Activating Leadership

The Aiesec Values: Activating Leadership

AIESEC has 6 important values ​​that each individual must have and believe in it: Striving for excellence, demonstrating integrity, activating leadership, acting sustainably, enjoying participation, and living for diversity. 

In this article, we will discuss the third value of AIESEC, Activating Leadership. 

As one of John Quincy Adams’ famous quotes says “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” From this quote, we can conclude that everything that correlates with leadership begins with an action which then inspires others so that this action becomes an example that will be followed by others and have a real impact around them. This is also the same as the AIESEC perspective in seeing the value of leadership, AIESEC believes that we lead by example and inspire leadership through action and results, taking full responsibility for developing others.

The implementation of this value is seen when we are creating a plan and executing it. It is hoped that each individual can do their job as best as possible without forgetting their responsibility to develop other individuals where this can be done by effective communication and working as a team. Then, from all the work that has been done, we will get a result where it will be evaluated together on whether the impact or benefits obtained from the progress are the same as the predetermined expectations. If not, then we will try to find another solution. In finding and deciding on another solution, it will require leadership from all the people concerned.

Now, in this section, we hope you will understand why leadership is so important and that value should exist in every individual and not just for a leader. When a job is led by a leader who has leadership, but other members do not have leadership, then these members will certainly not have the feeling of being responsible for developing other people. When they don’t feel like that, building a communication will tend to only occur in two directions, namely between the leader and him as a member or even in the worst case the members do not cooperate with anyone and only do work according to the job description given. This of course is not something that is expected in an organization, especially since everyone will eventually achieve the same goal in general which is expected to work as a team. The tendency to miscommunication will occur so often that instead of finding a solution and smoothing out the work process, on the contrary, it will hinder and slow down the progress of work. In the process of developing other people, we also have to make sure beforehand that what we are responsible for in the job description has been done so that the process of evaluating other people’s work and their process of completing tasks will be better.

In activating the leadership itself, of course we will encounter various obstacles. For example, the leadership relativity and abilities that exist in each individual in a group will of course be different. Therefore, as someone with good leadership, this is not seen as a real obstacle, but a challenge to find a way to solve the problem so that it is no longer an obstacle.

Those are the leadership perspectives that can be conveyed in general and the forms of implementation that can be done at AIESEC. After understanding it, the next question is, are you ready to activate the leadership that is in you? If so, what steps should you take to get started?

Reihan Zahra

LCVP of Finance, Governance, and Legal AIESEC in BINUS 20.21