Leadership

1) This is a difficult question to answer due to the simple fact that we have not really established a main leader as of yet. Kaylee's face has so many informative members, all having an input to each task and each providing different qualities to the group. I think at the beginning it was difficult for everyone to effectivly work together due to the fact that everyone wanted a say in the planning for a task, however i believe now the group has become stronger as all te members are now willing to keep thier input but at the same time reflect on what others have to say.

An attribute of the team that inspire's me is the enthusiasm and determination to succeed, every team member has the same goals and it allows us all to get fully interactive and support each other throughout the tasks.

2) I have only had one captain/ leader in sport. Qualities that this leader had were, enthusiasm towards the sport and all of it's members, the ability to support the team and willingness to listen to other players as a captain to allow progression of the club and himself. Experience was also very important not just in the sport or at competition but the skills obtained to be able to get a team ready with belief for a competition.

A big aspect of thier leadership approach was to teach by example, when at competition it gave the team confidence when the captain was playing well and using correct decision making. Personally i didnt enjoy being an amature at a sport so it was really helpful, when as a captain they were able to give you goals at competition, provide feedback of performance individually or as a whole team.

3) Freddy Flintoff: In history this player has been influencial to English cricket, recieving alot of critism over the past couple of years, fighting injury and yet he still wants to take on a roll which can only be described as massive pressure. Not only has he had a rewarding career as a cricketer but has also displayed the leadership skills required to be a successful captain. I think it is an inportant skill to recieve critism but to look at it in a positive way to try and improve.

Flintoff's talent lies not in his batting or bowling but in his ability to lead
England's victory over India in Bombay this week was a triumph of leadership, says Simon Barnes
ENGLAND’S victory over India in Bombay this week was a triumph of leadership. It was a triumph of a few other things, too, but England’s first win in India in more than 20 years, which left the series tied at 1-1, came down in the end to the leadership of Andrew Flintoff, the replacement for the replacement captain.
He was expected to take England to a big-hearted failure, but it turned out to a big-hearted success. He bowled well, he batted well, but above all he created an atmosphere in which every newcomer felt welcomed, every non-player felt cherished and every old sweat gave the lot. Leadership: the one cricketing talent we hadn’t seen from Flintoff before and perhaps the last one we expected.
Australians think we English make too much of the captaincy thing. They say pick the best 11 players and make one of them captain. The English tradition is to do it the other way round, as if leadership were a talent in itself. But the greatest years of Australian cricket came about under the leadership of Steve Waugh, who changed the way Test cricket is played and established Australia as the great infernal cricketer-crushing machine. If Waugh had still been captain, England would not have won the Ashes last summer.
Waugh proves that the Australian notion of captaincy is flawed. The English fascination with leadership is nothing to do with class. A great leader isn’t just the man in charge. It is not a matter of what you are. It’s about who you are.
Flintoff’s leadership against India was not a matter of tactical brilliance. Obviously, the man is no fool, but he didn’t win in Bombay by out-thinking his opposite number. He did so by the way in which the team followed. Leadership of this kind — leadership of any successful kind — is a moral quality. It is not a matter of giving orders, it is about being followed.
Sport showcases leaders and leadership. The 2003 rugby union World Cup was also a conspicuous triumph for leadership. Funnily enough, Martin Johnson, the England captain, always said that he never wanted to be leader of anything. But he had the colossal knack of inspiring in others the virtues of followship.
Again, it is not Johnson’s tactical decisions that are the crucial issue. It is a matter of setting the tone. Johnson as a leader was uncompromising, insisting on the highest standards of professionalism, but above all he expected total dedication to the cause of victory. Anything less than your all was simply a non-option.
He was the man who never took a backward step. Sir Clive Woodward, the head coach of England at the time, was once asked what Johnson said when he learnt that he was to play as a replacement. “He gave me the eyebrows look and said, ‘Fine,’ ” Woodward said. Others suggested that Johnson’s greatest talent as leader was to frighten the life out of the opposing team’s captain at the toss.
However, the point is not that Johnson led, but that people followed. If you had passed the Johnson test, you had a right to think pretty highly of yourself. Your reward was knowing that you had Johnson on your side, and having Johnson on your side was a very total sort of thing.
The England cricket captain has the most demanding job of any playing athlete in the country. Nasser Hussain was possessed by a demented ambition to end the endless years of disappointment and he took the job on with a searing fury. The notion of muddling through and making sure you keep your place for the next match was no longer possible.
The furies exhausted him eventually and he resigned at the right moment, allowing Michael Vaughan to step in and lead with a relaxed air, treating players as grown-ups. It was time for the bad cop to go, as Hussain wrote in his autobiography, and time for the good cop to come in.
Hussain’s leadership was right for the time, Vaughan’s for the time that followed. First the revolutionary firebrand, then the consolidating politician. England were lucky with both, but luckier still with the transition from one to the other. As a result, England have changed from a consistently very bad cricket team to a consistently very good cricket team. Individual talent matters — I’m not saying it doesn’t. Waugh set the tone for Australian cricket and it did rather help that he had Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne. But the leader’s essential task is to make sure that every individual gives the best he is capable of, and that has been Flintoff’s triumph in India.
No one loves being a leader more than David Beckham. The idea of being England captain seems to form the bedrock of his personality — so much so that you wonder how he will cope with life after captaincy, as he will probably have to when Sven-Göran Eriksson leaves the England team after the World Cup this summer.
Two games showed Beckham’s leadership at its very best. There was the World Cup qualifier against Greece at Old Trafford in 2001, when England were losing. An almost unhinged performance from Beckham rescued the situation and he scored the late equaliser that meant that England would play in the World Cup finals.
Once there, Beckham had his match of personal redemption against Argentina, which England won 1-0 thanks to Beckham’s penalty. Beckham wants to be the one everyone looks up to, as well as the one everyone looks at. He insisted on taking all the penalties, which ended up as a personal and corporate disaster. The one that really mattered was in the penalty shoot-out against Portugal in the quarter-finals of the European Championship in 2004. Beckham took the first one, being The Leader. And missed. Learning in the process the sad truth that being called captain doesn’t always make you a leader.
But Beckham will be leading England in the World Cup finals in Germany, metatarsals permitting, and we will see how far his — not inconsiderable — talents for leadership take England. He leads by example. That’s what people say about captains, generally meaning that he doesn’t have a clue about tactics. But it is a more complicated businesses than that. In India, Flintoff certainly set a good example, but it wasn’t bowling fast and batting patiently that made people want to follow him.
Rather, it was the fact that people believed in him. Each successful leader has that quality, each in his own way. It is not just a quality in the leader; more importantly, it is a quality that resonates among the led. It comes in as many forms as there are leaders — in the monobrowed taciturnity of Johnson, the messianic nature of Waugh, the intensity of Hussain, the staginess of Beckham, the relaxed nature of Vaughan, the generosity of Flintoff.
But the quintessence of the talent is unanalysable; it is just something that followers recognise and they do that only because they discover they are (a) following and (b) playing better than they thought they could. Leadership — you can work out what it means by watching the followers.