You are helping to elect a leader for a student organization or group. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? A person’s honesty is the most important characteristic for being a leader.

You are helping to elect a leader for a student organization or group. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? A person’s honesty is the most important characteristic for being a leader.

Some people say that being honesty is the most essential trait of a leader. However, I do not agree with this statement because there many other characteristics that also contribute to excellent leadership, such as the willingness to serve the public, the mastery of their expertise and their communication ability.

Admittedly, honesty is definitely a merit for any human being and an honest leader may well deserve people’s respect. However, when we are choosing a leader, we expect the person to be effective in his/her position. Sometimes, being honesty cannot surely bring to effectiveness of the leadership. If, for example, as the head of the sports department of student union, the leader misses the deadline for the school soccer team to file an application for the participation of a regional competition among universities, even though she/her is an honest person, we cannot say he/she is a good leader.

In addition, the willingness to serve the students is also a critical factor when we are grading those candidates for the position. The aims of many students’ organizations are to serve the student body so that they can live a better live on campus, and the leaders of these organizations are unpaid. That is to say, the person holds the leadership position will have to sacrifies his/her own time and energy to solve problems of others. Take my roommate for example, she was the chairman of the student union in her sophomore year. Once, the union is going to organize a singing contest for the students. She spent most of her spare time for the preparation and even had to skip some classes. Therefore, the willingness to serve the students are vital.

Furthermore, being a leader of a certain organization sometimes requires particular expertise. Taking the debate society for example. The job of the head of the debate society usually contains various tasks, like organizing or holding training sessions for new debaters, hosting debating contest, participating in debating competition. All these tasks require the leader to know well about debate and be a top debater himself/herself. As far as I know, in the debate society, most of the leaders have go through their way from a fresh debater to a top debater and finally the head of the society.

To sum up, although being honesty is certainly an esteemed quality, we have other standards such as willingness to serve the students and expertise when coming to the choice of leader for students’ organization.