but sharing anecdotes helps keep readers invested and adds immense value to the essay.

Here’s a helpful video by Matthew Singleton on how you can use anecdotes while writing essays

Focus on key qualities

We know how effective leadership constitutes certain key traits and qualities such as empathy, collaboration, good listener, visionary, ownership, decision-making capabilities, delegation, communicator, and more.

Your essay needs to reflect some of these traits. Instead of choosing to enlist all these traits and not focussing on either of them well, it’s important to first choose which are the traits you want to explore in your essay and then work towards highlighting them while writing.

Get feedback

It is always better to have more than one pair of eyes to read and evaluate your essay. Getting feedback on your writing is crucial for the betterment of your essay, as the limitations and problems that you may not have realized while writing your essay can be identified by a fresh set of eyes or a new perspective.

These errors or misses can be rectified, resulting in a quality, no-error leadership essay.

Edit and proofread

A leadership essay requires attention to detail, a set organized structure, and a logical flow of sentences. Editing your essay and proofreading it will overcome any misses that may come your way.

As you proofread, you can double-check the leader’s name and designation, dates, sources, factual, spelling, and grammatical mistakes, punctuation errors, out-of-place references, and transition flows.

So, now you know that leadership essays are not as ‘vanilla’ as they sound. They need to be descriptive and logical while capturing your leadership abilities.

If you don’t have the time to write a compelling leadership essay or doubt your writing skills, don’t worry. We at Writers Per Hour are pleased to write an essay for you that will get you noticed.

From choosing a suitable topic to outlining and writing a thoughtful leadership essay from scratch, our writing experts promise to deliver precisely what you need - high-quality essays that meet your budget and deadlines.

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627 Leadership Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for leadership essay topics to write about? Being both an exciting research area and a practical skill, leadership is definitely worth exploring!

• 🔝 Top 10 Essay Topics

📃 Leadership Essay: How to Write

• 🏆 Best Essay Examples
• 👍 Interesting Essay Topics
• 🎓 Simple & Easy Essay Titles
• 📌 Controversial Title Ideas
• 🥇 Good Topics to Write

✍️ Leadership Essay Topics for College

❓ leadership essay questions.

In your leadership essay, you might want to take a look at the sphere of government or elaborate on the role of leadership in business organizations. Here we’ve gathered most catchy leadership title ideas together with leadership essay examples. There are also useful tips on writing your introduction, conclusion, and formulating a thesis statement.

🔝 Top 10 Leadership Essay Topics

• Leadership as a research area and a practical skill
• Theories of leadership
• Functional leadership theory
• Autocratic and democratic leadership styles: compare and contrast
• Task-oriented leadership style: the key features
• Measuring leadership: the main approaches
• Gender and leadership in Western countries
• The concept of leadership: myths and misunderstandings
• Emotional intelligence and leadership: the connection
• Leadership in non-human animals

While writing a leadership essay, you may struggle with the subject, structure, titles, and other components. Don’t worry – these tips will help you to write the best leadership paper!

Tip 1. Choose your subject area first. If your professor did not provide specific topics, you would need to select one on your own. In order to do this, you may focus on an area of leadership that sounds interesting to you.

For example, if you consider working in the hospitality sector in the future, write about leadership in hotels or restaurants. Alternatively, you can browse leadership essay topics online and see if that gives you any clarity.

Tip 2. Narrow down the topic. To ensure that your essay earns high marks, you should avoid choosing an area of leadership that is too broad.

A college level paper should offer enough details and depth to receive an excellent grade. For instance, instead of overviewing a bunch of leadership styles, focus on how certain styles impede or facilitate teamwork. This will give you enough to talk about while limiting the scope of your essay.

Tip 3. Don’t confuse leadership with management! This is a common mistake that students make while writing leadership essays. Although the two concepts overlap, leadership is more about beliefs and vision, whereas managerial work is focused on specific tools and techniques.

Thus, a leader may or may not be a manager. To get more familiar with the subject of leadership, research various leadership styles, such as transformational, autocratic, and servant leadership.

Tip 4. Pay attention to the structure. In a great essay, ideas are always well-organized and follow one another in a logical sequence. First, write an introduction where you present your topic and thesis.

Then, write the main body, where you explain the key concepts and the relationships between them by reviewing relevant research evidence.

Lastly, write a conclusion summarizing your key points. A good leadership essay conclusion should also show how the information can be applied in practice.

Tip 5. Seek to answer any questions that readers might have. For your essay to show excellent depth, you need to address the points that might be interesting to readers in connection with your subject area.

For example, if you are reviewing a particular leadership style, you might want to discuss in which settings it would be useful and what are some of its limitations.

To make this part easier, you could search for leadership essay questions online to clarify what kind of answers readers expect you to cover.

Tip 6. Explain the importance and relevance of your paper. Because leadership is focused on effective strategies that can be applied in real life, you need to provide examples of how your essay may be used to support future practice and research.

Can leaders use the information you provided to improve their relationships with other employees? Can the proposed strategies influence performance?

Think about the potential uses of your research, as well as any gaps that are yet to be studied. Highlighting areas for future research will show your tutor that you are genuinely interested in the subject while also helping you plan for future essays.

We hope that these leadership essay tips will make it easier for you to write an outstanding paper! Make sure to check our website for sample essays on leadership!

🏆 Best Leadership Essay Examples

• Nelson Mandela Leadership Style Mandela’s fight for democracy and fulfilment of the majority will was also seen in his efforts to reconcile Libya with the rest of the world.
• Transformational Leadership Essay This requires the transformational leader to have the right communication skills to be able to relay the vision they have to a point of winning the willingness of the followers such that they too are […]
• Google Democratic Leadership Style – Compared to Amazon Applying behavioural leadership style theories in Bezos and Schmidt’s case reveals that the Amazon CEO is an autocratic leader while the Google CEO is a democratic leader.
• Reed Hastings’ Leadership Style: Netflix CEO’s Strategy Since the work of a leader is crucial for the performance of the whole enterprise, it is essential to analyze the leadership style of a particular business leader through the perspective of his or her […]
• Foundation of Army Leadership Essay The Army leaders therefore, need to be swift, adaptive, and multi-skilled both in the country and across the world. This ensures obedience of the Army to the authority of the President and his authority from […]
• Leadership Case Study This is mainly achieved through setting a pace in serving as a role model and creation of a working environment that allows members of the organization or employees to feel honored as part of the […]
• Frederick Douglass Leadership Personality Traits Report (Assessment) The book was so humorous that he feared that he would be enslaved again for the weaknesses that he portrayed in the American lifestyle and how he was able to trick them with the attire […]
• Nigerian Poor Governance and Leadership In the paper under consideration, we will examine the concepts of the good governance and leadership, the problems concerning the implementation of these concepts in the Nigerian government; then we will investigate the history of […]
• Leadership in Organization Leadership is applicable in the nurturing and development of constructive behavior patterns and organizational culture. Charismatic leadership is appropriate for the development of followers.
• Mahatma Gandhi’s Leadership This report is an analysis of the behaviour and leadership style of Ghandi, the transactional and transformative aspects of his leadership and the way he used the power he had to help India gain Independence.
• Mercedes Company: Leadership and Management Essentials The idea behind theoretical investigation is to obtain enough background information on leadership styles, which might be applied to analysing the performance of Mercedes Benz in the light of the theory’s implications on the practice […]
• Esther’s Leadership Qualities Essay The book of Ester narrates the story of a young Jewish woman who rose to the thrones of power but also reveals the life of the Jews under the Persian reign.
• Teamwork and Leadership From diversity to team hierarchy, many factors influence the eventual output of the team, affecting the leader, team members’ performance, and client’s satisfaction.
• Nelson Mandela’s Leadership in the “Invictus” Film The film “Invictus” is a 2009 drama and biography that depicts the challenging initiative of Nelson Mandela to unite the country with the help of sport.
• Comparison of Leadership and Management In leadership, the leader uses his charisma and influence to elicit the help and support of the followers to achieve goals.
• Foundations of Army Leadership BLC This paper examines the foundation of Army leadership, focusing on its levels and leaders’ characteristic features.
• Barack Obama’s Charismatic Leadership In Obama’s Case, the sparkle and invisible energy as defined by Rao pushed him to the presidency and continues allowing him some loyal following albeit the fact that some are being disappointed by the slow […]
• Comparison of Gandhi’s and Hitler’s Leadership The primary direction of Gandhi’s political and social work was the fight against the nationalist movement of the British rule of India.
• Leadership: Portfolio Project I will start by conducting a comprehensive analysis of my background in order to understand the factors that might have defined my leadership qualities in one way or the other.
• Leadership and Management Practice The efficacy of a decision to either lead or manage will base on the closeness of how the insight of the knowledge, expertise and talent of persons trying to pursue the goal matches with the […]
• Google Company’s Situational Leadership The current CEO of Google, Larry Page, is a considered a great leader because of his ability to apply situational leadership skills in resolving some of the problems that threaten the success of the company.
• Leadership Self-Assessment Essay To a butcher, the organizational goals of increased productivity, the input of both the individual and groups in the organization remains invaluable. To this end, the strengths and weaknesses that are inherent in my style […]
• Management and Leadership: Nokia Corporation The approach of the company is to have an innovative and outstanding teamwork; though the company has a departmental approach, the company ensures that it has teams in all sections that are mandated and empowered […]
• Bill Gates’s Leadership and Impact on Organization This problem grew out of the practice that was common in Microsoft to challenge the ideas of one another, doubt them, and put them to the test.
• Meg Whitman – Leadership Style: What Do People Do When They Are Leading? This is due to the fact that it influences the extent to which employees are committed to attainment of the set organizational goals.
• Educational Leadership and Management Team leadership is “the ability to solve every problem affecting a given group”. I have understood why every educational leader should use the best leadership styles.
• School Leadership The multi-levelled pedagogic school leaders highly determine the mode of teaching students in schools and the effective application of the learning process.
• Starbuck Company Case: Howard Schultz Leadership Style Hence, he spends a lot of time with staff and guarantees that the company helps employees to grow both financially and intellectually.
• Bernard Arnault’s Leadership One of Arnault’s leadership styles entails identifying brands that are preferred in the market and working on enhancing the quality of these brands. Bernard Arnault is a visionary leader who has helped LVMH to attain […]
• Developing Leadership Skills Bearing in mind the fact that the leader is tasked with marshaling the organization’s resources to accomplish some organizational goal, it can be rightfully stated that part of the role of the leader is to […]
• Autocratic Leadership Versus Participative Theory It will also critically analyse the effectiveness of both participative and autocratic leadership styles in an organisation to determine the most appropriate style to be adopted for the success of an organisation.
• Leadership in General Electric The third impact of good leadership at GE is that the ability of the organization to retain its employees would be increased.
• Toyota’s Culture and Leadership Strategy Toyota’s Leadership and Culture Irrespective of numerous difficulties, the company is still one of the leaders of the industry. To understand the essence of the lean leadership, it is crucial to consider some peculiarities of […]
• Marriott International Leadership This paper aims to present the analysis of the prevalent leadership style typical of executives and directors in Marriott International; to discuss the connection between the leadership style and ethical practices; to determine possible ethical […]
• Strategic Leadership Nevertheless, it is important that for these strategic plans to be implemented properly there is need to have strategic leadership in the organization in order to provide the much needed leadership.
• Ken Lay’s Leadership and Enron Company’s Downfall An analysis of Lay’s ethical conduct outlined below is conducted through the prism of Kidder’s ethical checkpoints, the principles of moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral motivation, moral character, as well as the CEO’s power and […]
• Conrad Hilton Leadership Styles and Principles Leaders in this category want to transcend the basic needs of a human being and to have a sense of life success.
• Personal Leadership Profile Analysis At the same time, I could also use my drive for learning to develop communication, motivation, conflict resolution, and other relevant skills that could enhance the performance of my team and the work environment in […]
• General Leadership Style: Norman Schwarzkopf According to the Katz model of leadership, the leader with human skills can leverage the power of the group. When the young Schwarzkopf visited his father in different parts of the world, he had the […]
• Democratic Leadership Style Self-Analysis Democratic leadership style is a participative and consensus-based approach to decision-making in which the leader encourages input from all members of the team and makes decisions that reflect the group’s best interests.

