A Strategic Plan for Personal Development Research Paper

A Strategic Plan for Personal Development - Research Paper specimenThough the general notion is to think that lead and power are synonymous, to me what Martin Luther King Jr. utter makes more sense, I am not interested 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 model in this respect though I can in no way assign a call option to achieve the level of his lead legacy. It is important for my quest to find a leadership model that combines personal line of credit 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 full-page nation behind him, ready to respond to his every uttered word (p.2). All this was achieved through non-violent means, which is zipper less than a miracle. Renowned leadership expert, Karl Moore has observed two key leadership qualities in Gandhi and added that they are also what many leaders of today lack- leadership by example and persistence (2011). It is the high regulation of leadership practiced by Gandhi that I would like to set as my notion of perfect leadership, and aim 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 humanness, which is day 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 double. As a path for traveling in this direction, it is obligatory that I seek the support of already evolved and well-defined paradigms for leadership. The leadership qualities that I look earlier to cultivate include an ability to lead from the forefront yet walk with the group, exercise power where n ecessary yet make that power emerge from a common will, a vision of a world that is a more equal and just society, and the willingness to let others grow and become leaders themselves. Given the take situation where idealism looks good on paper but is mocked when it becomes real, I understand that it is a quite an challenging task ahead of me. To make creative use of the scholarship on leadership that has been build 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 fact that Gandhian model of leadership has been already described as transformational and transactional (M oore, 2011). Before I go deeper into the relevance of these paradigms for me, I need to consider some definitions of leadership. Academic definitions go as follows