This week began with a talk from Dr. Nabeela Kajee on inclusive leadership and authenticity – which are traits and skills which leaders are not often taught. Personally, I believe that leadership doesn’t need the adjective of inclusive because to me leadership encompasses inclusivity. Nabeela described inclusive leadership as ‘taking risks to enable others to do their best work.’ – which I agree with, as leaders we should value the members of our team, support and nurture their uniqueness and the skills that they bring to the project, goal etc, and as leaders we should motivate the people we are leading. The risks that Nabeela mentions refers to the integrity and authenticity side of leadership – we, as leaders, should not forget the purposes of our goal and the aims that we have. When we have that integrity, we are able to show, not just tell, people and the members of our team that we are committed – a trait that makes us a good leader. Additionally, Nabeela recommended looking at the leaders we admire, to ask ourselves what the reasons are that make us like them but also what are the things that they have done which may have made them not a good leader. This thought exercise was useful to help you humanise the leaders we hear and see in our everyday and help us realise as leaders ourselves that it is likely that we will have moments where we are not the best leaders. It helps us to see the common pitfalls that many leaders have and how we can learn from them. Authenticity is a trait that leaders need, the people you lead look to us as an anchor and therefore when we go back on a goal or change our interests which go against the goals of the people we lead – we lose trust and confidence in our leadership. I really enjoyed the talk that Nabeela gave us as it helped me reframe my ideas of the leaders that I take my inspiration from.
For the rest of the week, my team worked on our literature review, report and coding to analyse the raw data that we received from our graduate research advisor. We decided to add to our research, which was mainly focused on quantitative research, a survey which consisted of both quantitative and qualitative elements. I created a survey to send to the Oxford Sports Ambassadors which were involved in facilitating the sports activities in our pilot study. This survey was sent off, and we are currently still waiting for responses. (we have received 3 so far out of the 10 Ambassadors who were involved). We hope to receive these responses by the end of next week by the latest so we can include the results into our literature review and report. During this week, we have been focused on finalising our analysis of the data that we have received and being more descriptive in our analysis. This week has required much more collaboration from my team and more analytical input on what the data from each we have is telling us.
Finally, we had time to de-stress from the week and hang out with other Laidlaw Scholars, which I thoroughly enjoyed!
Hopefully for next week, we receive much more responses from our survey as well as be able to finalise our literature review and report. I am excited to condense my team’s hard work into a nice poster, which we will soon receive a session from Ben Margetts!