My Reflection On Leadership

Throughout this course, our textbook readings, the posting to threaded discussions, my responses to a classmate’s post, and reading various classmates’ responses helped further digest, comprehend, and synthesize the leadership content within Daft’s “The Leadership Experience” textbook. Our weekly lectures with various classmates’ interpretations and responses during the open discussion forums about the textbook themes brought a variety of unique viewpoints to the specific leadership topics. This reflection paper was an extension of this learning, and provided a deep introspection about leadership concepts; how did I, how am I, and how can I apply this knowledge in my workplace. This writing exercise uncovered new meaning and insights while both challenging and supporting certain personal views and ideas about leadership.

At the beginning of my Masters I took a class called Leadership Theories and Practices. During this class we had to take over 16 leadership assessments that ranged from assessing our personality type and its impact on goal setting, to assessing my appreciation and value of diversity. Through these assessments I have learned a lot about my leadership style and my strengths and weaknesses. I will first start out with the assessments that I believe I need to improve to become a better leader

I believe that students are the center of our work and we, the staff, faculty, and administration, are here to facilitate, educate, and advise students to learn effectively and efficiently that will afford them the opportunity to grow professionally and personally so they can and will reach their full potential. Leadership is about influencing people by providing purpose, direction, opportunity, and motivation. It should focus on operating and improving to accomplish the mission and vision of the organization. I believe that a leader must be sincere in her intentions, transparent in her motives, deliberate in her actions, and collaborative in her decisions. She should exude an inspiring, participatory, and transformational leadership style that facilitates communication and encourages innovation and results. As a leader at a university, it is important to engage faculty, staff, and students by embracing them as stakeholders, promoting collegiality through an open door policy, and building consensus on issues facing the college, university, profession, and education.

I also believe that an effective leader plays a significant role in promoting and molding individuals’ readiness as it relates to motivation and commitment. As such, I developed my leadership assessment with these points in mind. The assessment focuses on 14 attributes that I believe are important not only for a leader to be successful within the parameters of the SLT, but for most any leadership model adopted by a successful leader in the modern business environment. The assessment was completed by Bobby, my manager of nearly six years, and by Katrina, my highest-ranking direct report of nearly four years. Each was asked to assign a candid rating to each attribute using a one-to-ten (worst-to-best) scale as well as to make notes or offer any suggestions so that I may incorporate it into my leadership style in an effort to improve the areas of weakness and become a better leader. In addition, I did a self-assessment using the same criteria. It should be noted that while Bobby offered both a ranking and narrative feedback, Katrina completed the assessment using the numerical ranking only. The results were consistent in some areas and mixed in others, but revealed some valuable information that I can use not only within the context of this course, but also as my career is better defined over time.

As a graduate student approaching her final semester in school, thoughts regarding my leadership abilities in the soon-to-be “real world” have occupied my mind lately. To further explore and develop my ideas about leadership, I decided to develop my personal leadership theory. So, I asked myself the following questions: What makes a successful leader? How do you recognize a leader when you meet one?, and lastly, what is my theory of leadership? With this last question I thought about what leadership meant to me personally and how I personified it in a role of authority. While I had given thought to how I led, I had rarely taken the time to fully understand what my personal leadership theory entailed. Throughout the length of this paper I will analyze how my leadership skills, traits, values and elements from both Authentic Transformational theories help me to shape my leadership philosophy. In doing so I hope to define the leadership values that influence the way I view and practice leadership.

It’s interesting to sit down and write my first paper in almost 20 years. I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to be very concise in my communication, to the point and easy to skim the important facts to ensure what I need to get across will be read. I feel that having some emotional response to the stress of regularly writing papers that ‘feel long’ is just a great example of some of what I learned from my MBTI/Firo B results.

This paper contains my personal leadership development blueprint this quarter. The paper consists of four sections: In the first section, the key aspects of my leadership practices (believes, values, ethics, and actual strengths) will be discussed. The second section provides an insight into the aspect of my leadership activity, which need to be improved or developed. The paper identifies main leadership weaknesses and impediments which restrain me from becoming an effective leader. The third section contains an action plan, which is called to improve my leadership behavior. The fourth section is an annotated bibliography of different works which discusses leadership, application and development.