👍 Interesting Leadership Essay Topics

• Nursing: Leadership Development Plan I utilize the nursing process and evidence-based practice to work collaboratively with the core team, including the patient, staff members, primary care provider, registered nurse care manager, and patient support technician, and expanded team, including […]
• Ethical Leadership: Martin Luther King All individuals were expected to consider his actions and embrace the idea of morality. Through the use of a positive community culture and empowerment tactics, King managed to model such desirable behaviors.
• Mark Zuckerberg’s Leadership Style Shareholders have complained about his leadership and failure to increase the stock price of Facebook, and others have claimed he is socially inept and too young and immature to be a CEO of a multi-billion […]
• 21st Century Leadership Based on the character of these issues, researchers distinguish six major areas of the new leadership, and each one of them includes a set of practices which are considered to be contributive to the organisational […]
• Development and Curriculum Leadership: Advanced Curriculum Models This book is of great assistance to educational leaders who want to explain curriculum concepts, analyze and understand the hidden curriculum, explain the contracting nature of curriculum elements and unfold strategies to develop and implement […]
• Mary Kay Ash and Her Leadership Style The success of this woman, as well as her contributions to the world of business, may be explained in terms of her biography, milestones, she had to cope with, and the decisions she made during […]
• Leadership Approach in “The Devil Wears Prada” The first point is personal characteristics that can be considered on the example of the film. Thus, whether it is the latest edition of a Harry Potter book that she manages to find or her […]
• Gibb’s Reflective Cycle in Nursing Leadership To ensure all the processes run effectively in the organization, the leader must reflect on the various encounters to improve the aspect of decision-making and management.
• Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore’s Leadership Hal Moore’s courage to fight on despite the odds that had afflicted his men was the major driving factor that led to the victory of his group over the Vietnamese.
• Participative Leadership: Strengths and Weakness The paper gives an overview of the approach, followed by the strengths and weakness of participative leadership. Organizational leadership, more so the approach of leadership is critical to the performance of an organization.
• Leadership Style: Reflection and Analysis The concept of leadership is an essential part of the modern world due to the fact that it is one of the key determinants of successful management.
• Servant Leadership Research Paper | Term Paper In the context of organizations, leading entails the leader consolidating the efforts and resources of the organization and focusing on the future by setting up a vision for the organization which it intends to achieve […]
• Bad Leadership: Causes and Effects This can result in a loss of confidence on the part of employees and may cause them to feel resentment towards their leaders.
• Leadership of Change in an Organization The change process involves developing urgency of change, empowering change groups, developing a vision, frequent and powerful communication of the vision, eliminating change obstacles, creating short-term goals, building on change and incorporating change in the […]
• King T’Challa’s Leadership in “Black Panther” However, because Black Panther needed the help of the Jabari, he had to suppress some feelings of pride and act in the interest of his people.
• Leadership of Jerry Yang, Co-Founder of Yahoo The creation of Yahoo is the story of the hobby and knowledge of two Yang people who wanted to make the Internet more convenient.
• The Leadership of Mao Zedong For example, the Great Leap Forward policy resulted in a food crisis that led to the death of many Chinese people. Mao was assertive in the development and implementation of his policies.
• The Essence of Leadership: Warren Buffet and Oprah Winfrey To understand the concept of leadership, the report evaluates the leadership qualities that the two leaders have developed. The reason behind the conflicts rests on the fact that the organisation, for instance, has no one […]
• Howard Schultz’s Leadership Style: Strengths and Weaknesses These results are in a large part due to his leadership style which can be characterised as transformational, the strengths of which are openness to new ideas and creativity, and among the weaknesses can be […]
• Ann Fudge’s Leadership Lessons The reason is in the fact that Fudge is a broad-minded leader who is interested in receiving new experiences. Fudge demonstrates a medium level of extraversion as she is a good motivator and a decisive […]
• The Action-Observation Model: Leadership Discussion In the beginning, I tried to persuade some volunteers to agree with their assignments since they were helping to spread awareness of a good cause; however, as arguments started occurring, I decided that the best […]
• Organizational Culture & Leadership: Whirlpool Corporation At the heart of the discussion of management and leadership are the concepts of goal setting and results. Common to both managers and leaders is the focus on the results they produce, which are based […]
• Sundar Pichai’s Leadership and Action Logics As a result, the issue of action logics presented in this paper is vital because it paves the way for leaders to develop practical ways of understanding not only their individual codes of conduct but […]
• Unilever Company’s Leadership and Corporate Governance The success of Unilever associated with the company’s commitment to leadership. First, the strategic leadership of Unilever is tied to the company’s long-term goals and objectives.
• A Revolutionary Model of Leadership When the father of Ricardo Semler left his company in the early 80s, he never imagined that his son would transform Semco to be a leading and one of the best-known companies across the globe.
• Leadership Concepts: Kentucky Fried Chicke This means that if the recipe was revealed to a leader who is not loyal to this organization, he/she would share it with the competitors which could cause the organization to loose many of its […]
• Individual Leadership Philosophy I have also developed new values that will continue to support my leadership objectives. I will also acquire new skills that have the potential to improve my leadership philosophy.
• Walt Disney and Henry Ford Leadership Styles Disney devoted his time to art and had a dream of becoming a leader in the animation business. The employees started to fear him and could avoid the lobby whenever Disney was passing.
• Ursula Burns Leadership Style in Xerox Company By suggesting that color printing should be made more affordable, as well as reconsidering the company’s organizational behavior and putting a very strong emphasis on the relationships between the managers and the staff, Burns has […]
• Leadership and Motivation – Carlos Ghosn The purpose of this paper is to present a discussion of theories and concepts of leadership in current multinational businesses using the leadership style of Carlos Ghosn as a benchmark for effective leadership in the […]
• Situational Leadership Style According to the two experts, the major responsibility of any situational leader is to become accustomed to their individual leadership style and satisfy the followers’ needs.
• Carly Fiorina’s Leadership at Hewlett-Packard Company In this respect, the first part of the paper will compare the traits of Carly to the characteristics described in various leadership theories.
• BMW Key Strategic Issues Analysis The strong brand name and capital potential of the company is the core elements of the company’s success and popularity across the globe.
• Delta Airlines Company’s Traditional and Digital Leadership The aviation industry is one of the most performing sectors of the economy, generating considerable revenues to the respective airline companies across the globe.
• Reflective Practice in Leadership This model has made me understand that I need to orient myself to the organisational culture and values cherished by my subordinates to enable me to have beneficial exchanges with my subordinates.
• Leadership Styles: Democratic, Autocratic and Laissez-Faire According to McNichol and Hamer, the participative approach, compared to the other styles, enhances the productivity of employees for a prolonged period of time as it encourages cooperation and increases staff morale. As a democratic […]
• Leadership in the hospitality industry His success in business has been attributed to the manner in which he attends to details such as research and collection of information, provision of clean and high quality products and services, and the logical […]
• Leadership Philosophy and the Theories of Leadership These theories are the trait theory of leadership, behavioral theory of leadership, and the contingency theory of leadership. In line with the chosen personal leadership philosophy that urges the leader to show empathy, the trait […]
• Maxine Clark’s Leadership at Build-A-Bear Workshop How might her personality influence her behaviour as the CEO of Build-A-Bear? Maxine Clark is the founder and CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop.
• Warren Buffett’s Leadership in Berkshire Hathaway The analysis is conducted within the appropriate business context after the examination of the history, structure, and organizational culture of Berkshire Hathaway.

📌 Controversial Leadership Title Ideas

• W. Buffett’s and F. Porsche’s Leadership Styles Finally, the third reason to call Ferdinand Porsche a bad leader is his ignorance of the social context. The businessman did not contribute to the development of the community or country but focused on his […]
• Leadership Style and Employee Motivation: Burj Al Arab Hotel How effective and sustainable is the current leadership approach within the Burj Al Arab in the management of the level of employee motivation? How effective is the function of the current leadership styles in improving […]
• Personality and Leadership Style Relationship According to his approach and tests, stable and introverted people are phlegmatic, stable and extroverted are sanguine, unstable and introverted are melancholic, and unstable and extroverted are choleric.
• Relationship between Leadership and Management Additionally, it is apparent that the only constant in the business world is change, and for this reason, for employees to be sure of coping with such changes, there is need for them to acquire […]
• Leadership and Motivation: FedEx Corporation and UPS Inc. Introduction Leadership is the process of influencing people to contribute willingly to the goals and objectives of the organization. To solve this problem, the managers of FedEx used 360-degree feedback system to identify the causes […]
• Transformational Leadership among Nursing Students The members choose me as the nursing student among the ten to be their leader. The leader creates a vision for the team and encourages them to make the dream a reality.
• Personal Leadership Development Plan I will continue with such exercises to find answers to existential questions and achieve my personal and religious goals. I identify my managers and supervisors as the best people to offer professional counsel and advice.
• Stephen Hawking: Visionary and Cross-Cultural Leadership By incorporating the elements of visionary and cross-cultural leadership, he manages to succeed as not only the man that makes science evolve and become understandable to those interested in it but also the leader of […]
• Leadership Legacy Issues The ability of leadership to attain results is dependent on many factors such the followers, the environment, resources, and activities that go towards the achievement of the goals that the leadership is established to attain.
• “Organizational Culture and Leadership” by Schein, Edgar H. The book covers the subject of leadership and culture in three major sections, including the definition of organizational culture and leadership, the dimensions of culture, and leadership’s role in building culture.
• The Free-Rein Leadership Style In my perception, the free-rein leadership style is the most suitable for me as it includes a high level of freedom and individual decision-making among employees and the opportunity to look at problems from different […]
• Effective Leadership: What It Means It is very imperative to bring a change in the organization and only successful leaders can bring this change in their organization and their team.
• The Book “The Power of Positive Leadership” by Jon Gordon The positive psychology paradigm connects to organizational behavior and the leadership position. The book’s goal is to provide a framework for leadership and explain some instances of effective leadership.
• Daniel Roth’s and Sam Hazen’s Personal Values in Leadership Hazen’s primary personal values in his leadership style are commitment, which was mentioned previously, and interpersonal connection: Hazen constantly aims to improve the relationships with his juniors.
• Leadership Action Plan To begin with, I will join a toastmaster that can support my communicational and leadership goals. For instance, the decision to join a toastmaster will support most of my needs.
• Ricardo Semler’s Leadership at Semco Partners The case of Ricardo Semler and Semco companies reflects typically on the transformational leadership from the traditional Brazilian company’s organisational leadership structure that involved pyramidal headship.
• Leadership Behavior: Ratan Tata and Emotional Intelligence This shows that Ratan Tata, as a leader, was not eager to compete but rather searched for options to expand the market through acquiring businesses.
• Bill Gates’ Leadership To achieve the best out of the two, Bill Gates explored a dichotomy of both to align his characteristic leadership with the company core values.
• The Impact of School Governance on School Leadership The traditional school system in most states and territories took the form of the old public administration with school governance highly centralized in the Ministry of Education and the Education Department.
• Mohandus Gandhi’s leadership He modeled what he expected his followers to act on and practiced ethical leadership, as his core motivation was to benefit his fellow countrymen and women rather than himself, thus he was ready to face […]
• Charismatic Leadership The transformational leaders focus on changing the organizations or the leaders, while the charismatic leader has a focus on commitment and devotion both to the persona values as well as those of the group members […]
• Constructive Criticism in Leadership The manager’s charisma and constructive criticism benefited all employees, enhancing productivity and professionalism and developing skills and competencies. The manager at my first workplace was open to feedback and positive criticism from top management and […]
• How Does Social Media Affect Leadership? As a result, the new types of leadership are designed, and the significance of the global network is felt due to the possibility of information exchange.
• Leadership Styles and Theories According to Yukl, a leader is the individual with the responsibility of the leadership role, while the rest of the member are followers.
• Leadership Styles, Traits in a Nursing Professionals The leadership styles that are being utilized by my group members are servant leadership, charismatic leadership and transactional leadership.
• Nelson Mandela: Speeches and Leadership Nelson Mandela is, undoubtedly, one of the strongest and the most inspiring political leaders of the 20th century, the embodiment of the human spirit’s limitless possibilities.
• Women in Top Leadership Positions According to glass ceiling proponents, women have a limit in ascending to top leadership positions and they are set up to fail at a given point in time when those invisible barriers are reached.
• Studying Leadership Behaviour: “The King’s Speech” by Tom Hooper This article will discuss the leadership style, behaviour and traits that the main character of The King’s Speech had and what are the learning outcomes from the case of the leader in the historical movie.
• Democratic Leadership Styles and Patient Outcomes Democratic leadership positively impacts patient outcomes as it influences nurses to participate in all processes of the organization and contribute to its development.
• Leadership Theories in the Automotive Industry At the same time, the changes in the industry and the economic environment of the recent years have led to the situation where the leaders of the field lost their definitive advantage and faced a […]
• Leadership in “The Hunger Game” Movie Moreover, the archery skills of Everdeen her earned power to the extent that players saw her as a big threat in the game.
• “Spiritual Leadership” by Henry and Richard Blackaby The lack of leadership strategies causes the death of the church1.”Chapter Two: The Leader’s Role: What Leaders Do” The chapter starts with the evaluation of various definitions of leadership.
• Contingency Theory of Leadership In order to improve the effectiveness of the leader, the situation should be modified or aligned to the leader’s capabilities. According to this model, the effectiveness of leadership depends on the relevance of the task […]
• “The Ethics of Leadership” by Ciulla Joanne On the one hand, the moral problem presented in the case is that an individual and leaders should be able to understand that the question of morality revolves around their ability to act in an […]
• Transformational Leadership Theory: Pros and Cons This form of leadership seeks to bring change to an organization by having to leader act as a role model who motivates and inspires the rest of the workforce.
• Elon Musk’s Leadership Style and Accomplishments His business acumen is exemplified by his massive successes that he has achieved, mainly as the CEO of Space X and Tesla Motors, as well as other businesses, including Neuralink, the Boring Company, and Open […]
• Organizational Behavior: Teamwork and Leadership The attributes of a strong and successful group encompass effective communication, facilitated morale, excellent leadership, and the ability of the members to perceive themselves as valuable players.
• Leadership Case: Arthur Burton’s Behavior Burton paid a lot of attention to hiring employees, and he tried to make sure that novice employees would-be professionals who could use their creativity to contribute to the development of the company.
• John Howard’s Leadership Style In addition, he applied a reassuring style of leadership that succeeded because most of his closest supporters were not in politics by the time he ascended to power.
• Does Gender Affect Leadership? The number of women who are reaching top positions in the management of an organization is very less, though nowadays there is some change in this fact and so many women are holding top leadership […]

