LEAD 6011 Module 1 Personal Definition of Leadership Example

Leadership Is What Happens Between Us: A Health Education Manager's Working Definition of Leadership, Tested Against Three Lines of Research

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6011: Leadership as a Reflective Practice

Module 1 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 12, 2026

Introduction

I manage the health education section of a composite county health department in southern New Mexico: seven health educators, two community health workers and a budget that depends heavily on state and federal grants. When I began this Ed.D. in Public Health Education, I assumed I knew what leadership meant because I had been doing it for nine years. This paper tests that assumption. It sets out the definition I would have given before the course, compares it with three lines of leadership research and arrives at a revised definition that I can carry into the rest of the course and into my work.

My First Draft

Asked a month ago, I would have said that leadership is setting direction for a team and making sure the work gets done well. The definition comes straight from my job. I write the section's annual work plan, assign educators to programs such as diabetes prevention classes, school vaping prevention and the summer heat-safety campaign, track their numbers and report to the deputy director. When the work is on time and the grant reports are accepted, I consider myself to have led well.

The draft has a virtue: it is honest about what I actually spend my time on. It also has a problem that became obvious once I set it beside the research. It describes management, the planning and controlling of work, more than leadership, and it places all of the action in me. It also says nothing about the people the section serves. Our programs succeed or fail in living rooms, school gyms and church halls, and a definition that ends at the edge of my team ignores the residents whose trust decides whether anyone comes to a class.

Test 1: Transformational Leadership

Bass (1990) contrasted transactional leadership, in which leaders exchange rewards for performance and step in when standards are missed, with transformational leadership, in which leaders broaden and elevate followers' interests, generate awareness and acceptance of the group's mission and move people to look beyond their own interests for the good of the group. He argued that transformational leadership produces performance beyond what exchanges alone can achieve, and that it can be learned.

Measured against this distinction, my first draft is almost entirely transactional. I set targets and monitor them. What it leaves out is the part my best moments as a manager actually involved: the afternoon I helped a discouraged educator see that her poorly attended classes in a colonia were reaching exactly the families no one else reached, and she redesigned them instead of asking to be reassigned. That was not setting direction or checking work. It was helping someone see her work differently.

Test 2: Relational Leadership

Uhl-Bien (2006) distinguished between two ways of studying leadership. An entity perspective focuses on individuals, their traits, behaviors and perceptions, and treats leadership as something a person has or does. A relational perspective treats leadership as a social process, a matter of the relationships and interactions through which coordination and change emerge, so that leadership can arise anywhere in an organization, not only in formal positions. My first draft was pure entity: leadership is something I, the manager, do to a team.

The relational view fits what I see in my section better than I expected. The most influential person on our school vaping work is not me but a community health worker with no supervisory role, whose relationships with school nurses and coaches decide which campuses let us in. If leadership is only what managers do, her influence is invisible; if it is a process between people, she is plainly leading.

Test 3: Shared and Distributed Leadership

Reviewing the field, Avolio et al. (2009) traced a move away from a focus on the individual leader toward approaches that include followers, peers, context and culture, among them work on leadership that is shared, collective or distributed across a team. They also described attention to followership and to the relationships captured in leader-member exchange. Taken together, these lines of research suggest that a definition built around one person in a position misses much of what the field now studies. For a small public health section working across schools, clinics, churches and a tribal health program, a definition that allows leadership to be shared is not a theoretical nicety; it describes how anything gets done.

The Revised Definition

My revised definition is this: leadership is the process through which people in relationship help one another see what matters and act on it together. It keeps the direction-setting of my first draft but places it in a relationship rather than in a job title. It includes what Bass (1990) described as elevating others' sense of the mission, it treats leadership as something that happens between people, as Uhl-Bien (2006) proposed, and it allows the community health worker who opens school doors to count as a leader, consistent with the shared forms of leadership Avolio et al. (2009) reviewed. It also leaves room for management. The work plan still has to be written and the grant reports still have to be accepted; those tasks simply are not the whole of leadership.

Where the Revised Definition Is Still Weak

The new definition has weaknesses of its own. It says little about accountability. In a health department, someone must answer when a grant report is late or a program harms rather than helps, and a definition centered on shared process can blur who that someone is. It also says nothing about power. Relationships between a manager and a community health worker are not equal, and a definition that describes leadership as something people do together can hide the fact that I still decide who is assigned to which program and whose position is renewed. Finally, it is untested. It sounds right in a paper written in October; whether it holds up when a county commissioner demands results by Friday is another matter. I will keep these weaknesses in view rather than adding clauses to the sentence until it covers everything, because a definition that covers everything guides nothing.

What the Definition Asks of Me

A definition is only useful if it changes behavior. This one asks three things of me. First, to spend part of each one-on-one meeting on what the work means, not only on numbers. Second, to notice and name leadership by people without titles, starting by asking the community health worker to lead the next planning meeting for the school program. Third, to treat my own authority as one source of influence among several, which means listening to the people closest to the community before deciding. Later modules in this course ask for reflection on specific leadership incidents, and I will test the definition against them.

Conclusion

My first definition described what I do on a busy Tuesday. The research showed me what it left out: the transforming moments when someone sees their work differently, the relationships through which influence actually travels and the leadership exercised by people without my title. The revised definition is less tidy and more accurate, and for a reflective practitioner that is the right trade.

References

Avolio, B. J., Walumbwa, F. O., & Weber, T. J. (2009). Leadership: Current theories, research, and future directions. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 421-449. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163621

Bass, B. M. (1990). From transactional to transformational leadership: Learning to share the vision. Organizational Dynamics, 18(3), 19-31. https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-2616(90)90061-S

Uhl-Bien, M. (2006). Relational leadership theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), 654-676. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2006.10.007