I found the article by Williamson to be very interesting. The points made about how we need to first deal with our past, especially in terms of racial bias, was very accurate because we do still see race come up as some kind of inequality in America to this day. Bringing this point in with the leadership article, the difference between management and leadership is something I didn’t think about really but now that I am aware of it, it makes sense. It’s one thing to just tell people what to do but it’s another to have the skill of leading people to do better, and that’s the kind of service we need in our democratic state when dealing with these issues unsolved.
Overall, I think one of the main points from both articles is to focus on some kind of community strength because the issues brought up by Williamson need leaders in this new perspective given by McFarland. Leaders who understand human emotion and are sensitive and all that need those skills in order to bring people up and our government needs to work on equality of the people since, from the example of the founding documents, the people are the ones who should be the true leaders.
It seemed to me, in this part of the reading at least, that the leadership vs management was almost just transformational leadership vs… any “inferior” kind of leadership. Though, I acknowledge that there is a big difference between keeping something going/running something vs making it better… I still couldn’t help but think every leader doesn’t have to make radical changes to do a good job.
I fully agreed with Williamson’s point about acknowledging our past in order to further our democracy. We try to ignore the ever prevalent racial inequality in our society by focusing all the things we are equal in instead. But it is not fair for us to ignore the past without fully trying to make it right with concrete actions as one the readings pointed out.
I am usually the type of person to try and move on from my mistakes and take the valuable lessons but America has not done so. We have had racial bias occur from slavery days to now. We are still dealing with it so we indeed do need to correct our mistakes from the past since they are still occurring.
I agree with you about looking for community strength. I think in this age of political polarization it is important to be able to look at each other as people rather than members of certain groups and remember that though certain aspects of our aspirations may be different, we do have many goals in common and should work towards those together.
I also enjoyed McFarland’s point comparing leadership and management. I always thought of leadership as a proactive process, but being able to truly transform your followers is a key differentiation between leadership and management. This reminded me of transformational leadership versus transactional leadership.