On 13th June, the new House Captain Team assembled for a workshop on Leadership, presented by Lisa Goodenough. Dr Khan invited Lisa for her expertise in leadership within the legal world at Vodafone, where she has worked for many years. During the workshop, we all took part in an exercise which gave us insights into the leadership qualities we already have. The exercise highlighted our preference and helped us understand how other people work around us in a team, which, by extension, will help us to maximise our productivity in the future.

 

After this exercise (that produced shockingly accurate results!), Lisa went on to explain the attributes and characteristics that seem to be a common theme amongst some of the most influential and resilient leaders we have come to know. Those qualities include: being able to communicate, the ability to deal with change, the ability to deal with failure (which also happens to be the thought for the term) and finally knowledge.

 

By walking us through these traits in depth, Lisa explained that leadership is a multi-faceted role that requires resilience, adaption, involvement, failure, planning and team work. Additionally we learned that ‘leader’ isn’t just a word, but rather something far more fundamental; a characteristic that we all have the ability to possess but one that takes time and hard work to develop. 

 

On behalf of our student leadership team, I would like to extend a massive ‘Thank you’ to Lisa for the time put into the presentation; we all walked away with a better sense of what it requires to be a leader. I can say with confidence that this is something that we will not only use as students and leaders in and around the school, but something that we will carry with us for even the smallest of tasks looking into the future.

 

Finally, we would like to thank Dr Comina, Dr Khan and Miss Still for selecting the new House Team for Year 11. We are all incredibly thankful for the opportunity and excited to prove ourselves as rising leaders.

 

Dalas Kruger

Year 11