Leadership – Is a trained leader is like a product that follows its mold?

What do I mean by a leader is like a product follows its mold. This thing comes into my mind, one Saturday wee long teach the recruits something, and tingxuan comments on something, suddenly after dinner, it strike my mind, I guess this thoughts of mind is living in my brain, it is a mystery which I wanted to solve long time ago, maybe previously I do not have the experience to relate on. Finally I have found the meaning and understand how I can put the thoughts into words, so that it can help to relate to the others.

First of all, for those who don’t really knows me like wee long, baoshun and yee seng, you might not understand what topic am I talking about? It has been the 10th or 11th year in the Boys’ Brigade, I have seen lots of leaders and different kinds of leadership from the boys, all of them have a unique characteristics in their leadership, but at the same time they still possess some similarities. As for me I did train lots of boys, and some boys mapped my leadership and characters. People like bangshi and shuncheng really mapped my leadership and characters.

Before I went to Australia I trained another boy closely during the last Leadership Development Camp, people said that he too mapped my characteristic and leadership style.

So what is my leadership style and what are my characteristics. For those in BB, they know that I am a harsh person, and a strict person, a person who demands a lot on standards and pride on their work. My belief is when you are wrong you must be punishing, and when you are right I will reward, I don’t believe in rewarding first. You must earn your reward. To me human is bad, they must learn the hard way to get it correct, I guess to put into a better context is self – control, if you don’t have the self – control, then I will control you.

That is just part of my leadership and those who don’t understand will be mislead, as I wanted to say to those who are mislead and said that I am “devil leader”, don’t judge a person so early as you have not understand them. So for those who I trained closely with, they also inherited this behavior of leadership. Some of them grew mature overtime and understand it and they slowly changed this leadership style to their leadership style.

So what do you mean by a leader is like a product that follows the mold. Base on the above you can understand that from those people who I have trained, some part of their characters changed, leadership style and thinking mapped accordingly like me.

So why this thing happened?
Base on my own understanding and logical thinking, all of us have a person we look upon to and to learn to when we were young, or someone who we really inspired to be, so we absorb part of their thinking and doings. So as for me, they are the ones I trained, and they looked at me as a mentor or teacher, so physiologically they absorb that thinking and shape their characters too.


What I felt that a leader must be flexible and knows, what is his weakness and strength, combine with knowledge and experience, he also needs to comprehend and be sensitive to the situation, so base on all these data, he can then demonstrate a good leadership style for that situation. Situation can changed over the time, time means seconds, minutes and hours, so it also means that your leadership will changed according to time.

So when I am teaching the boys in the Boys’ Brigade, is normally on the role of CSM, and up – front leading. They must remember that the leadership I have demonstrated is best for that situation but not for all situation.

It is alright to take the mold of the leader you inspired, but you must remember that the experience and knowledge which you have gained from him, is for that type of situation for that time, and base on a lot of factors, that sometimes you cannot even see or comprehended, factors like the consideration he took note of and the other experience he has gathered all these years that makes him decide on the decision. As I have said the leadership style should changed according to time.