🥇 Good Leadership Topics to Write

• Jim Jones Leadership Traits
• Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility
• Leadership and Management
• Management and Leadership Paper
• Strategic Leadership and Organisational Transformation of Walmart
• Healthcare Leadership and Economic Models
• Modern Nurse’s Role: Leadership
• Leadership Skills and Leadership Development Plan
• Mark Cuban’s Leadership Style in a Basketball Team
• Carlos Slim: Leadership Styles and Personality
• Leadership in Sports Analysis
• Red Bull Project’s Effective Leadership Measures
• Relationship of Problem Solving to Leadership
• Leadership at The New York Times Newspaper
• Personal Vision Statement in Organizational Leadership
• Jeff Bezos’s Leadership and the Amazon Revolution
• Leadership Input to the Community Development
• The Common Theories of Leadership
• Leadership – Ann Fudge
• Leadership Styles in Nigeria, America and China
• The Benefits of Transformational Leadership
• Definition of Strategic Leadership
• Leadership Management in the Hospitality Industry
• GlaxoSmithKline’s Leadership Management Framework
• Concept of Leadership Skills
• Organizational Behavior and Theory
• Delta Airlines: Corporate Governance and Leadership Issues
• John Terrill’s Leadership Style at DGL International
• My Leadership Achievements and Services to Our Community
• Chicago Bulls 1995-96 Championship: Team Leadership
• Mark Zuckerberg: Leadership Style on Practice
• The Leadership and Communication Style of Angela Ahrendts
• Leadership, Its Requirements, Roles and Objectives
• Leadership in “12 Angry Men”
• Machiavelli and Othello’s Leadership Skills
• Blanchard and Fiedler Leadership Models
• Astro Airlines: Burton’s Leadership Style
• A Leadership Development Plan’s Analysis
• Warren Buffet’s vs. Bernard Madoff’s Leadership Styles
• Followership and Servant Leadership in the Military
• Leadership Styles in Nursing
• Nursing Leadership and Personal Skills
• Leadership of Health Care
• Leadership Experience Critique
• Democratic vs. Autocratic Leadership Styles
• Leadership vs. Management in the Nursing Context
• B-Med Company’s Leadership Change and Management
• Leadership in Teams: Experience and Reflection
• Ho Ching’s Leadership at Temasek Holdings
• Lao-Tzu’s and Confucius’ Ideas on Leadership
• Elon Musk’s Leadership and Action Logics
• Tim Cook’s Leadership Transformation and Action Logics
• Leadership: Definition and Features
• Leadership Concepts in the “Coach Carter” Film
• Effective Leadership: Character and Personal Growth
• Transformational Leadership and Management Skills
• Colonel Novak’s Effective Leadership Behavior
• Women’s Features in Administrative Leadership
• “Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership” Book
• Sales Management and Leadership
• Educational Leadership: Theories and Practices
• Leadership Theory and Practice via an Account of BP’s Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill
• Leadership Motivation: Anita Roddick, Founder of Body Shop
• Ineffective Leadership in a Workplace
• Leadership Styles of Yahoo, Blackberry, and Google
• Leadership in the United Arab Emirates
• Charismatic vs. Inspirational Leadership
• The Charismatic Leadership of Steve Jobs at Apple
• Instructional Leadership
• Commander Abrashoff leadership Style
• Team Dysfunction and Leadership
• Leadership and Teambuilding
• Gender Differences in Leadership Styles
• Leadership in the 21st Century
• Analysis of “Understanding Leadership”
• Theories of Situational and Participative Leadership
• James Madison’s Leadership Qualities
• Survival in Today’s Business Environment Requires Strategic Leadership
• Organizational Leadership Socrates
• Attitude Reflects Leadership: a Look at Leadership in your Professional Portfolio
• The Role of Leadership Programs in Business
• Bedside Shift Reporting: Essentials of Nursing Leadership and Management
• “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” by John Maxwell
• Biblical Leadership and Ministry
• The Concept of Laissez-Faire Leadership Style
• Ethics Code in School Leadership
• Leadership Values and Authenticity
• Mountain West Health Plans Company’s Leadership Styles
• Leadership Through Effective Communication
• Leadership Issues: The Case of CEO Gary Kelly of Southwest Airlines
• The Effect of Leadership in Project Management
• Daimler-Chrysler Merger: Leadership Issue
• Impact of Gender Difference on Leadership Styles
• Transcendental Leadership and Total Quality Management Theories
• Leadership in the “Saving Private Ryan” Film
• Leadership in Lost TV Series
• New Business Realities and Leadership Theories
• The Role of Storytelling in Leadership
• Leadership Challenges in the Church
• Nursing Management and Leadership Studies
• Personal Development of Leadership and Flexibility
• Zappos Organization’s Leadership and Objectives
• Leadership Philosophies and Core Values in Healthcare
• Leadership Styles: Democratic and Collective
• Criminal Justice Leadership: Strategies and Practice
• Pixar Company’s Effective Leadership and Competitive Advantages
• Workplace Management Styles: Autocratic Leadership
• Radical Leadership at Semco by Ricardo Semler
• Leadership Role-Play Activity for Students
• How Communication Affects Leadership
• Cognitive Skills and Leadership Performance: The Nine Critical Skills
• Self-Awareness Importance in Effective Leadership
• Personal Leadership Approach
• Martin Luther King and Winston Churchill’s Leadership Styles
• The Global Leadership of Carlos Ghosn at Nissan
• J.F. Kennedy’s People-Oriented Leadership
• Political Frame for Educational Leadership Issues
• Leadership Impact on Healthcare Delivery
• Ontology and Epistemology in Leadership Research
• Effective Leadership Today
• Public Safety Leadership Styles and Tools
• Strategic and Ethical Leadership Styles Comparison
• Adidas Company’ Leadership Issues
• Bill Gates’s Leadership and Success Factors
• Emotional Intelligence and Leadership in the UAE
• Leadership in the Early Childhood Field
• Reflection on Leadership in Management
• Transformational Leadership in Hotel Industry
• Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization?
• Sheikh Zayed’s Authentic Leadership
• Steve Jobs and Tim Cook Leadership Styles Comparison
• J. Carranza’s Leadership at United Parcel Service Company
• Alvis Corporation’ Leadership Information
• The Ship Board: Management Styles and Leadership
• Ann Fudge Leadership Style Analysis
• Global Leadership Development
• Khalaf Al Habtoor’s Leadership Style
• The Role of Leadership in Business and Its Advantages
• Aspects of Leadership Styles
• Transformational, Self-Leadership, Kyosei and Customer Relationship Leadership Styles
• Leadership as One of the Important Factors in any Organization
• Strategic Thinking and Leadership
• What Makes a Great Military Leader?
• General Electric’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership
• Meliá Hotels International: The Leadership Model
• Relationship Between Personality and Leadership Style
• Leadership and Influence
• Dr. Maya Angelou and Her Leadership Abilities
• Leadership and Its Approaches: Strengths and Weaknesses
• The Behavioral Approach of Studying Leadership
• Human Resource Management – Leadership Qualities
• Leadership: Alan Keith
• Traits Theory in Leadership
• Leadership Styles: Nelson Mandela and Margaret Thatcher
• The Importance of Strategic Leadership in the Global Business Environment
• Business Ethics in Multinational Corporations
• Leadership Models and Theories: Management Process in Organization
• Leadership Traits and Characteristics
• Management and Leadership in Case of General Motors Company
• Machiavellian Leadership Style
• Personal Leadership Philosophy in Nursing
• Business Ethics in Leadership & Management Development
• Management vs. Leadership. What Leaders Really Do?
• Leadership Theories: Mother Teresa
• Biblical Leadership, “Becoming a Different Kind of Leader”
• Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: Leadership Analysis
• Paternalistic Leadership and Cross-Cultural Relations
• Level 5 Leadership, Humility, and Will
• Singapore Mass Rapid Transit Company’s Leadership Style
• Richard Branson’s Business Leadership
• Leadership: Providing Purpose, Motivation and Inspiration
• Leadership Style: Ellen Kullman
• Transformational Leadership at Virgin Group
• Leadership Style of Richard Branson
• Regional Strategies for Global Leadership
• Insomniac Games Inc.: Development of Leadership Strategy
• Organizational Motivation and Leadership in Workplace
• Servant Leadership at St. Jude Children’s Hospital
• The Role of Inclusive Leadership Strategy in Diverse Workplaces
• Transparency: The Role in Leadership
• International Leadership: Management Strategies
• Community Leadership in Personal Experience
• Pacesetting as a Leadership Concept
• The Volkswagen Group: Global Leadership and Management
• Leadership, Trustworthiness, and Ethical Stewardship
• BM and Leadership: Delegation
• The Nature of Leadership Power
• Professional Development Plan: Developing Leadership
• Personal Experience of Ineffective Leadership
• Public Leadership and Its Qualities
• Leadership at YouTube: Susan Wojcicki
• Leadership and Diversity Discussion
• Gates and Buffett: Global Leadership and Management
• Inter-Organizational Networks and Leadership
• The Leadership of Lubna Al Qasimi
• Barack Obama’s Leadership Skills
• Leadership Themes and Recreation
• James D. Sinegal’s Leadership Analysis
• Impact of Leadership Style on Employee Empowerment
• Sergey Brin: Leadership Process and Organizations in Context
• Consolidated Products Managers’ Leadership Styles
• Influence of Leadership Style on Employees Performance
• Leadership Roles and Management Functions in Nursing
• Positive Behaviour Leadership Model in Teaching
• Social Change and Servant Leadership Models
• Andy Garafallo’s Recipe in Leadership Theory and Practice
• Comprehensive Leadership Approach
• Leadership Styles: Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler
• Leadership: Johari Window and Transactional Analyses
• Team Leadership in “Apollo 13” by Ron Howard
• Emergency Department: Leadership Strategy
• Leadership Styles in the Middle Eastern Companies
• Autocratic, Democratic, Free-Rein, Coaching Leadership
• Leadership: Top Talent Retention
• Advantages and Limitations of Online Leadership
• Global Leadership Barriers and Overcoming Measures
• Classical Leadership Style and Aristotle’s Perspective
• Hovey and Beard Company: Leadership and Management
• Scholarship, Practice and Leadership
• Costco Company’s Business Diversity, Ethics, Leadership
• Mandela’s Leadership: Long Walk to Freedom
• Poor Leadership as a Cause of Employee Turnover
• Strategic Leadership: Gap Inc.
• Strategic Thinking and Strategic Leadership
• Complexity Theory Models of Leadership with Other Models of Leadership
• The Concept of Leadership
• Leadership and Organisational Change in MCFC
• How Emotional Intelligence Influences Leadership
• Reflection on Leadership and Sustainability: SKK Inc
• Success Factors and Leadership Strategies: Southwest Airlines and Emirates Airlines
• Performance Management: Key Strategies and Practical Guidelines
• Quality Management Systems
• Critical Examination of Strategic Leadership
• Leadership: Virgin Group
• Leadership and Constitution
• Leadership and Management Definition
• The leadership of Amazon
• Effective Situational Leadership
• Jamie Oliver and Leadership in the Food Industry
• Contingency Theories of Leadership
• The Role of Civic Leadership
• Lesson Plan ‘The Concept of Leadership’
• Introduction to the Four Functions of Management
• Leadership & Direction: Questions to Ask
• Leadership Skills of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s
• Is Ethical Behavior and Leadership a Challenge to Law Enforcement Officers?
• Management, Leadership and Communication
• The Status of Women in Leadership
• The Failure of Leadership in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
• Pros and Cons of the Four Major Styles of Leadership
• Strategic Change Leadership in Management
• Transformational and Transactional Leadership
• Situational Leadership Theory & Path-Goal Leadership Theory
• Leadership: Role, Benefits, and Limitations
• Personal Leadership Charter
• Leadership Qualities as a Part of a Team
• Spiritual Leadership and Citizenship Behaviors
• A Lollipop Moment in Leadership
• The Main Characteristics of Servant Leadership
• Organizational Theory: Democratic Leadership
• Leadership Under Cultural Influences
• Leadership in Healthcare Management
• Adaptive Leadership as a Style and Model
• Leadership: Self-Evaluation and Comparison
• Bill Gates’ Positive Leadership Behavior
• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Leadership Program
• Task Specialization and Directive Leadership in Beaufort County School District
• Mindful Leadership in Managing Critical Change
• Strategic Leadership at The New York Yankees Team
• Chapter 6 of Northouse’s Leadership: Theory and Practice
• Leadership, Family, and Community Collaboration Project
• The Crucial Role of Courageous Followers in Effective Leadership
• Leadership in Group Counselling
• Relation Between Leadership and Police Ethics
• Leadership in the Educational Sector
• How Nursing Professionals Can Benefit From Servant Leadership
• Leadership and Innovations: Article Review
• Applying Five Leadership Practices
• Transformational and Servant Leadership in Nursing
• Strategic Leadership in the United Arab Emirates
• Leadership: Theory and Practice
• The Plays “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey,” and “Agamemnon”: Understanding of Leadership
• Leadership Development Plan in Nursing
• Leadership: Character, Competencies, and Virtues
• Nursing Practice: Leadership and Cooperation
• St James Settlement’s Leadership and Management
• Servant Leadership in Fannie Lou Hamer
• The Art of Communication as the Language of Leadership
• Organizational Leadership and Attitude-Behavior Theory
• Leadership and Ethical Requirements
• Measurement and Leadership Effectiveness in Business
• Leadership: Definition and Values
• Principles of Management and Leadership Positions
• Application of Irrefutable Laws of Leadership in the Military
• French and Raven’s Five Forms of Power: An Overview
• Leadership Style as an Important Element of the Nursing Practice
• Leadership Styles Across Generations Working in Wal-Mart Store
• Christ’s Approach to Leadership: Transformational Leadership Theory
• Morale and Leadership, Encouragement, Dedication, and Commitment Within a Band
• Elon Musk: Leadership, Financial Success, and the Future of Tesla
• Leadership in Turbulent Times: Key Takeaways
• Brand Leadership by Levi’s and Coca-Cola in Going Green
• Leadership Role of Creating Safe Nursing Environment
• Clinical Nurse Leadership Program
• Transformational Leadership at School Sites
• Fostering Effective Leadership and Collaboration in Human Services
• Behavioral and Situational Leadership: Pros and Cons
• Leadership Skills, Goals and Vision of Nurses
• Educational Theories and Leadership Studies
• Communication Style and Leadership
• American Association of Critical-Care Nurses and Its Leadership Culture
• Effective Leadership Analysis
• Transformational Leadership: Essential Strategies
• Servant Leadership Characteristic Evaluation: Conceptualization
• Maintaining a Leadership Position in a Company
• A District Director Nurse’s Leadership Roles
• Effective Leadership: Traits and Behaviors
• Assignment: Student Integrity and Nursing Leadership
• How Contemporary Leadership Styles Are Relevant in Today’s Military
• Diversity as One of the Principles for Sustainability Leadership
• Leadership in Nursing Practice
• Exploring Power Constructs in Leadership: A Self-Reflective Study
• Servant Leadership: The Key Aspects
• Leadership and Management: Reflection
• Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Leadership Reflection
• Leadership Commitment Statement on Prevention of Workplace Violence
• Leadership Foundations in Nursing Practice
• Presidential Leadership: Diplomatic History
• IoT and G.E.’s Leadership Position
• Principles of Leadership and Future of Terrorism
• Leadership at the Reuters Holdings PLC Company
• The Foundation of Army Leadership and Its Factors
• Leadership in a Multinational Organization
• The Ryno Firm’s Demands of Responsible Leadership
• Two Models of Political Leadership
• Change Leadership and Emotional Intelligence
• The Hempel Paints Firm’s Leadership for Strategic Execution
• Qatari German Medical Devices: Leadership for Strategic Execution
• The Home Depot’s Journey Towards Innovation and Effective Change Leadership
• Leadership Communication and Management
• Culture and Leadership in Health and Social Care
• Barack Obama’s Biography and Political Leadership
• Modern Leadership: Trends and Challenges
• Leadership Leverage at Gunderson Lutheran Health Facility
• Gender and Leadership in Healthcare Administration
• Leadership Theories and Styles
• Leadership Philosophy in Nursing
• The Personal Leadership Philosophy in Nursing
• Collaborative Leadership Model in Business
• Leadership: Summary of Media Interview
• Culture and Leadership in Organizations
• The Doctor of Nursing Practice Leadership Program
• Personal Leadership Philosophies
• Leadership Types in Telemedicine
• Connective Nursing Leadership
• Aspects of Collaborative Leadership
• Aspects of Collaborative Leadership Plan
• Organizational Change: The Effect of Transformational Leadership on Employees
• My Involvement as a Leader, Leadership Coach, and Development Instructor
• Transformational Leadership and Abusive Supervision
• Personal Leadership Philosophy in the Sports Industry
• The Role of Leadership in a Digitalized World
• The Importance of Leadership Training
• The Servant Leadership Concept
• Emotionally Intelligent Leadership
• Holistic View of the Management and Leadership
• Leadership Skills for the Negotiation Process
• Measuring the Quality of Government Leadership
• Collaboration and Leadership in Healthcare
• Kouzes and Posner Model of Nursing Leadership
• Leadership Formation in the Medical Field
• The Leadership and Funding Relationship
• Transformational Leadership in a Healthcare Team
• Abortion Backlash and Leadership Issues
• Strategic Crisis Leadership: South Korea’s Response to Covid-19
• Darwin E. Smith’s Level 5 Leadership Characteristics
• Change Leadership: Telehealth Technology at Orlando Health
• Leadership Style Personality Assessment
• The Basic Aspects of Leadership
• Leadership in a Digitized World
• Authentic Leadership in Healthcare
• Aspects of Leadership in Healthcare
• Behavioral Theories of Leadership
• Personal Leadership Style’s Improvement Areas
• Organizational Experiences Based on Leadership
• Leadership Analysis in Corporate Governance
• Leadership at Qatar National Bank
• Aspects of the Sustainable Leadership Style
• Nursing Leadership in the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Martin Luther King’s Leadership Approach
• Self-Analysis on Democratic Leadership
• Leadership Ambiguity in Nursing Practice
• Importance of Leadership Skills for Employee
• Emotional Intelligence in Leadership Development
• Interpersonal Leadership Skills in Bank of America
• Developing Organizations and Leadership
• Leadership Approaches in Healthcare
• Behavioral and Trait Leadership Theories in Medical Educational Setting
• Nursing Informatics: Leadership and Administration
• Developing Leadership Skills in Nursing: A Proposal
• Women’s Leadership During a Crisis
• Situational Leadership Analysis
• Leadership for Happiness in Workplaces
• Leadership in Nursing: Organizational Servant Leadership
• Supportive Leadership During COVID-19
• The Type of Leadership Described by Daniel Goleman
• Transformational Leadership Benefits Innovation
• Transformational Leadership at the Walmart Organization
• Machiavelli’s The Prince and Cheney’s Leadership
• Exploring Diversity and Inclusion Leadership
• The Significance in Shaping Emerging Trends in Leadership
• Authentic Leadership Style in Business
• Leadership Experience Example: Leading a User Research Team
• Importance of Leadership Attributes for Healthcare
• Importance of Leadership in Healthcare and Nursing
• Servant Leadership Benefits in Nursing
• Leadership and Its Three Major Models
• Adaptive Leadership: The Main Aspects
• Boris Johnson: Influence Tactics and Leadership
• Discussion of Servant Leadership Behaviors
• Analysis of Poor Leadership Experience
• Enterprise Holdings at Leadership Styles
• The Value of Leadership Skills and Teamworking
• Leadership Implementation Regarding Medication Incidents
• William White: Leadership Style
• Servant Leadership and Decision-Making in Nursing
• Leadership Behaviors, Passion, and Devotion
• Can a Dictator Who Developed an Economy Be Considered to Have Leadership?
• Does Leadership Affect Employee Commitment Management?
• Does Despotic Leadership Harm Employee Family Life?
• What Two Characteristics Best Describe Leadership?
• Are the Differences Between Management and Leadership?
• Does Leadership Style Impact on Projects Team Member Performance?
• Can Responsible Leadership Affect Work-Life Balance?
• Does Decentralized Leadership Influence the Performance?
• What Are the Key of Leadership Skills That Can Not Learn From?
• What Are the Critical Factors in Understanding the Nature and Dimensions of Leadership?
• How Does Leadership Emerge in a Group That Has No Common History?
• What Are Charismatic Leadership?
• How Bad Does Leadership Affect the Organization?
• How Are Culture and Leadership Linked?
• Does Cartel Leadership Facilitate Collusion?
• What Is the Role of Machiavellianism in the Relationship Between Authentic Leadership and Morality?
• Does Leadership Make a Difference?
• How Are Leadership and Management Similar?
• Are Leadership Fairness, Psychological Distress, and Role Stressors Interrelated?
• How Does Ethical Leadership Influence Employees?
• How Does Leadership Work in Different Gangs?
• Can Servant Leaders Fuel the Leadership Fire?
• Are Leadership Mentoring Programs Beneficial?
• Can Transactional Leadership Keep Your Team in Shape?
• How Does Authentic Leadership Influence Employee Proactivity?
• What Are the Differences Between Management and Leadership?
• What Leadership Behaviors and Management Systems Support?
• What Are Niccolo Machiavelli’s Ideas on Effective Leadership?
• Can Leadership Theory Improve Leadership Quality?
• What Is the Relationship Between Leadership Type and Organization Performance?
• Career Development Topics
• Conflict Resolution Essay Topics
• Management Skills Research Topics
• Communication Theories Paper Topics
• Management Styles Essay Titles
• Trait Theory Research Topics
• Work Environment Research Topics
• Work-Life Balance Essay Titles
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Feb 15, 2023

