Relating to the Theories

After doing the midterm and learning about all these great theories, I now try to apply them to my own everyday life. When doing something at work or school, I always stop and kind of reflect back on each of the major theories we talked about and see if they apply to me. In this class each one of us wants to be a type of leader and have our followers, employees be able to apply some of these theories to us so we can realize just how a class about “leadership” has impacted our leadership abilities.  Looking just at the seven major leadership theories we talked about on our midterm I can say “ oh I want  path/ goal theory to represent the way I will be interacting with my followers,” but after being in this class now half of the semester, one thing I have learned is that’s not how these theories work. Yes some of them you can try to consciously implement in the way you lead your followers but mostly many of the leadership theories come subconsciously to leaders without them even realizing they are doing it. One entity I can say I have taken away from the movie, Mona Lisa Smile is just that, seeing that leadership theories come subconsciously and sometimes, its moments in our life that bring them out. Like many characters in the movie, many of them didn’t see themselves as leaders except, maybe Betty but because of periods in their life they became leaders all in their own ways.