By: Alexa Mikalaski

As a member of the Teen Korps Youth Leadership Council it is my responsibility to attend the monthly meetings. For almost every meeting there is a lesson and a speaker. Whether the lesson was on how to reach out to different parts of a community or how to be an effective leader, the lessons are always very powerful and helpful and are paired with a speaker that hits the message straight home.

The meeting was just starting and everyone sat in their chairs and got comfortable. This was going to be a long hour and a half. A man was already waiting in our meeting room; he was going to be our speaker for tonight. He stood up and walked to the front of the room introducing himself as Don Sando. Tonight’s lesson was on team building and our strengths and weaknesses as a leader. Mr. Sando started off with a power point presentation that showed us graphs on the relationship between good morale (people having confidence in you and being liked) and strong results as the leader of your team.

He also had other graphs on similar topics. All of his information and results were actually from real companies and organizations that had experienced good leadership and bad leadership. Finally, Mr. Sando talked about the four characteristics that make a high achieving leader. You need to make sure that you listen to your team’s suggestions and ideas and have positive feelings toward your team. This will lead your actions towards your team to also be positive. We also learned the importance of involving everyone in decisions. Last but not least, he taught the importance of being motivated not for selfish reasons of self gain or wanting to be liked, but because you enjoy sharing power and want to do what’s best for your team.

He also explained the five steps to leadership improvement. First you need to assess what the problem is, then learn how to fix it. After learning how to fix the problem you can continue to adjust by experimentation and observation. The last step is to simply practice this new method of leadership and master it. The result will be a stronger more efficient team.

A favorite quote of Mr. Sando was “people don’t care what you know unless they know that you care.” With that last thought in mind, I hope to become a more effective and stronger leader and am very thankful that I had the experience to learn from Mr. Sando.