Essays on Leadership for Students | 200 - 500 Word Essays

Are you writing an essay about leadership? Check out these examples!

Leadership is often defined as "the action of inspiring others to act in concert to achieve a particular goal." It signifies the harmony in actions that lead to a common objective. A genuine leader not only exudes confidence but also paves the way for their followers towards triumph. Over the years, various leadership styles have been identified and discussed by psychologists.

 Qualities such as intelligence, adaptability, extroversion, innate self-awareness, and social competence often emerge as the hallmarks of impactful leaders. There's a consensus that these traits mold an individual into an effective leader. Interestingly, some theories suggest that extraordinary situations can thrust an ordinary individual into the spotlight, bestowing upon them the mantle of leadership. It's also believed that leadership isn't a static trait but an evolving journey. It underscores the belief that with dedication and the right resources, anyone can hone their leadership abilities.

 True leadership goes beyond merely advocating for a cause. It involves taking responsibility, igniting motivation in others, and differentiating oneself from just being a 'boss'. A leader's essence lies in their ability to inspire and propel people towards grand visions, whereas a manager typically focuses on oversight and operational aspects.

What Is a Leadership Essay?

A leadership essay falls under the category of student application essays and serves to provide student admissions officers with insight into your past leadership experiences. Despite appearing to be very specific, this type of essay acknowledges that the nature and perception of leadership can vary significantly depending on the individual and the context.

 If you find yourself in need of further insights or a unique angle for your leadership essay, consider exploring an expert essay-writing tool designed to assist students in crafting compelling narratives by analyzing vast data and generating fresh ideas within minutes. In this article, we'll also delve into various leadership essay examples to offer a clearer understanding of the genre and inspire your writing journey.

4 Examples of Leadership Essays

Qualities of a good leader, introduction.

