My Leadership Strengths And Weaknesses

Over the past couple of months, we discussed several traits, skills, and behaviors that have contributed to the success of both past and present leaders. Intelligence, integrity, charisma, and confidence are some of the traits that characterize many of these leaders. Interpersonal skills, oratory skills, and conceptual skills are some of the more important skills that helped to shape their leadership style. Some of these skills go hand in hand with the traits that are essential for strong leadership. Meanwhile, the behaviors that drive these leaders include inspiring and motivating others, collaboration, having a strategic perspective and trust. Combined, these traits, skills and behaviors make for effective leadership.

The book, “Remarkable Leadership”, is significant in our leadership discussion because its main focus is on bringing out the leader quality in all of us. The book’s premises rest on the belief that leaders maybe born but they can also be developed, thus leadership is learnt. The author draws reference on the fact that we are all born with some sort of talent/gift or we may have an interest in something that needs to be developed through training. The critical concepts in the books discuss the qualities and roles that leader should possess, which include being; an advocate for change, an effective communicator, a teacher/mentor, develop necessary relationship, being an innovator, know the importance of teamwork, and one who values learning continuously.

(Focht, 2015). In a previous role I held, I had three direct reports. Each were at different

Research proved that athletes found their coaches training as well as instruction behavior and their style of coaching did have an impact on individual performance. This was important research for me in understanding how those I coach perceive my leadership and whether or not I am effective as their leader. My teams’ outstanding performance or lack of performance can be a direct link to my type of leadership skills in addition to my training. The primary role of any coach or athletic leader is to help their athletes and improve on their individual performance. “Several sport studies exploring the coach-athlete relationship claim that effective coaching includes basic ingredients such as empathic understanding, honesty, support, liking, acceptance, friendliness, cooperation, caring and respect” (Moen, Hoigaard, & Peters, 2014, p. 76). The challenge for me is finding the balance between being supportive and meeting the individual needs of team members while also enhancing their ability and understanding of the sport. Understanding how to lead and coach various personalities within the team is essential to the team’s

"Leaders are people who are able to express themselves fully…they know who they are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how to fully deploy their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. They also know what they want, why they want it, and how to communicate what they want to others in order to gain their cooperation and support. Finally they know how to achieve their goals" (Ingram, 2004).

In the Leadership Challenge, 4th edition, it is Kouzes & Posner (2007) intention to present a road map for individuals to follow on their leadership journey. The authors stress that “leadership is not a gene and it’s not an inheritance.” Leadership they assert is “an identifiable set of skills and abilities that are available to all of us” (p. 23). They make clear that the “great person” theory of leadership is “plain wrong.” Leaders are our everyday heroes who do extraordinary things on a regular basis (p. 23).

In another instance, I had to lead my fellow student employees during one of our biggest summer events. Our team had coordinated this event a few times before and each person had both the ability and the confidence to complete their tasks. For this situation, I used an entrusting style of leadership and let them take charge of their respective portions of the event (Daft, 2014). This style of leadership gave them the freedom to use their creativity to improve the event and the decision-making process was more efficient.

At twenty-three, Carly Fiorina had dropped out of UCLA Law School with no plans about what she wanted to do with her future. However, almost twenty-two years later, she became president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard Company - the first woman CEO of a Fortune 20 company. She was given a mandate by HP’s board of directors to “shake things up” and was later named the "Most Powerful Woman in Business" by Fortune magazine. Prior to joining HP, Fiorina spent nearly twenty years at AT&T and Lucent Technologies, where she held a number of senior leadership positions (Cara Carleton Fiorina. (2014).

As a growing debate, the question at hand is whether great leaders are born with specific leadership traits, or if one can be taught certain traits over time. According to (Wikipedia.com) the approach of listing leadership qualities, often termed "trait theory of leadership", assumes certain traits or characteristics will tend to lead to effective leadership. I believe that leadership traits such as honest, competent, initiative, inspiring, hardworking, intelligent, and the ability to lead the masses, are some of the leadership traits one should possess. Within this paper, I will examine the overall concept of leadership traits, while observing the traits that were, or can be associated with successful leaders.

The trait leadership theory focuses on the individual leader’s personal characteristics as the basis of its investigations. It is one of the earliest leadership theories upon whose tenets many researches on leadership have been done. Although it is not very coherent, its heuristic nature has contributed to its significance in leadership research. Zaccaro and Klimoski (2002) define traits of reference to leadership as the stable personality characteristics, which result in a consistent leadership performance pattern, given different scenarios and groups. They include individual personalities, temperament, rationale, prowess, as well as cognitive abilities. Initially, the theory explored both physical and psychological characteristics that tell apart leaders from non-leaders.

In my reflections as I prepared to write this paper, I came to the realization that leadership is much more complex especially since the paper requires that I focus on a few traits. In an effort to make it simple, I wrote down the traits that came to mind and in process had over 10 important traits but an even bigger challenge was on how to narrow them down to 3 or 4 and this is the place that required a good deal of reflection. Eventually, however, I had to prioritize them since in any case; it is not possible to get a leader that has all the traits. As I thought of the various leaders who have inspired me, I noticed that while they strived to provide the best leadership by focusing on their strong points, they still had their weaknesses. To me this provided a justification for at least identifying key desirable traits and thereafter working to improve them. I did manage to settle on four traits, which for me are indispensible if a leader or a leadership is to become effective.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect and make an analysis of the general strengths and weaknesses of a leader, provide recommendations, thoughts of overall performance to improve on this person’s leadership style in which practices and theories were utilized most effectively. Upon such, draw conclusions and provide an integration of this leadership practice into my own leadership practice. The accomplishment of this will be achieved by identifying several key practices from published documents surrounding and encompassing the leader, and comparing them to known relative concepts for a holistic view of the approach.

Leadership is a very broad topic; I never knew just how many different traits and skills that it takes to become an effective leader. Some of which I was familiar with, and others that I was not aware of, but now from taking this course, they all seem to be necessary for the role of leadership. The attached paper, will explain of some of the important theories and concepts that I thought were most important to be able to become and effective leader.

In chapter two of the textbook, Introduction to Leadership, I was introduced to leadership traits, and asked to identify my specific traits and determine my leadership strengths and leadership weaknesses. There is an extensive list of traits which contribute to the leadership process and effectiveness of the leaders, however, six are considered to be key traits: intelligence, confidence, charisma, determination, sociability, and integrity. (Northouse, 2015) Of these six traits, I consider intelligence, charisma, determination, sociability, and integrity to be my strongest, and while I am very confident, I tend to question myself occasionally. Therefore, I would consider confidence to be my weakest trait on the list.

“Leadership is more ability than job. Moreover, it is all about determination, ability to solve problems, set direction for followers, gather them for common purpose and motivating people to achieve tasks. Furthermore, it is a charisma and the ability to reacting at the right time for a particular competitive situation” (L.Mullins, 2010, P372).