The only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you.- Tom Bradley
GENERAL QUESTIONS
1.What does AIESEC mean to you? What has changed in you since you joined AIESEC?
I joined AIESEC without any previous knowledge about the organization. Before joining in, I was already a leader (I worked as a tour leader), but I was considering myself a bad leader: always trying to get things done my way, never asking anybody for permission and never ever asking anybody for help, thinking I can do everything better myself. When I came back from my GCDPs, I decided to join AIESEC on a local level with two clear objectives: 1) to learn to work on my character traits to become an awesome leader in the future 2) to improve the EP reception, because during my GCDPs I found out that it doesn’t work as it should.
As soon as I got back to Poland, I got in touch with the LCVP ICX to ask what I shall do now. They told me I could be anything, so I became an OC. As an experienced retournee (2 DTs), I was offered a position of the team leader but I rejected it. I wanted first to see if I am capable of giving others the benefit of the doubt and actually delegate tasks. In the meantime, I was learning to be a team member, to work as a team and to rely on others. Having observed a lot of mistakes that the leaders were making, I decided to apply for a position of the leader myself to prove, especially to myself, that I am now ready to change my attitude and have an influence on the changes in others. In other words, if I am able to change, everybody is able to change, and this is the message which I will always be passing to other people.
As an OCP I finally got to change a little my attitude. I learnt to delegate tasks (although I still have a need of constant tracking and giving/getting feedback), I found out that I can count on others and that asking someone for help is not the end of the world. Before, I was obsessed with the details, triple checking all my emails before sending, triple checking the punctuation on every facebook event I was making, triple checking if every poster I was making was 100% perfect. Now, I am no longer upset that there are spelling mistakes in the emails me or my OC send to others. I learnt to let it go.
2. What attitudes should leader in AIESEC present ? What would be the characteristics of a perfect leader? Which of them do you posses, and on which you still have to work?
There is no perfect leader, and everybody has their own leading style. In my opinion, a good leader is a person who has a clear objective of the project, has outstanding communication skills, who can manage many tasks at a time and who has a good time management skills. The leader should have a lot of empathy, and should always take into consideration other people’s feelings, fears, limits and weaknesses, in order to be able to boost others to work on them. The leaders should have at