Confidence is the most important attribute first of all. One of the most important qualities in a leader is confidence in one's own abilities. A lack of self-assurance is fatal to a person's leadership potential. If you want others to follow you, you need to exude self-assurance. It's imperative for a leader to have faith in his own judgment and actions. How can people want to follow him if he doesn't even know what he's doing?

Every effective leader knows that they need to be an inspiration to their followers. A leader needs to set an example for his team. In addition, he ought to inspire them whenever feasible. A leader must also maintain optimism in trying times.

What qualities a good leader must have?

Leadership is the ability to influence and guide individuals or groups toward a common goal. A leader must possess several qualities to be effective, including:

Communication skills: A leader must be able to communicate their vision and goals clearly and effectively, both verbally and in writing. This requires excellent listening skills, empathy, and the ability to adapt to different communication styles.

Emotional intelligence: A leader must be able to understand and manage their own emotions, as well as those of their team members. This includes being able to understand and respond to the emotions of others, and handling conflicts in a constructive manner.

Visionary: A leader must have a clear and inspiring vision of the future, and be able to articulate this vision in a way that motivates others to work towards it.

Strategic thinking: A leader must be able to think critically and creatively to identify and solve problems, make decisions, and develop plans and strategies to achieve their goals.

Flexibility: A leader must be able to adapt to changing circumstances and be open to new ideas and perspectives. This requires the ability to embrace change, be innovative, and continuously learn and grow.

Integrity: A leader must have strong ethics and values, and be willing to make difficult decisions that are consistent with their beliefs. This requires honesty, transparency, and accountability.

Decisiveness: A leader must be able to make tough decisions quickly, without undue hesitation or procrastination. This requires courage and the ability to take calculated risks.

Empowerment: A leader must be able to delegate responsibilities, give team members the resources they need to succeed, and foster a sense of ownership and accountability among their team.

Conclusion 

These qualities are essential for effective leadership, and when combined with hard work, determination, and a commitment to excellence, can help leaders to achieve great things.

How one can be a Great Leader?

Leadership is the act of performing the duties of a leader. In the business world, for instance, it is essential to have someone in charge of a team to ensure everything runs well. Effective leadership is essential for any group that wants to maximize its prospects of success.

Leadership Comes from Experience

As we've shown, leadership can be innate in some cases but is more often learned through practice and exposure. Sometimes the best traits of a leader must be learned over a lengthy period of time, so that one can become a notable one, proving that leadership is not always about a person's innate qualities. Leaders should continuously be on the lookout for opportunities to grow their leadership skills.

Nobody can disagree that experience is a key component of leadership. Numerous examples exist to back up this claim, such as:

Instance 1:

Our school's head boy or girl has traditionally been an older student who has been around for a while and thus has a better grasp of the ins and outs of school politics.

Instance 2:

When there is a vacancy for a team leader, it is common practice for the employee who has consistently put in the most effort and attention to the office job to receive a higher number of votes than their coworkers. 

“The best teacher for a leader is evaluated experience.” - John C. Maxwell

How one can be a Great Leader/Skills to be a Great Leader?

Effective leadership is a skill that develops through time. Developing into a leader with all the qualities that are needed takes a lot of hard work and potential. Being a prominent leader calls for a wide variety of traits. Some of these characteristics are addressed in further detail below:

One should be a Good Communicator

To be an effective leader, one must be able to convey his thoughts clearly to his/her/its subordinates.

Should have Confidence

The individual should have faith in what he says and does.

Give Credit to other Team Members too

A leader not only needs to impose his viewpoints and opinions instead he must also hear to the suggestions of other members of the team and offer them credit if their concept is appropriate.

Good Bond with the Team

A leader's ability to command respect from his team members depends on his ability to develop and maintain positive relationships with them.

Leads with Responsibility

A leader needs to be completely committed to his position. It's important that he takes on responsibility so that he can effectively deal with the various challenges he will inevitably face.

Any group or organization needs a leader above all else. Leadership development takes time and effort. One needs to have lived through a lot to be an effective leader. It's not enough to simply have years of experience in the field; one must also have the traits that make one an effective leader. You can't be a great leader unless you possess certain traits.

What makes a Good Leader?

Trying one's hand as a leader appears easy when viewed through this lens. Is that so tough? Of course not; leading is difficult, and not everyone aspires to be a leader. The vast majority of us have settled into well-established careers where we report to superiors and make a living. Still, not everyone is content to go along with the crowd. They become leaders in whatever field they pursue. A leader is an example to followers and will prioritize the needs of those around them.

Some Unique Qualities of a Leader

Many individuals resort to their leaders to vent their frustrations, therefore it's important for them to be good listeners.

A leader ought to be completely forthright; they can't play favorites or give anyone preferential treatment. One of the most essential qualities of a strong leader is the ability to make decisions with integrity.

They need to be aware of the bigger picture and understand what makes an individual stand out or become a leader. It's their expertise in addition to other distinguishing traits. Their awareness of current events and the results of recent studies is essential. In many ways, this is helpful, and it's the leader's responsibility to stay current.

Since some might not understand them, they should utilize straightforward, easily comprehended language. Leaders need to be able to communicate effectively at all times. In reality, what sets them apart is their exceptional communication skills. Adolf Hitler was such a gifted orator that his followers believed every word he said.

No matter how you're feeling or what's going on in the world, if you listen to a leader, they may make you feel energized. Since leaders are in charge of inspiring confidence in their followers, they can't afford to be wary or unsure of themselves. People tend to blindly follow their leaders.

Whether you're a leader or a doctor, you should devote yourself completely to your chosen field. Everything we do is for the benefit of others; engineers, for example, spend much of their time designing and constructing buildings for other people. So, take pride in what you do, and if you possess the aforementioned traits, you are also a leader who doesn't have to rely on others to succeed. No matter what you do, aspiring to leadership positions will always benefit others.

What is Leadership in Management and what are the weaknesses and strengths of a Leader?

Simply said, leadership is acting as a supervisor or manager of a group. Different mental pictures pop up when we hear the word "leadership" used in conversation. One might think of a political leader, team leader, corporate leader, school leader, etc. Leaders facilitate order and efficiency in the workplace. Teamwork and success are fundamental to effective leadership. Leaders utilize their managerial abilities to establish courses and guide their teams to success.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Leadership

Able to express oneself more clearly

Growth of character.

Self-awareness.

Possession of teamwork skills.

Gain assurance in yourself.

Weaknesses:

Acting favorably toward one's teammates.

Having no faith in the leader.

Thinks they're better than everyone else, but act hypocritically.

Not living up to the promised standard.

Insufficient morals.

Leadership and Management

Management and leadership are inextricably linked to one another. Leadership and management are both vital to the efficient operation of an organization; but, they accomplish very different things in the process. Leadership is a necessary skill for anyone aspiring to be an effective manager. The terms management and leadership are synonymous with one another. In this manner, we are able to draw the conclusion that a manager who demonstrates the traits of a successful leader is, in fact, a manager who is effective.

Leadership in School

Leadership is essential in nearly every group, as we've seen above. That group includes one's educational institution. Every school needs an outstanding figure to serve as its head of school. Class monitor, assembly captain, cultural leader, etc. are all examples of leadership roles that can be taken on at school, but this raises the question of what makes a person a successful school leader.

Any student hoping to be chosen as a student body leader will need to demonstrate a wide range of competencies. He or she needs to be a consistent student who pays attention in class and does well in extracurricular activities. For the simple reason that no intelligent and hardworking kid would ever be considered for leadership. Student leaders are most often selected from among those who participate fully in all activities.

Leadership in Organization

Leadership in an organization, also known as organizational leadership, is the process of establishing long-term objectives that further the company's mission and help it reach its ultimate destination. This is a classic illustration of how Bill Gates often works with his team: they agree on a strategy, and Gates implements it. To the same extent, it is the responsibility of the leader in each given organization to determine what it is that the group is trying to accomplish.

Leadership in Politics

Leadership in politics, also known as political leadership, is the process of becoming actively involved in a political party in the role of a party leader. Knowledge of political processes, their outcomes, and the political agenda is central to the idea of political leadership.

An effective leader can be developed in anyone who has the determination and drives to do so. Both the strengths and the areas for improvement should be nurtured. Whether in the classroom, the workplace, or the political arena, leadership is always necessary. Therefore, one can exercise leadership anywhere they like inside their own organization.

What are the types of Leadership?

The ability to lead is a rare trait that not everyone possesses. The ability to do so is a gift, so count your blessings if you possess it. It's recommended that you hone it even more so that you can propel your career forward and serve as an example to people around you. However, it is crucial to grasp the various leadership styles before you go ahead and polish your skills.

Types of Leadership Styles

Democratic Leadership

In this style of management, subordinates are given a voice in decision-making. Although the subordinates' efforts are highlighted, the leader is ultimately held responsible for the group's actions. Many people find this type of leadership to be effective.

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leaders motivate and inspire others to adopt new behaviors and ways of thinking in order to improve their own performance and that of their teams and organizations. A transformational leader is someone who encourages their team to strive for greater things and works to boost morale and output.

Team Leadership

A good leader fully incorporates his team into the task at hand. Members of the team are motivated to reach their goals and advance in their careers thanks to the leadership of the group.

Strategic Leadership

It requires a chief executive who doesn't restrict himself to brainstorming sessions with his superiors. He contributes on every level of the team. He is well-liked for his ability to unite the need for fresh ideas with the necessity of grounding them in reality.

Autocratic Leadership

The leader in a command and control structure is the center of attention. The chief executive has absolute power in this setting. He decides things on his own, without polling his staff. He relays this information to his staff and stresses the importance of swift action. The buck stops with him, and he alone must answer for his actions. Not much room for negotiation exists. It's no secret that this method of leading has its detractors.

Visionary Leadership

This kind of leader appreciates the abilities and requirements of his team members. He describes his ideal outcome and the teamwork that will be necessary to attain it.

Coaching Leadership

Leaders who coach their teams do so regularly in an effort to raise output. He inspires his employees to do better and works to keep them motivated. This approach to leadership has been much praised.

Facilitative Leadership

With occasional guidance, a facilitative leader ensures that the process runs smoothly for his team. As a precaution in case his team is ineffective. If the team is highly effective, the leader will take a hands-off approach.

Cross-Cultural Leadership

The leadership of this type is necessary when interacting with people from various cultural backgrounds. Because of the wide variety of cultures represented in the workforce across the United States, many managers and executives hold cross-cultural positions.

Laissez-Faire Leadership

The members of the team are given responsibility in this style of management. They are free to choose how they spend their time at work, with minimal oversight from the boss. It's not a good way to lead, according to experts.

Transactional Leadership

An interactive approach is integral to this kind of leadership. When team members successfully implement their leader's ideas and choices, they are rewarded with immediate, material benefits.

Charismatic Leadership

In order to bring out the best in his followers, this kind of leader makes the effort to change their attitudes, values, and actions.

This article should dispel the notion that leadership qualities can't be further subdivided. It should also assist you in pinpointing your own personal brand of leadership so you can perfect it over time.

Final Words

In conclusion, leadership is a complex and multifaceted concept that involves various qualities and skills. Effective leaders possess traits such as integrity, vision, empathy, decisiveness, and the ability to inspire and motivate others. They are able to navigate challenges, make difficult decisions, and lead their team toward success. Leadership also involves continuous learning and self-improvement, as leaders must adapt to changing circumstances and remain relevant. Effective leadership can have a positive impact on both individuals and organizations, fostering growth and creating a culture of success.

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Guidelines for Completing your Leadership Application

The following are guidelines for completing your Leadership Scholarship application. These ideas will help you to think about how to structure your essay, what to include in your essay, and how to prepare for an interview if you are selected. They are not meant to be step-by-step instructions, nor are they given in any particular order of importance. If there is anything unusual about your timeline, project, or circumstances, please talk about this as well. In addition to reviewing these tips, you may wish to attend an information session before writing your essay. 

Writing your application essay

Apply when you are ready.

Most students who are successful in the leadership scholarship application process are those who are beyond the “idea” stage and have begun planning or implementing their ideas. Planning may include activities such as making contact with involved persons, scheduling and organizing meetings, recruiting volunteers or participants, writing a mission statement, or getting elected to office. The scholarship committee members need to be able to imagine you in action.

Focus your essay

Below are some questions to think about as you develop your application essay. Use these and other questions you identify about your own learning and leadership goals to help you develop an integrated statement. Essays that are merely a list of separate answers to these questions will not be competitive.

