Taking My Own Leadership Apart by Dakota

Taking My Own Leadership Apart by Dakota - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

I'm a software engineering student, so I expected the project that hooked me at Western Governors University to involve code. The one that stuck with me came in my first term, in a course called IT Leadership Foundations, and the subject was me.

The assignment was to take my own CliftonStrengths results and apply them to three leadership styles, transformational, charismatic, and directive, inside a change-management scenario. My top five strengths came back in November 2025 as Strategic, Futuristic, Relator, Intellection, and Focus. What caught my attention was the question underneath the assignment. What does each leadership style actually require from a leader, and which of those things do I really have?

I had led people before, I just had never taken it apart to see how it worked. As a correctional officer with the Nevada Department of Corrections I talked with more than two hundred young inmates about finishing a GED or getting into an HVAC certification program. At The Home Depot I worked in asset protection and trained associates on safety. This project asked me to treat leadership the way I'd treat a system at work, break it into parts, look at the inputs, and figure out why it behaves the way it does.

Looking at my strengths that way changed how I saw them. Strategic and Futuristic are about seeing where a group could go and finding a path there, which lines up with the vision side of transformational leadership. Relator is about close, trusting relationships, and that's the strength I leaned on in those conversations with young inmates, one person at a time. Focus is about picking a direction and staying on it, which matters most in the directive style, when a team needs clear instructions and there's no time to debate. Then there's Intellection, which is about thinking things through. That one made me curious, because so much of my strength happens inside my own head. A team can't see a plan I've only worked out in my head.

That's where the project went deeper than I expected. Change is where leadership gets tested, because when people don't know what's happening, they fill the silence with worry. The goal I wrote for myself in that course was to improve my communication during times of change so I can give the team clearer direction and reduce uncertainty. It's the most practical thing I've taken out of any class so far, and the work earned a WGU Excellence Award for exemplary work in December 2025.

It also changed how I think about my own field. I used to see software engineering as mostly a technical subject. Now I see that almost every piece of software is a change someone else has to live through. At Golden 1 Credit Union I'm a data analyst on a continuous improvement team, sitting between business units and IT, so change is the job. Through my company, Zenith Asset Management LLC, I built an app called GoGrub and I'm building a second product called Slyng, and every release I ship asks somebody to work differently. The code has to be right, and the people affected have to understand why it's changing.

My long-term goal is to become a senior developer and then move into management, and this project gave me something to work on right now. The habit I'm building is to explain a decision before it lands, so the people it affects aren't left guessing. I didn't expect a leadership course to teach me that much about engineering, but it did, and I'm still curious where that question leads as I move toward the master's half of my program.