Not born a leader? It’s ok

Matthew Lo
Dec 6, 2017
2 min read

I want to share my takeaways from my experiences as a Swimming Team Captain in secondary school and as a Water Polo Team Captain in University. Here are a few advice and lessons learnt.

Believe in yourself I thought for a long time why members, alumni and the coach selected me as the captain. It is not because they need someone to be the captain. It’s because they see someone who has the potential to make a change. Therefore, if you’re reading this article, whether you are a leader or a leader-to-be, believe in your potential. They must select you for some reason. Perhaps they see you make decisions well or they see that you can influence other members. Dig deep into your talents and you’ll lead the team with excellence.

You’re the example Leaders lead from the front, not make orders at the back. If you stay in front, people follow what you do. If you want people to come to practice, you need to go to practice. If you want the team to be self- disciplined, you need to be extra self-disciplined.

Photo source: foundr

For instance, if you want the team to train 3 times a week, type a list of those who will attend starting from you as first. You can also record the attendance in a Google form where everyone knows who attended and who didn’t . It gives pressure to those who missed training. Actions are better than words Sometimes, actions convey the message better than saying it. I realized that when I set up the Instagram page for the team this year. It’s hard to tell the team how I want the page to be without giving them a reference. I have to browse other sports pages Instagram to see how they promote, how frequent they post and how their content (photos, videos) is edited.

Don’t afraid to make mistakes I am afraid that poor quality social media posts can deteriorate the team’s reputation. The first few posts was indeed not attracting. After finding common techniques large brands used in social media. For example, using short captions, layers, effects and unique brand hashtags. The more I post the more I learnt. Impressions and engagements from the analytics shows the effectiveness of each post. Analysing each post gets me familiarised with reading and interpreting the analytics.