• What does leadership mean to you?
• What experiences have informed these understandings?
• How will your activity and your role in that activity deepen your thinking about leadership?
• What activity do you propose to undertake with this scholarship? (Be specific)
• What is your unique role in this project – how does your individual initiative and creativity shape your project?
• How does this project or activity provide a way for you to develop as a leader?
• What do you hope to learn through your involvement in the activity you describe?
• How does your activity foster this learning?
• How does this learning connect to your larger educational and/or life goals?
• What do you hope to know, be able to do, or become as a result of your experience with your proposed activity?
• How will you know you have achieved these goals?
• What difference will accomplishing these goals make in you and your role in a community?

Write a compelling essay

The writing of a Mary Gates Leadership essay calls for a balancing act between describing your ideas on leadership and personal development as well as the project or idea that you are using to move your leadership development forward.

Here are some components that we have found make for a compelling leadership essay:

Write your essay in your own voice:

• There is a clear and consistent voice of the writer that lets the reader connect on a personal level.
• The reader has a clear sense of what the writer feels about leadership on a personal level.
• Readers also have a sense of how the writer identifies themselves as a leader.
• These thoughts on leadership are tied to personal narratives and experiences within the essay.

Effectively illustrate a clear plan and timeline for your project:

• There is a clear description of the project or set of ideas within which the leadership experience will be framed.  Your essay gives the reader confidence that you have thought carefully about how to approach the project, have  the necessary support to carry it out, and that the project will be challenging but ultimately do-able (at some level).
• The essay is organized well with a natural flow between sections and is not cobbled together.
• For previous applicants/recipients: Acknowledge your prior application/award and cite the major goals you will set for yourself with this new application. Reviewers and interviewers will want to know what you have accomplished since your last application, as well as your plans for the new award period.

Show your enthusiasm and commitment to the work:

• The writer describes how they know they will have accomplished what they are setting out for themselves both personally and concretely.
• There is mention of how this project/process is connected to the writer’s ultimate goals.
• The reader is left with a clear understanding of the passion that the writer feels about their leadership project and is excited to meet with them to learn more!

Describe how your mentor guides/supports your role in your project:

• The essay explains clearly how the mentor was chosen and why.
• There is also a clear sense of how your partnership with your mentor will evolve through the project.

Adhere to provided formatting guidelines

Essays should be no more than four pages (double-spaced, in 12 point font or equivalent size, standard margins). One additional page may be included for references, images, and/or figures, if applicable – this page will not be included in the page limit.

Prepare for your interview

Application timeline.

The application review process may take up to 8 weeks. If you are selected as a finalist, you may be contacted to schedule an interview with members of the Mary Gates team as well as a committee member. After your interview is completed, we will contact you to let you know whether you have been awarded the Leadership Scholarship.

Interview questions

In an interview, committee members will ask you to expand upon your essay. Some interview questions that committee members have asked in the past include:

• How do you plan to grow/what do you need to learn as a leader?
• Is this project something that this community wants or needs?
• How are you planning to work with others on your project? With your mentor?
• What do you hope to learn or gain from this project?

Ask for critical feedback before submitting your application

Ask your mentor and someone who is not involved in your project to review your essay.

Your mentor will provide you with the best feedback on your essay’s representation of the work you are doing and how it fits into a larger framework. Someone else – a peer, another instructor, or adviser – will be able to tell you if your essay is clear to an outside perspective, and if you have conveyed a sense of enthusiasm and commitment for the work you describe. Be sure to leave yourself enough time to get feedback from these key people before submitting your application.

Schedule an advising appointment with us

If you would like to discuss your application/proposed leadership project with a Mary Gates team member before submitting, we highly encourage you to schedule an advising appointment with us. For first-time applicants, we recommend that you schedule a ‘First-time Applicant Advising Appointment’ or a ‘General Advising Appointment’. For returning applicants/awardees, you are able to discuss your past applications with an MGE team member by scheduling a ‘Feedback Appointment’ with us.

Attend an application workshop

During each application cycle, we host application workshops that applicants are encouraged to attend. These workshops will give applicants more in-depth advice on how to structure their application essay and what to include. Applicants are asked to bring a draft of their application to the workshop as well, as there is allotted time for peer reviews and for applicants to ask specific questions pertaining to their project/application. RSVP here for our application workshops!

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Essay on Leadership: Samples in 100, 200, 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Oct 7, 2023

The concept of leadership has been known to us since ancient times, from Ashoka: The Great to modern-day democratic leaders. Whether it’s politics or business, sports or entertainment, leadership is an essential part of human society, Leadership is the art of inspiring and guiding people towards a common goal. 

Critics might argue that being a leader is just about holding a prestigious position and living a fancy life. That might be 1 in 1000 cases, as leaders across the globe work for the welfare and development of their people and country. Below we have discussed some essays on leadership where the multifaceted roles of this position are highlighted. 

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Leadership in 100 Words
• 2 Essay on Leadership in 200 Words
• 3 Essay on Leadership in 300 Words

Also Read – Essay on Summer Vacation

Essay on Leadership in 100 Words

Leadership involves a set of qualities, values and actions, which are focused on the benefit of people and their country. A person holding the position of a leader plays a pivotal role in every facet of life, influencing the direction and success of organizations, communities, and nations. To become a leader, one must have a clear vision to understand a future state that is better than the present and communicate that vision to their team or followers.

A leader’s actions should be aligned with their words, and they must demonstrate their honesty, transparency and ethical behaviour. Trust is the foundation for any successful leadership, and it is built through consistent ethical conduct. 

Essay on Leadership in 200 Words

Leadership is a complex and multifaceted concept and is an essential part of developing a society or organisation. Leadership can involve various positions and types, from democratic to autocratic, where the leaders inspire and empower their teams, fostering an environment where individuals can thrive and achieve their fullest potential.

Effective leadership involves skilled communicators to can convey ideas, expectations, and feedback clearly and persuasively. They also listen actively to their team’s input and concerns. A great leader empowers a team of professionals by entrusting them with responsibilities and decision-making authority. With the formation of delegates, the power of leadership is divided among different authorities who are responsible for fostering growth and development among team members, making the organization more robust.

Some of the fundamentals of leadership are authenticity, integrity, ethical behaviour, a clear vision and other vital traits. Trust is the bedrock of leadership, and it is built through honesty, transparency, and consistency in actions and decisions. A leader who understands and cares about the needs and concerns of their team fosters strong relationships, promoting collaboration and cohesion.

At last, leadership is more than a title; it’s the embodiment of vision, integrity, empathy, communication and resilience. Effective leaders work to bring positive changes, inspire people around them and create a sense of purpose and direction in their terms and organizations.

Also Read – Essay on Cricket

Essay on Leadership in 300 Words

Leadership is a vital concept for the welfare of a society, community or country, depending on what the leadership is about. A leader transcends boundaries and is fundamental to human endeavours in various domains. Their job involves the ability to influence and guide a group of individuals toward achieving a common objective. Effective leadership is characterized by a combination of qualities, skills, and behaviours that inspire, motivate, and empower a team.

The first and most important aspect of a successful leader is having a clear vision. A clear vision works as a guiding light, outlining the desired future and providing a sense of purpose and direction for the team. Leaders with a compelling vision can inspire and rally their followers, creating a shared sense of purpose. 

The other cornerstone of leadership is integrity. Leaders must demonstrate honesty, transparency, and ethical behaviour. Trust, which is essential in any team or organization, is built on the foundation of integrity. When people believe that their leader acts with integrity, they are more likely to follow willingly and commit to the cause. 

Another trait that is essential for effective leadership is empathy. Leaders with empathy understand and connect with the emotions, needs, and perspectives of their team members. By showing compassion and actively listening, they create a supportive and inclusive environment that fosters trust and collaboration.

Apart from these traits, other important qualities for effective leadership include effective communication and interpersonal skills. A leader must be able to articulate their vision, goals, and expectations clearly and persuasively. 

In conclusion, leadership is a multifaceted concept that plays a pivotal role towards the positive growth and development of organizations, communities, and societies. Effective leaders inspire their teams, create a sense of purpose, and drive positive change. Leadership is not merely a position; it is a journey of personal growth and a commitment to serving the greater good.

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• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Morning Walk for Students
• Essay on Discipline
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Some of the synonyms for a leader are: Coach, Captain, Principal, Chairman, Kingpin, Boss, CEO, etc.

What makes a good leader is their ability to persuade people using their effective communication skills, having a clear vision working towards the welfare of society, and taking responsibility for their actions.

Writing an essay on leadership in 200 words must include the fundamental aspects of leadership and the qualities they must possess. Effective leaders around the world create a supportive and inclusive environment where people can thrive and contribute their best efforts. They inspire a shared sense of purpose, foster collaboration, and guide their teams toward achieving collective goals.

For more information about such informative articles, visit our essay writing page and make sure to follow Leverage Edu .

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With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, leadership college essay examples.

Hey there! I'm a junior in high school, and I'm starting to think about my college essays. I want to write about my leadership experiences but I need some inspiration. Does anyone have any examples of successful college essays that talk about leadership and can give me ideas on how to structure mine?

Hi! It's awesome that you're starting to think about your college essays early, and writing about leadership experiences can be a great topic. You can indeed find an example of a leadership essay, written in response to one of the UC system's Personal Insight Questions, on CollegeVine's blog: https://blog.collegevine.com/university-of-california-essay-examples. The post also contains analysis of what the writer did well, and any aspects that could have been made even better.

I can also give you some general examples of topics that can anchor a strong leadership essay. Remember, overall the key is to pick an experience that stands out and genuinely reflects who you are.

1. Leading a community project: You could write about a time when you took the initiative to create or lead a community project, such as organizing a neighborhood cleanup or starting a tutoring program for underprivileged kids. Focus on your motivation for starting the project, the challenges you faced along the way, and how you addressed those challenges. End by reflecting on the impact the project had on both you and the community.

2. Being a mentor or role model: Think about a time when you stepped up to mentor or support someone in need, whether a younger sibling, a teammate, or a neighborhood kid. Describe the relationship and why you decided to take on that responsibility. Explain the qualities that you demonstrated in your mentorship and how you helped the person grow or overcome challenges.

3. Overcoming adversity in a leadership role: If you've been in a situation where you faced a significant challenge as a leader (such as dealing with conflict within a club or managing a complicated project), you could share that experience. Detail the situation, the steps you took to address the problem, and the outcome. Reflect on the lessons you learned from grappling with that adversity and how the experience has shaped your approach to leadership.

4. An unconventional form of leadership: Don't limit yourself to structured roles or titles. Sometimes, leadership can be demonstrated in unexpected ways, such as by guiding your friends out of the woods after getting lost on a hike. Describe an example where you took charge or influenced others, even if you didn't have an official title, and how that experience has shaped your understanding of leadership.

Remember to keep the essay focused on a specific experience rather than covering multiple instances of leadership. Add personal reflections and insights to make your essay genuinely unique. It's essential to showcase your personality, beliefs, and growth as a leader.

Finally, if you want to be sure your leadership skills are being presented clearly, consider taking advantage of CollegeVine's Free Peer Essay Review Tool, or submitting your essay for a paid review by an expert college admissions advisor on CollegeVine's marketplace. Sometimes, a more objective look at your essay from someone who doesn't already know you can give you the best sense of how well you're communicating your points.

Good luck with your essay writing!

About CollegeVine’s Expert FAQ

CollegeVine’s Q&A seeks to offer informed perspectives on commonly asked admissions questions. Every answer is refined and validated by our team of admissions experts to ensure it resonates with trusted knowledge in the field.

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How to Manage: Selling Your Ideas to Leadership

Don’t let the opportunity you’ve identified come to nothing.

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Think back to the last time you pitched an idea to upper management on how to change the way your company does business. Perhaps you proposed an improvement to an existing process, a new technology that would help things run smoother, or a different market you all could break into. How’d that go over?

As a mid-level manager, your involvement in day-to-day operations positions you to propose change that’s innovative and achievable. Amy B and her two guests, Sue Ashford and Ellen Bailey, give suggestions for framing those ideas so that executives buy into them. They’ll talk about the research findings they keep in mind, questions they ask themselves and others when vetting something, and what they learned from the times they missed the mark.

Guest experts:

Sue Ashford is a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.  

Ellen Bailey is the vice president of business and culture transformation at Harvard Business Publishing.

• “ Middle Managers Should Drive Your Business Transformation ,” by Michael Mankins and Patrick Litre
• “ Do You Understand the Problem You’re Trying to Solve ?” from HBR on Leadership
• “ Get the Boss to Buy In ,” by Susan (Sue) Ashford and James R. Detert
• HBR Guide to Building Your Business Case , by Ray Sheen and Amy Gallo
• “ How to Push for Policy Changes at Your Company ,” from Women at Work
• “ The Essentials: Persuading People ,” from Women at Work

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AMY BERNSTEIN: You’re listening to Women at Work, from Harvard Business Review. I’m Amy Bernstein.

