A Strategic Plan for Personal Development Research Paper

A Strategic Plan for Personal Development - Research Paper ExampleThough the general notion is to suppose that leadership and violence are synonymous, to me what Martin Luther King Jr. said makes more sense, I am not raise in power for powers sake, but Im interested in power that is moral, that is right, and that is good (as cited in Ng, 2012, p.88). I look up to Gandhi as a set in this respect though I stop in no way put a claim to achieve the level of his leadership legacy. It is important for my quest to find a leadership model that combines business or politics with personal integrity, that I learn what kind of a leader Gandhi was. As put by Nair (2010), Gandhi wore no resplendent uniform, commanded no armies, and held no government position, yet he had a whole nation behind him, ready to respond to his every uttered word (p.2). All this was achieved by non-violent means, which is nothing less than a miracle. Renowned leadership expert, Karl Moore has observed two key leade rship qualities in Gandhi and added that they are also what many leaders of right away lack- leadership by example and persistence (2011). It is the high exemplar of leadership practiced by Gandhi that I would like to set as my notion of absolute leadership, and aspire to at least work towards it with the self-reassurance that Gandhi was also an ordinary human being like I am. I believe, towards building and maintaining a peaceful world, which is daytime by day becoming a distant mirage, I owe this quest to myself, my future generations, and to my society. I envisage finding a high standard of leadership using the model of Gandhi as my idealized and ultimate paradigm. As a path for traveling in this direction, it is necessary that I seek the oppose of already evolved and well-defined paradigms for leadership. The leadership qualities that I look forward to cultivate include an ability to lead from the forefront yet walk with the group, exercise power where necessary yet make th at power emerge from a common will, a vision of a world that is a more equal and respectable society, and the willingness to let others grow and become leaders themselves. Given the present situation where idealism looks good on paper but is mocked when it becomes real, I understand that it is a quite challenging task ahead of me. To make creative use of the scholarship on leadership that has been built by great academicians and visionaries, will be the best possible option for me to begin with. Hence I searched for theories, paradigms and models put forth by scholars in the field in an attempt to locate a paradigm that genuinely moves me and synchronizes with my vision of leadership. The paradigms that I found to be having the closest potential to achieving my end are, transformational, transactional and servant leadership paradigms. This is also in view of the accompaniment that Gandhian model of leadership has been already described as transformational and transactional (Moore, 2011). Before I go deeper into the relevance of these paradigms for me, I need to consider some definitions of leadership. schoolman definitions go as follows