We asked a hundred and fifty students and sixteen teachers a series of leadership-related questions, and the results are the following:
From the results we can see that foresight is considered to be an important leadership quality by the most people, with willpower and eloquence close behind. We believe the reason that foresight is the most popular choice is that people believe the ability to make good policies or decisions based on more accurate predictions of future conditions, thus creating results that produce a more favorable effect is important in a leader. We can also see that willpower, often considered to be closely related to perseverance and determination and more positive than ambition, is also favored by many. Eloquence, the ability to communicate ideas effectively by fluency of the tongue, is a quality that can not be defined as either positive or negative. However, many people clearly consider it important of a leader to possess such a quality, putting it in third place in our survey. As for the other options, we can only conclude that they are not as relevant to the forming of a successful leader.
From the results we can conclude that there is a great difference between boys and girls in the reasons that make them want to be a leader. The majority of boys chose the ability to make constructive changes as their major incentive in wanting to be a leader, whereas the number one choice for girls was inspiration from others. While we cannot be certain as to the reason behind this difference in opinion, we believe that it is because of the slight differences in personalities, while girls are more sentimental and tend to be more easily moved, and so their chances of being inspired. But boys are more down to earth, and they tend to think more about steady work, and being constructive appeals to their personality traits more.
As we can make out from the results, most people believe that leaders should possess a higher standard of morals than the average person. Our explanation is that people believe that if a leader is to successfully guide and manage the people under him/her, he/she must first be morally self-demanding. The idea is that leaders must themselves be role models for others to look up upon. After all, how will they be able to lead their subordinates if they themselves do not demonstrate the very qualities that they ask of them? So as we can see from the survey, a successful leader must first demonstrate a strong sense of morals before they can demand the same of others.