“ Middle Managers Should Drive Your Business Transformation .” That’s the title of an HBR article published in April. The authors, Michael Mankins and Patrick Litre, both partners at Bain, implore executives to harness the ingenuity and creativity of leaders under them because that’s often where breakthroughs come from.

Directors and department heads have uniquely valuable perspective. They’re deep enough in the day-to-day operations to appreciate the factors and assumptions that contribute to any given problem. They’re also close enough to the work to spot certain emerging opportunities. All this means that they’re inclined to propose solutions and ideas that are thorough yet doable. Common sense, right? But the reason Mankins and Litre implore executives to welcome bottom-up change is that senior leaders tend not to.

I mean, think back to the last time you had an idea for changing how your company does business or for bringing in new business: different tech, a new market, an improvement to a process. How’d that go over? Did you feel you even had their full attention?

Michigan Ross professor Sue Ashford says the overarching reason executives pass on an idea from a mid-level manager is that they don’t immediately perceive its relevance to organizational performance. She teaches MBA and exec ed students how to sell their ideas up the chain of command, and she’s here to share wisdom from her couple of decades of research into that skill.

Ellen Bailey’s also here with us because at Harvard Business Publishing, she’s the VP of Business and Culture Transformation—and boy does she live up to that title. She’ll give examples of how she’s applied Sue’s thinking in her job: tailoring her pitch, framing the issue, involving others, and more. Ellen’s developed her own road-tested persuasion tactics, and she’ll tell us all about them. I hope that hearing about the tactics that have worked well for Ellen, and for Sue, and for me will help you choose your next battle and win it.

Sue, Ellen, thank you so much for joining me today.

SUE ASHFORD: Thanks. It’s wonderful to be here and to have this talk.

ELLEN BAILEY: Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, Ellen, you’ve had to sell really big ideas into leadership at this organization. Some of them were about growth, some were about culture. Tell us about that and what you saw as the key moments, and maybe what you’ve learned along the way.

ELLEN BAILEY: Absolutely. Amy, one of the things I learned from you years ago when I brought questions up or when I brought ideas up is you always said, “What’s the problem that you’re trying to solve?” And so that’s where I always start. And so, the formula that I use is, number one, what is the problem that I’m trying to solve? Number two, what are the benefits mutually beneficial to the organization and the people? Because it’s never just about the business, and it’s never just about the people. They’re completely intertwined, right? And then, I would say, thirdly, does it link to our strategy or goals or drive that, right? So, when we think about the benefits, is it also aligned with what we’re, at the core, trying to do? Those are just literally the three questions that I ask before I even try to put a story or a narrative together.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. I love hearing that, Ellen, because I remembered those conversations, and it took me so long to learn those lessons. It used to be for me that I’d have an idea, and I’d think it was just obviously a good idea, right?

ELLEN BAILEY: Right.

SUE ASHFORD: Mm-hmm.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, that is not the proper way to get buy-in, right? You really have to explain what makes this a good idea, and it’s really helpful to think it through for yourself.

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah. The one thing I’d add to that is thinking through for whom might this not be a good idea, and what would be the reason? I know that we get so invested in our idea and we know why it’s good, but we forget that someone from another point of view just is going to look at it differently. For example, an idea about, We need to reorganize this way . One case study is a woman putting forth an idea about more time off and more flexibility for everyone. Because the people were working themselves to death in this organization, and the person who had the contact with the client was like, “Oh, so we’re going to tell them we work less for you.” And so, if you think about What are they going to say? it makes you think, Oh no, we need to think about how we frame it, how we phrase it, how we talk about it . So, it’s more just… once you think about their point of view, you have new ideas about how to sell your issue.

ELLEN BAILEY: I can build on that and give a very specific example. So, one of the things that we wanted to do a couple of years ago was we were wanting to ensure that we have equity for all in our organization, right? We just need to have some checks and balances in place, some evaluations to make sure we’re doing the right things right. And the best certification out there that I could find, and I still believe is great, is this Black Equity at Workplace Certification. It was like, okay, so we are not as racial and ethnically diverse as we would like; we are predominantly a white organization. So, how do we sell this idea and think about it from another person’s perspective, and could there be a downside? Through further research though—and having your data points is really important because there are studies that prove that if your organization is equitable for a black woman, then it is equitable for all. So, then everybody wins. And so, then I was able to use that data point to try to address that perspective of folks that would’ve perceived that something may be going away or not as beneficial to them. So, it reiterates Sue’s point.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, I think I actually remember that, and I remember that as a very compelling argument that you made. My version of that is I wanted to change a process that would’ve affected a particular group of people who could have understood it as making their jobs harder. And having done that job myself in the past, I, really, in my heart, believed it was just making the job different. And so, what I had to do to sell this idea was to address that head on with the people affected to hear what they were saying, to see if my perception was right or wrong, and I had to adjust. And to deal with it, not steamroll them, but also to feed back the argument for the greater good. I mean, it’s hard and it can be frustrating, and it takes way more time than you may have budgeted.

SUE ASHFORD: That’s so true. Yeah. Our oldest model of change is a very simple one by Kurt Lewin, unfreezing the organization, changing, and refreezing. And he talks about a force field model where at all times there’s forces pushing for change and resisting change. And right now, they’re equal in their pressure. And so, it keeps the organization in a stasis state, and you could either increase the pushing forces or decrease the restraining forces. And basically, it’s a better strategy to try to decrease the restraining forces because when you increase the pushing forces, people push back, they don’t like it. But if you try to understand the point of view, make it work for them, reducing their blocking and their desire to block, you get the movement.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Right, we hate change.

SUE ASHFORD: We do.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, let’s just go to this point where you’re in this moment of birthing an idea. How do you even know if it’s a good idea? How do you vet your own idea before you set out to sell it? Ellen, tell us about how you do it.

ELLEN BAILEY: Yeah. Before I even think about selling it, I actually leverage my network for this. Because I’m like, Am I thinking about this the right way? Is this even worth putting forth? Is anybody else thinking about it this way? How radical is this really? And so that’s the first place I start is just evaluating it that way.

SUE ASHFORD: Exactly. Allies, colleagues, friends, husbands, wives, partners.

ELLEN BAILEY: All of the above, Sue. Yep.

SUE ASHFORD: All of the above. Yeah.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Okay. But then, how do you move from the inner circle of trust to the greater organization? How do you do that, Sue?

SUE ASHFORD: Well, I propose, and when I teach executives, I make them do this, that you map who’s out there. So, you map three different groups. Who is an obvious ally for this issue, who is an obvious blocker for this issue, and who are the fence sitters? And then, my favorite sentence about change is, your job is to mobilize your allies to influence your fence sitters to pressure the blockers. You don’t go directly at the blockers; you’re really just trying to mobilize people around that faction in order to get it going.

So, part of the preparation is just mapping who’s out there. And then, the other thing I have them do is map who makes the decision, and then, who do they listen to? So, who do they trust? Who in their eyes has expertise? And those would be other people you might want to try to get on board.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, Ellen, can you take us through a real situation? All right, you vetted with the people you trust who you know are going to be straightforward with you. You have some confidence that this idea really could be valuable. What’s your next move?

ELLEN BAILEY: My next move is to start weighing the pros and cons, right? So, taking a look at the impact that it could have on the business and what would the trade-offs be? And can we actually—I know this sounds really odd and oversimplified—but can we do it, is it doable? Are the people that I’m going to talk to, will they feel like it’s doable? Because you can have the best ideas in the world, but if it appears even or the perception is it’s too hard, or it’s too complicated, then it’s not doable. But the first place I start is what’s the business that it could drive or the upside and identifying the trade-offs, then literally positioning it in a way that I think it might be doable, and then, I go from there.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So how do you prep for the pitch? What kind of information do you get? You say, is it doable? So, what kind of information are you looking for?

ELLEN BAILEY: Yeah, so good question. So, I look at the organizational landscape from a business perspective as far as what have we done to date and what has worked or hasn’t worked. And then, I also take a look at the culture and the people. And so, do we have the right people? Do we have the culture in place? What are the shifts that we would need to make to do that?

And then, I literally, I guess I’m, I don’t know. I’m very informal and so I don’t try to make it fancy. I don’t try to make it bigger than a bread box, but I literally lay out then step by step by step, starting with here’s the problem that we are trying to solve and making sure that we gain agreement on that. Because the biggest mistake that I made and still make periodically for sure, is making the assumption that we agree on the problem and the baseline. We are in agreement that this is an issue, and I just make an assumption because I see it that I’m right, that everybody else does too. And so, it’s like, Oh, wait, no, there are multiple perspectives out there . So, starting with that baseline to gain agreement on this is the problem to solve, and that it’s actually worth solving.

And then, from there, walking through literally step-by-step by step on how we can actually get there. And so, it is very targeted and succinct, and I challenge myself to how few slides or how few pages can I have?

And then, I’d say the last piece is when I’m selling in an idea is the first meeting, my goal is just to get buy-in to its worth exploring, not a yes, but are people willing to process it, think about it, and explore it. So, I think not trying to bite it off more than I can chew, which is also a lesson learned. I want to go from zero to a hundred in one meeting and get a yes and go, and I’m like, Oh yeah, no, that’s not how this works .

SUE ASHFORD: There’s two things you raise that are really consistent with how we think about this in the academic world: we think of organizations as having an agenda, and it’s limited. They only have limited time and attention. And because there’s a limited agenda, it’s a marketplace: you have this issue, but somebody else has some other issue that they think is important; and you guys are not competing, but there’s a scarce time and attention. Only some issues are going to get there. And then, the other thing that was… So, in your story was the idea of small wins. If you can get people to think small, they’re more likely to think, Okay, I could do that . And then, you start to see outcomes which makes you feel like you could do more, and it creates some momentum. It attracts allies like, Oh, look what they’re doing over there. I want to be part of that .

AMY BERNSTEIN: I also wonder about that first… You’re ready to take the idea, you’re ready to shop it out there, take it out of the circle of trust. How do you think about those first pitch meetings, if you will? Ellen, how have you thought about them?

ELLEN BAILEY: Yeah, so one, to be quite frank, they make me nervous, so I don’t even pretend that they don’t. So, I play it over in my head and scenario plan. One of the things I do too is I try to understand—if it’s a large group, it’s a little bit tougher; if you’re talking to two, three, four people, it’s a little bit easier—but really, honestly, what are their personalities and what are their work styles? Do they want a narrative? Do they want bullet points? Do they need a visual? Do I need to have all three of those things in there to help convey my point? And so that’s one of the things I absolutely do is try to think through what are the work styles, learning styles, and honestly just flat out personalities of the folks that I’m addressing.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Totally. I also try to socialize ideas, talk to the stakeholders one-on-one to hear their concerns, to hear how they play the idea back before taking it wide. So, before the big meeting with the executive committee, whatever it might be. I actually think it’s important for almost everyone at that table to have heard this before and to have been able to give some feedback so that those people can also feel some authorship. Also, so you can improve the idea to bulletproof it. What do you think, Sue?

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah, exactly. You’re meeting with the team that’s going to decide is just the most visible step in the process. It’s not the whole process. The way I phrase it is issue selling is a campaign. You have a campaign plan for your idea.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Absolutely.

SUE ASHFORD: And I think when you get out of the circle of trust, you are selling the issue: You’re selling the issue in the elevator, and you better have a 20-second portrayal; you’re selling the issue when you hold a meeting with one-on-one meeting. To gain your allies, you’re selling the issue. You’re not just selling the issue in that one meeting. You’re selling the issue all along the way, and it gives you all the benefits that you mentioned, Amy.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, and the other thing I always keep in mind is this isn’t about me. So, feedback, particularly negative feedback, is not personal, and you take that as the gift it is.

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah. It’s really about the collective. And Ellen, you said, I always start with what’s the strategy. How does this fit? Because all true leadership isn’t about me, it’s about what we’re trying to create here. And issue selling is just a great example of that.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. So, Sue, you think about this a lot. What are the common mistakes that you’ve seen people make when they are pitching an idea to the business?

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah. Well, one is going it alone, thinking that you alone are going to make this big deal happen.

The second is not regulating your own emotions. Because if you think about it, you often need very hot emotions to want to sell an issue. It’s something that you’re invested in that matters to you. So, you’ve got, maybe you’re angry, and then, maybe it doesn’t work, so you get frustrated. So, managing those emotions because I think when you actually raise it with people, you need to be somewhat cool emotionally to raise it, to be open.