All individual has some dreams and goals for his/her betterment, improvement or successful future. But, unfortunately, only having ideas and objectives is not sufficient. We need to take practical steps, make a change, and works to get them in a better way, and these measures and actions demand a different kind of knowledge, skills and talent to become successful. After my encounter with the module, I was able to make some personal change. This module has changed my views, even my philosophy of life being a leader and how to manage change.

At the begging of this class, I thought that a leader had to be someone who had an extroverted personality and had what people see as leadership skills. What I learned and noticed as this course went on is that not everyone is a born-leader and some leadership qualities can be learned if you try hard enough. Now I think of a leader as someone who is in charge of getting people to meet a certain goal together. A leader is also someone who is confident in themselves and can reflect their confidence on to their followers. I also know that my definition of what I see a leader to be will change over the years in due my life experiences.

As I began this Leadership in Education course, I entered with an open mind and eagerness to learn about varying leadership styles and approaches. Over the years, I have fortunately been exposed to numerous genuine, caring, exceptional leaders in higher education. They all shared one commonality: student-centeredness. This has been my compass and guides me in my work. Through this course, I wanted to learn how I can better support students, whether directly or indirectly by leading other professionals and para-professionals in their work with students.

Throughout these first few weeks of the semester, I have enjoyed learning about leadership through this course and the reflection I have done. Currently, I do not hold any formal leadership roles, apart from Biochemistry club at my university. In that club, I hold a board position, and, at most, I help direct and run biweekly group meetings. Through that, I aim to be presentable, approachable, and kind during my time with the rest of the group members. I know that I would not want to show up to a meeting, only to have the meeting director appear as though they did not want to be there. That would discourage me from ever approaching them with any questions or comments, and it would definitely prevent me from becoming further involved with the club. Our club is not actually related directly to Biochemistry, (it should be renamed) so I try to show the new and young students how to maintain their club presence without their further science background. To do this, I try to appear as kind and presentable at the meetings, and this, hopefully, encourages some of them to come up to me afterwards and further question me about the club and further events. Aside from this, I do not hold a formal leadership role, but I still attempt to practice and exhibit leadership qualities that I would find valuable.

With a million ideas racing continuously over and over in my head, once again like many times before, my struggle would present itself of not being able to write those ideas down on paper. Years of nursing experience, and more recently managing the nursing informatics department, carrying out ideas that would advance the flow of information and improve processes came so easy for me; yet it was so difficult to present this in writing to the leadership group in our facility. To confidently complete a walk through in each department in our hospital with the leadership, verbalizing the changes that would take place was second nature for me. This walk through demonstrated how the changes would improve not only the flow of information but also bridge each department to function in unity. Understanding what needed to take place and following through bringing about positive changes I was comfortable in performing, however, expressing this in written format was something I needed to development considering my position as manager of my department. To receive approval on any request for change, we were required to write our proposal as a professional improvement (PI) project. The proposal would include, the reason for the change, objectives, stakeholders involved, and set a timeline with target end date. The day would come when I would begin my literacy development journey. Writing a professional improvement proposal is one of the most important moments in my literacy development

At the beginning of the semester after taking the assessment I found out that I needed to work on my leadership skills in influencing others specifically motivating performance, ethical power and team dynamics. I also found that my interpersonal skills like communication needed some work. My stronger human relation skills include valuing diversity, organizational change, behavior, human relations and self-performance.

I have been working in my family’s business since I was 12 years. I come from a business-oriented family, both my sister and I have worked the family business. Through sheer hard work, I have been able to rise up to a management position. In my life as a leader, I have always strived to apply the path-goal leadership theory, by Northouse (2013). I have come up with a clear-cut leadership model. I have learned what works best, and does not work for the family business. I continually emphasize to employees the importance of working together as a team and try as much as possible to be a role model for other workers. I continually encourage other workers to do their best and be the best in whatever work they are

The objective of this reflection is to expose critically how I could evaluate my own experience with relation to the theories and ideas about Leadership. In other words, how this lecture and insights changed my personal notion, as well, how I could amplify my knowledge about this subject. But I assume that the most important is to demonstrate how the application of Leadership skill is relevant in my career in the future.