Becoming a Leader

Every student during their university period wishes to become a leader of the team, a project or a department. During your professional career, such moments not only boost up your confidence but also your reputation.

For Presley university students, the career advisors suggest that it is at these times, you need to have a strategy and a system for handling those “firsts.”

While it’s unrealistic to expect a perfect performance on your first time at anything, it’s nonetheless worth it to have a plan – and that makes it easier to improvise when you need to.

Below Presley University presents five useful questions to help you feel prepared.

• What are my goals? This allows you to block out the extraneous and give you a foundation from which to improvise.
• What is my baseline strategy for achieving those goals? These are your guiding principles and basic approach to the task.
• What could go wrong, and how would I handle that? These are the “what if” scenarios that are useful to talk through with someone who has experience so you can avoid the obvious pitfalls. More importantly, you’ll have the start of a roadmap for getting yourself out of difficulty, which is a mark of a successful leader.
• Who are my allies? These are the “go to” people when you get into a sticky situation.
• What would be in the “nuclear zone”? These are things that you could do, but that would break a lot of glass, so you wouldn’t want to start with them. Like escalating to top management without seeking to resolve it at your level first.

So when you are heading into new territory as the one in charge, or about to put a team member in charge for the first time, tick through those five questions. You’ll not only feel more in control, you’ll have the best chance of staying in control.