My name is Akeel, and the study of leadership and communication literally changed my life. I know that it will change yours too.
Since the end of my freshman year of university, I’ve been engaged in the study of how to cultivate my peers into better leaders. The three years after I joined my university’s peer leadership organization were spent analyzing and applying principles of leadership; from facilitating weekend-long diversity and leadership retreats for students across the campus to week-long leadership development camps for incoming freshmen students and everything in between, I learned about, learned from, and learned through a multitude of leaders and leadership theories. I also changed my major three times as I tried to figure out how to be the person and leader that I saw myself becoming in a field that I felt I could contribute meaningfully towards.
Eventually, I graduated and moved to China where I got to experience leadership in traditional Chinese education systems, international (IB) education systems, and international organizations dedicated to improving public speaking/communication and leadership skills. Despite the contrasts in culture, team size, and purpose of the overarching institutions, two things remained the same across all of these experiences:
A need to cultivate strong leaders who could both express and execute their ideas and the ideas of others effectively.
A deep frustration about the gap between the ideal and the actual leadership capability of various stakeholders due to a lack of knowledge about and support for the cultivation of leaders.
Leadership is a process.
I’ve found that many of us still perceive leadership as an end goal, instead of a process; there seems to be a pervasive belief that those who are good leaders are either born performing at high levels of leadership excellence or that leaders magically gain the ability to lead after enduring some great crucible of their lives. The truth, as I hope to explore in this Substack, is both a greater mess and also a greater work of beauty. Leadership is your favorite dungeon crawler. Leadership is your favorite book. Leadership is your favorite movie. Even when you feel that you have reached the end, there is more to learn, explore and understand, and going through it again makes you appreciate the entire work even more.
I hope that you’ll join me as we explore this messy, beautiful process of leadership every other Sunday!
Let’s go through this process together!
With this space, I want to build a community of people who want to challenge others constructively and with references to become better humans and by extension better leaders and communicators. People who seek to understand rather than to be right. People who believe that to lead effectively means being able to use the right tools for the job. To this end, we must understand more about both the tools, the jobs, with whom we work to complete the jobs as well as for whom the jobs are completed. If this sounds like you, I welcome you to roll up your sleeves and get ready to work, because we’ve got something big in store for our community. Get ready to witness Leadership In the Making.
Stay up-to-date
Again, I’ll be making posts every other Sunday that’ll go straight to your inboxes, so you can check your inbox every two weeks for an update!
Please reach out!
If you have a leadership theory that you think would be interesting to explore, a facet of communication that you think should be unpacked, some connection that you think I’ve overlooked, or just want to show some appreciation, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to get in touch!
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
