3 Leadership Skills for College Success by Joshua

3 Leadership Skills for College Success by Joshua - March 2015 Scholarship Essay

Leadership skills are essential to college success. Leadership skills involve the ability to collaborate. Strong leadership does not lead by force of will, but works along side others to accomplish group goals. The ability to collaborate requires three skill sets: persuasiveness, listening and empathy. To be persuasive as a leader a student must be able to articulate logical and impactful ideas. This way people will want to hear their ideas. These ideas must challenge the status quo and forcefully put forward an alternative. The alternative must be one that the group is willing to work for because it achieves a goal that the group believes is important and necessary. A persuasive leader who articulates impactful meaningful goals is a leader who others will happily follow.

A strong leader is one who is able to listen effectively. Patience is key. A patient listener will be willing to hear others ideas or criticisms with an open mind. Their ideas may be based on experience which the leader does not have. The strong leader must set aside their own ego and be willing to accept other ideas, even if the other ideas are counterpoints. What matters most is not who the idea comes from, but that the leader focuses students on the best ideas. A student leader who is effective listener can successfully target the best ideas that will accomplish the group’s goal.

An effective leader is one who leads through empathy. In life, we will meet different people from all walks of life. Learning to accept different people and emphasize with them is key. Empathy allows a leader to put himself in the shoes of another, thereby benefitting from the others‘ experiences. We are all the product of our experiences and none of us have exactly the same experiences as someone else. By utilizing empathy, the strong leader incorporates the totality of the groups’ experience into more effective means of accomplishing laudable goals.

The college experience is a collaboration. There will be multiple times in our college experience were we will have to collaborate with others on projects and so on. By honing our leadership skills as students through improving our persuasiveness, listening and empathy skills we can ensure that our college experience is more than a successful collaboration, but that our college experience is a success!