Hierarchy is key in ensuring normal functioning of our increasingly complex society. Here in the US, we have an enormous variety of industries, professional branches, specializations, as well as a great diversity of other domains of human activity or interests. So, competence here is valued and opinion influencers or experimental pioneers have an important role to play. In fact, leadership evolves as a necessity virtually in any realm of human activity/ thinking, especially where more people are involved.

Thus, it isn’t hard understanding why even in academic institutions throughout the US and worldwide, students are given leadership essay assignments. Most students will take on leadership roles with various degrees of responsibility and impact in their lives, hence, becoming familiar with typical challenges, solutions, or skills required is essential.

Definition and Importance

One could define leadership paper or essay as a written work that helps identify and focus on many problems or challenges faced by leaders like efficiency, overcoming skepticism or distrust from subordinates, ensuring personal evolution of subordinates, inspiring motivation. In addition, it concerns potential solutions or strategies for addressing these issues, on vital qualities required by leaders, on how to develop certain skills. It also may be considered the same as writing a profile essay.

In fact, understanding what is leadership essay is simpler than understanding what leadership is because much knowledge related to the latter comes from directly experiencing a leadership role. Nevertheless, importance of leadership essay assignments cannot be undermined as they help create a future leader’s mindset, help understand underlying values, and prepare him/her for real-life challenges by arming with valuable knowledge condensed from more experienced and knowledgeable actors.

Steps Involved in Writing Such Essays

Writing a leadership essay reminds of writing other essay types with some peculiarities. Here are some basic steps involved:

1. Think about potential topics for your essay. If you already have some positive (or negative) leadership experience, it could be beneficial to reflect on it, choose a topic derived from challenges you faced or successes you achieved. Another strategy could be analyzing, dissecting leadership cases borrowed from other people.
2. Research this topic or reflect on it thoroughly, understand whether you truly want to delve deeper, whether you’ll deliver an inspiring, original story, or whether enough high-quality information is available. If you are confident about your topic, start gathering evidence.
3. Create thesis statement that would comprehensively describe/ summarize your paper’s essence, an argument, a position, idea, message, information piece.
4. Complete an outline – plan in detail your content – this will ensure that the entire paper is structured logically, that all information pieces go to an appropriate section or paragraph, but also that you keep your word count for each section in check as you write.
5. Write the first draft. Let ideas or arguments flow and develop while leaving editing for latter. Include solid evidence supporting your arguments, mention sources. Make sure you have a clearly delimited introduction, main body, and conclusion besides other required sections.
6. Edit your essay, revise, proofread, repeat. You might decide having someone else read essay to highlight any mistakes.

10 Qualities of a Good Leader

Essays about leadership focus heavily on highlighting, exploring, analyzing important personal qualities possessed by leaders. Among these qualities are:

1. Self-confidence – is highly cherished in the US society. It allows implementing and defending visions even when facing major obstacles or serious failures.
2. Competence. Obviously, self-confidence is only valuable when coupled with competence. Many leaders, however, might have heard definition of the Dunning-Kruger effect – confidence that one’s own cognitive ability or competence is greater than it really is. This’s a great risk dealing with illusion of knowledge, which is even more dangerous than its absence altogether.
3. Empathy. Nowadays, more than ever, importance of emotional intelligence is acknowledged in western societies – stereotype of productive but nervous, uncompromising, cold-hearted boss, as portrayed in Hollywood movies from earlier decades, is largely outdated. By contrast, being able to show understanding or empathy to an employee, subordinate facing difficult situation may earn their loyalty, devotion, trust, appreciation – things that are particularly important in the long term.
4. Charisma & charm – like it or not, some people are influenced not only by message or quality of your propositions but also by your charm – this is not limited to looks, but includes more aspects, like speech manner, gestures, mimics, friendliness, reaction to an opponent’s objection, emotional side, even vulnerabilities might play in leader’s favor.
5. Motivation – importance of motivation can never be overstated. It’s driving force everywhere. Motivation can allow one to go through hell and achieve impossible.
6. Visionary – true visionaries are rare but ability to anticipate hardships, expected event development, or future problems distinguishes effective leader from an average one.
7. Justice & impartiality – if we are talking about leaders that overview activity of their subordinates, then the latter must see leaders that fairly reward good behavior while punishing bad behavior. This gives clear message with regard to expectations and prevents chaos in an organization or group.
8. Dedication – seeing that leader is ready to sacrifice effort, time, money, and other things to see visions implemented or goals achieved is one of the most moving things from subordinate’s or follower’s perspective.
9. Responsibility – promises must be kept, problems must be faced rather than avoided indefinitely, true leader should be involved, present during the darkest hours, they should be fully aware of consequences of their actions and face them.
10. Negotiate & convince. Circumstances are not always favorable, opportunities are not always ideal, people are often doubtful even talented ones – bringing all elements, people, or circumstances to work together requires persuading power or ability to negotiate and compromise.

These are some important qualities every leader should have and you may use them as topic ideas. SplendidWritings has a great variety of topics for any paper, even social media essay.

Leadership Essay Example

Check an essay example completed by our expert. You may use it as a template or inspiration while writing your own essay on leadership!

Confucius was an influential figure of his time and one the most powerful thought leaders in human history. The fact that he became China’s greatest teacher for ages in just five years of professing this activity speaks for itself. He was a devoted preacher of morality, of correctness, sincerity, justice in social and family interactions.

Philosopher was dedicated, receptive, adaptive to his students’ needs, approaching each of them individually, qualities that describe both good teacher and emphatic leader focused on personal growth of this students and on deep personal ties with them – kind of leadership that elicits not only respect/ reverence but also attachment on a human level.

It is probably the suffering he endured as a young person that shaped his humanitarian worldview. He wanted to empower ordinary individuals through education and social reform in order for them to become masters of their own lives, as well as to identify with and take charge of society’s fate, demonstrating such leader qualities as responsibility, dedication, readiness for sacrifice.

Confucius has the allure of visionary highly devoted to the idea of making this world better but also of curious scholar thirsty of knowledge and in constant exploration, which are predictors of intelligence/ competence and open-mindedness among others. Being pragmatic thinker, he valued knowledge mostly for its potential to be used in practice to the benefit of society despite the fact that this implementation often proved challenging.

At the same time, he lived in a society that was disintegrating, objectives he was fighting for were often disregarded as utopist. If it were not for his persistence, he could be defeated by life many times over. Even despite multiple hardships, he managed to pass his legacy to the following generations achieving worldwide recognition for millennia.

Leadership Essay on Point!

Information provided above should be helpful when writing your next essay on leadership or when approaching other leadership-related tasks. Please note that our professional writers at SplendidWritings come to help with various types of tasks. Thus, we can not only write your cheap essays about leaders from scratch but also assist you at various steps of your writing project, creating an outline, editing, proofreading, writing an introduction, conclusion, abstract for an already written leadership essay, but also at completing other career goals essay.

We allow clients to transparently choose our writers after placing their order, to communicate and guide writers throughout the project, to receive intermediary results and to perform unlimited revisions until full satisfaction with the results is achieved. Besides, we highly value anonymity, privacy, unique content – you should trust that our collaboration would be confidential, secure, and productive.