Last week, 23 lucky student leaders had the privilege of attending a leadership workshop led by Abbi Growth. In this workshop, we learnt more about ourselves, including our values, strengths and weaknesses and ways to harness those abilities to become better leaders.
We started by discussing what qualities make a good leader. We learnt that there isn’t just one type of leader and we each have different strengths that we can use to make ourselves great leaders. For example, some strengths include being caring, dependable, and competitive. We took a test to identify what our top three strengths were, and from there, we were able to understand what those strengths meant and how we could use them to become better leaders. Abbi also taught us that a leader is a person who cares for everyone. This means to be a leader, you must connect with each team member to show them that you will support and care for them. In doing this it allows them to understand that you know who they are as a person and that you are there to help them.By building trust and connections between you and your peers, they will feel more inclined to follow you and your instructions.
We learnt that acronyms are also very helpful when it comes to remembering the qualities of a good leader. Abbi taught us a variety, with the two main ones being GRIT and BRAVERY. While we were there, we were put into groups and had to complete various challenges to earn points throughout the day. These activities allowed us to work with people that we hadn’t worked with before and understand that everyone has different strengths. We were taught how we can harness those strengths to work collaboratively as a group. We communicated with each other to find out the best way to use everyone’s strengths to their advantage.
On Wednesday, we did an activity where, as a group, we had to all agree on eight people we wanted to save and the rest we didn’t want. When doing this activity, we realised that everyone in the group had different values. This made it difficult for the group to decide who to keep because we all valued different traits. This meant that we had to problem-solve and as a group we had to compromise and meet in the middle. This made us understand that as a leader we will come across people who have different values to us, and we will need to find a way to work past that to find a solution.
We learnt many new things about ourselves, such as what we value, what our strengths are, and who we are as people. This workshop has taught us all so much about leadership and how to harness our strengths to become great leaders. Thank you so much to Abbi for taking the time to come in and lead this workshop. We hope to be able to use what we have learnt in future leadership roles.
Rebecca Robb and Lily Brook, Year 11