Then the other is around this having a solution, which everyone will tell you, “You have to do a solution.” And research has shown, yes, we like people who have a solution, but solutions can also be very narrow, and there might be a much better solution out there if it was discussable and we could brainstorm about it and come to a better solution.

The other thing is people, they grab hold of the organization like the blind man and the elephant, they grab hold of one part—the tail, or the leg, or the ear—and they’re passionate about their issue, but they’re not seeing the elephant. And other people often if you’re selling up, they have a broader perspective, and so they’re not liking your issue. It isn’t personal certainly, but also, they have information that you don’t, and you need to better understand how the issue fits in.

AMY BERNSTEIN: That is such an important piece of advice because if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a pitch and you’re grappling with it, you are buying in and you’re kind of playing it back, and maybe you change in word here or there, you add in a salient detail, and the author of this pitch just isn’t having it— it’s 100% percent my way, the way I’ve articulated it, or it ain’t worth doing —I got to say, that’s kind of a turnoff.

So, I want both of you to sit on the other side of the fence, and you’re being pitched ideas. What framing, what tactics really work for you? I’ll start with you, Ellen.

ELLEN BAILEY: Mm-hmm. I ask the same questions of the folks that are pitching to me that I ask of myself and my prep, which is leading with the benefit. So, what is the benefit to the organization and to the people? Do we actually think this is doable, and how does it impact or drive the strategy, et cetera, and what are the potential? So, I usually start with those very three specific questions, and now when folks come to me, if they come to me more than once, they come prepared with those three things.

AMY BERNSTEIN: All right, Sue, who has been a senior associate dean, you have been on the other side of the fence a lot.

SUE ASHFORD: For sure.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, what works for you?

SUE ASHFORD: People being open to understanding the bigger picture. They come to me with their issue, and if I can share, “This is hard for me because of X, Y, and Z,” they will work with me on that rather than being resentful or et cetera, so that matters.

Flexibility regarding timing. I was often overwhelmed by the amount of things coming at me, and if I could say to someone, “Look, I’d love to talk about this issue. Could we do it next week, in a month?” that kind of thing. There are openness and flexibility about that really helped a lot.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. And when I’ve been sold ideas, I find that when someone kind of opens the aperture and takes in strategic goals, solves a problem, articulates the argument crisply, that works for me. When I have to do a lot of work to try to figure out what this is and is it important, I don’t know, that’s a lot. I’ve got to be at a meeting in two minutes.

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah, I think being able to understand how it feels to receive helps you a lot with how you think about selling.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, I see you nodding your head, Ellen.

ELLEN BAILEY: Mm-hmm. Definitely. I mean, how do we get unstuck, and how do we help people who are pitching us ideas or others thinking about things differently? And so I embedded this question into my team meetings recently, which is, “What are the other three ways that we could think about this or solve for this?”

SUE ASHFORD: So good.

ELLEN BAILEY: Just this morning, as a matter of fact, I had a conversation with a couple of colleagues around an allyship reverse mentoring program. And so while we all know all of the benefits to this, and they’re all fabulous, the first version that I received was multiple months, a yearlong hours per month dedicated to this. And so, the reality, back to one of the points I made earlier, is that, Is it really doable when we think about our employees and what’s on their plate? While we want to do it justice, that’s probably too much of a heavy lift.

So, then the second version was one meeting, and I’m like, “Oh wait, that’s not enough.” And so, the discussion that we had then was around, what are two or three other ways that we can solve for this that still maintains the objective and the benefits that we’ve outlined, but what are some ways that we can do it?

And where we landed was three meetings that can take place over the course of three to four months to address these three topics. And then, there were options and flexibility built in, but it was me posing the question back to these two brilliant folks on what are two or three other ways. And then, the brainstorming just went, and we ran 15 minutes over our meeting time because of all of the great ideas that they came up with.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, we received quite a bit of email from listeners who are struggling to get their ideas off the ground, and I’d love to get both of you to weigh in on a couple of them.

So, let me start by reading a message we got from a listener named Pam. Pam’s a program manager at a company that issues credentialing exams for specific industry expertise. And she says the company can’t seem to manage projects effectively. There are no project managers, and the C-suite doesn’t understand the amount and type of resources it takes to execute on certain projects. Projects are continuously slowed down and derailed by fire drills from the executive team who don’t think there’s a problem with how things operate. As a result, the company isn’t issuing as many exams as they could. Teams are working long hours, turnover is high, and they’re perpetually understaffed.

Pam has talked about this to her boss and the C-suite, and she presented to them a deck with data around how much more revenue could be generated if they just had the proper resource allocation.

But before she really got into the conversation, the whole thing was derailed by a C-suite member’s own questions and agenda and went down a rabbit hole of everything else except what she had planned to talk about.

Pam is looking for your advice on how she can steer these conversations back on track and how to get the executive team to see how the lack of resources and project management is truly a problem.

So, one of the things that seems she’s failing to do is to get the executive committee to really understand the urgency around this problem. What advice would you give her to get them to feel this urgency? Ellen, what do you think?

ELLEN BAILEY: That’s a good question and a tough one because I too have been in those situations, right? And one of the things that I do is I just pause, and I start laying out, “Okay, our original intent was to discuss issue A, but we are now going down issue B. Is this the time and place that we want to discuss B? Or should we circle back and go back to A?”

AMY BERNSTEIN: All right, is this the quiet part, or are you saying it out loud in the meeting?

ELLEN BAILEY: I’m saying it out loud in the meeting.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Okay.

ELLEN BAILEY: So, one of the things that I will say is I am authentic, and I think you can have executive presence and be authentic. And so, I usually, hopefully not to my detriment, talk that through out loud so that we are in agreement, or we can come to a mutual agreement on what is most urgent to finish in that meeting.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, Sue, what do you think of Ellen’s approach to figuring out the timing here?

SUE ASHFORD: Well, the timing, I think, is good. But saying all that out loud, I would have a little worry about it because that other person is right there in the room, and it’s a little indicting of—I think it was her—and I think if that person is probably resistant to this idea possibly, which is why they took the conversation off into a different track. And I wonder if I would do it across meetings.

If you identify someone as a resistor, that label is dangerous for your openness, right? Because we don’t like resistance, we don’t like people who resist our ideas. And resistance gives you a lot of information. If that person was derailing, why are they derailing? What’s in it for them? How does this change potentially impact them? So, I might try to suss that out with my network, talking to other allies that could say, “What do you think that was about? And why do you think they were doing that?”

ELLEN BAILEY: And I wasn’t actually thinking that the person was a resistor. Yeah. If it’s a resistor, I certainly wouldn’t call them out in front of everybody.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I mean, I have seen it happen, and it has happened to me where I didn’t think it was resistance. I thought it was someone sort of musing out loud and taking the entire room with her.

ELLEN BAILEY: For sure.

SUE ASHFORD: And it might be a competing issue seller, right? And if that’s all it is, then I love Ellen’s, “Let’s just verbalize what’s happening here.”

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.

ELLEN BAILEY: Yeah.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, let’s hear another question. This one’s from a woman we’ll call Allison. She’s a data services manager at a water utility company who pitched a strategy to her department’s leadership, who told her that they loved it, and yet they haven’t brought her ideas to top leaders.

The organizational problem that she’s trying to solve is that the data engineers and analytics people are slow to make decisions and are bad at collaborating. She’s advocating for the two teams to merge. She’s also advocating for someone to lead that newly merged team because currently no one’s overseeing that work, even though the company says it’s very important. Here’s what she’s done so far. She’s explained to the leadership team how the new data team and structure she proposed would allow the company to grow. She’s created budget forecast for her proposal, and she’s jumped through hoop after hoop to justify why her strategy is needed.

Allison thinks that the leadership team’s inability to make decisions, their lack of overarching company strategy, and the fact that they’re all really busy doing their own thing is getting in the way. So, she’s wondering if the leadership team likes the plan and the business wants them to address these issues, why has nothing moved forward? How can she manage the feeling that she’s being annoying? What’s your take, Sue?

SUE ASHFORD: I would wonder whether she really has gotten buy-in, she’s gotten verbal statements about buy-in, but I don’t know that it’s there yet. People resist new ideas, actively, they criticize, they challenge, they don’t give you resources, or they also can do it passively. They’re just let time go by. They’re just somewhat unresponsive. There’s delay.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Right. And sometimes people nod their heads to get you to move on.

ELLEN BAILEY: Yeah, that’s very different than buy-in, right?

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah.

ELLEN BAILEY: Maybe, Sue, as what you said earlier, if she did get buy-in, then what is the holdup, and is there something else happening behind the scenes or something larger that she’s potentially unaware of? But yeah, seeking to understand, I would start following up with folks individually and confirming if she does have buy-in number one, and then, number two, then really seeking to understand what the holdup is then.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, you mentioned one idea, Ellen, about what might be the holdup, what’s going on behind the scenes. What are some other things that Allison ought to be thinking about?

SUE ASHFORD: I think she should think about who stands to lose. Changing structures in an organization’s big, right? So, who stands… How does the analytics head think about this plan of suddenly being merged with data and having a data person on the executive group? All structures come with issues. If you divide things up this way, there’s this set of issues. If you divide them up some other way, there’s a different set, but they all have issues that need to be overcome. So, this one does as well, even though it’s got some big pluses. And so, thinking through who stands to lose might be important.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I also think that sometimes an idea is good, and people buy into the idea as an idea, but there’s so many more urgent things on the agenda. There’s so many bigger problems to solve that it might be worth Allison’s trying, to Ellen’s point, to find out what else is the executive committee thinking about, right?

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah. It might be an example of what we were talking about where she has a thin slice of the organization that she understands-

AMY BERNSTEIN: Exactly.

SUE ASHFORD: … and may not understand the whole.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. So, let’s go to the more personal part of Allison’s question. How do we deal with that? Oh, that voice in our heads that’s telling us you’re just being annoying, piped down. Have you ever heard that little voice in your head?

ELLEN BAILEY: All the time.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And how do you tell her to shut up?

ELLEN BAILEY: I really do weigh the pros and cons, and is this the battle that is worth fighting? And I determine that literally by, does it help the people, and does it help the business in a significant way? And then, I just keep going.

SUE ASHFORD: At some point, if the issue is important enough, you have to be willing to risk being annoying. And I get mad at some senior women colleagues have tenure, have full, are chaired, and they’re like, “Oh, I’m scared to bring up issues about the treatment of women.” I’m like, “If you don’t do it, who will?” So yes, you might suffer a little bit, but if you’re doing it for the right reason that we talked about earlier for the mission, clearly not about me, about the collective, then you might have to risk being annoying.

ELLEN BAILEY: Yeah, I agree a hundred percent, Sue. I think, How critical is this to address? And there are things that I’m just passionate about, that I love, that I really want to address that are low-hanging fruit and good opportunities, but it’s just not a priority. And so that’s where the timing comes into play as well. But if it’s critical enough, then yeah, you have to continue to be annoying, so to speak, and push it forward. But there is that balance because you don’t want to be the one that seems to always be raising the issues either.

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah, that’s a pick-your-battles kind of thing.

ELLEN BAILEY: That’s exactly it.

SUE ASHFORD: Oh, yeah.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, thank you both so much. This has been, I don’t know, I’ve learned an awful lot in this conversation. I’m ready to go out and sell a big idea to ExCom.

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah, I loved it too. It was really fun for me to talk to people that are actually doing it.

ELLEN BAILEY: Oh my gosh, thank you. It was an absolute pleasure and an honor to be here with both of you today.

AMY BERNSTEIN: From here, I strongly recommend reading Sue’s 2015 article, “ Get the Boss to Buy In, ” which she co-wrote with Jim Detert. They specify seven tactics, like adhering to norms, that’ll increase your chances of actually having influence.

For further advice on pushing for change at your organization, check out the HBR Guide to Building Your Business Case . The book goes over how to align an idea with strategic goals, test it, calculate its return on investment, and present it to stakeholders.

For more podcast episodes like this one, scroll through Women at Work’s feed to 2022 to find “ How to Push for Policy Changes at Your Company ” and “ The Essentials: Persuading People .”

Our editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoch, Tina Tobey Mack, Rob Eckhardt, Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates, who’s producing this season. Robin Moore composed our theme music.

Next week, for the final episode of this season of How to Manage, is for those of you who are ready to rise up and out of mid-level management. I’ll start by speaking with executive coach Cynthia Pong, who’s helped many women make this move. Then we’ll hear from two COOs, one in a tech firm and one at a nonprofit. They’ll tell us all about how they got where they are today, including the risks they took and the relationships they built.

I’m Amy Bernstein. Get in touch with me and the rest of the show team by emailing [email protected] .

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