My Leadership Practice Analysis

Managing Organizations and Leading People (C200)

My Leadership Practice Analysis

Introduction

I self-assessment is a useful tool for self-improvement. That is because it informs self-awareness thus creating opportunities for improvement. Daft (2014) puts the issue into perspective by noting that a self-assessment is a highly valuable way for increasing self-awareness since it relies on self-inquiry and reflection to gain insight about oneself. This is especially useful for leaders who use personal awareness as an opportunity for self-improvement as individuals as well as for refining leadership approaches to better manage subordinates. Given this awareness, the current essay presents the results of a self-assessment using the ‘Seven-Habit Profile’ to determine personal leadership strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities for improvement through smart goals and strategies.

Reflections on the “Seven Habits Profile”

The results of the self-assessment reveal some personal features that are unique to me as a leaders. The results show that I am very strong at keeping peace with people. I value relationships and would always seek to avoid conflict in all opportunities. Covey (1989) evaluates this feature by noting that all relationships are concerned with giving and taking whether through interactions or emotions. I had a score of 16 in this feature, although I performed poorly on speaking negatively of others when they are not there. I justify myself by noting that my actions are not because of dislike. Rather, they are galvanized by a need to gain control and an inability to control freelance discussion as well as momentary anger.

The analysis also revealed that I am weak in my reflection process. Balancing life and work is a little challenging for me. I scored 13 in this category, my lowest score in the profile which indicates a need for urgent improvement. I shift interest easily to pressing needs but not the most important ones. Balancing work as a nurse, home as a wife and mother, church as a Christian with a hobby in singing and song writing, is sometimes a struggle. Given this score, I now know that I can only improve through targeted actions that seek to achieve a better balance in my personal, social and professional life.

The third aspect of the assessment showed that I had an average score of 15, reflecting that I needed to be a more proactive leader. This score shows that I have average leadership strength and to be an exemplary leader would require me to have more strength. Although I am amenable to changes, particularly constructive changes, my limited capacity causes me to have very little influence in bringing about change. In fact, I often blame others for my shortcomings in bringing about change. I now understand that I must be a proactive leader in order to achieve extraordinary results, through being resourceful and using my initiative to break the barriers that could hinder my growth.

The four aspect is my personal leadership, acknowledging that leadership outcomes are influenced by both internal and external factors. According to the assessment, I am weak in the personal leadership aspect since I had a score of 14. In fact, I am sometimes inclined to think that if only I can think or act in a certain way, I will make the change I want on that seemingly impossible situation. My score in this aspect was because I sometimes do not follow my ‘to do’ list for the week. I set great goals but sometimes do not follow through with the list. I am a great planner but sometimes do not follow the written plan due to seemingly unavoidable distractions. The implication is that I should set plans and follow through on my plans.  Leadership Practice Analysis Essay Paper

The fifth aspect is personal management where I had a score of 16. I understand that I cannot become principle-centered without first being aware of and developing my own proactive nature. I must first be aware of my paradigms and understand how to shift them and align then with my principles. In essence, I would not be productive without a vision of and a focus on the unique contribution that is mine to make. Practicing effective self-management is one’s ability to carry out task as planned while effective leadership is putting first things first to imply that a leader must be disciplined (Covey, 1989). My score in this aspect was average to imply that although I am strong and determined when it comes to discipline in carrying out plans especially the one I believed in, I allow my conscience to prick me when I am doing anything that is not meaningful or contributing to my overall goals in life. For instance, I have on more than one occasion ignored pressing school work simply to engage in leisurely activities such as watching movies.

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The sixth category was my best score when compared to the other categories. I had a score of less than 18 since I functioned well in groups to complete assignments, tasks and project. I understand that I need others to succeed. I like referencing the inputs of my colleagues, subordinates, or superior as the case may be after completing a project. The win-win attitude in me makes me motivate everyone around me, seek to be at peace with everyone, and encourage them to forge ahead even in difficult situation. Still, I have some shortcomings that limit my performance. I acknowledge that a person or organization that approaches conflicts with a win-win attitude possesses three vital character traits: Integrity (sticking with your true feelings, values, and commitments); Maturity (Expressing your ideas and feelings with courage and consideration for the ideas and feelings of others); and Abundance mentality (Believing there is plenty for everyone) (Trompenaars & Voerman, 2009). As a team leader, I appreciate and allow everyone to voice their inputs towards the sole purpose of achieving a mutual goal when to come to project execution. Still, I have some way to go before I can become capable of working with others without experiencing problems.

The seventh category concerned communication whereby I had a score of 14. I understand that communication is two-ways, knowing how to speak to people and knowing how to listen to people. In other words, good speaking and listening skills make up great communication habit. With my low score of 14 in this area was because of my shyness and impatience. Facing crowd gets me nervous and hence affected the way I speak to people. I am weak in this area and have to work harder to fix the weakness. I sometimes get so nervous that I forget important message to pass across in my speech and remember them after I get off the stage. This is detrimental to my capacity as a leader. Hargie (2004) likens communication to skill performance, further reiterating that effective communication comprises of other skills such as good motor skill, which is the use of one’s body to gesticulate the words, and social skills. This implies that an individual is considered socially skilled on the basis of the extent to which he or she can communicate with others. The communication must be in a manner that fulfils the existing rights, requirements, satisfactions, or obligations to a reasonable degree through free and open exchange (Hargie, 2004). In essence, I should gain the capacity for effective communication is a vital component of my desire to be an effective leader.

The eighth category concerned having the understanding to work effectively with others, taping their brains and having the understanding that no man knows it all. I had a score of 17 since I understand that knowing where someone’s knowledge ends is where another’s begins. This fact humbles me and this is why I like everyone to contribute their quota for the team’s mutual success. I believe that although two people may have similar qualifications and service time, their experiences are definitely different because those experiences come from living which vary from person to person.

The final category concerned physical, social/emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing. I had a score of 17 in this category. I had a better score in the spiritualism and mental aspects when compared to the physical and social/emotional aspects. Through maintaining good health in the four aspects, I have the energy to go through the day and complete my activities. Without energy I would not be able to complete my leadership tasks. As a result, I intend to improve my wellbeing and improve my energy levels to improve my leadership capacity.

My Leadership Practice with a Scholarly Leadership Theory

Considering the outcomes of the assessment and after carefully reflecting on the scores, I am of the opinion that I am a servant leader. This is because I am more concerned with the comfort and interests of my subordinates. Daft (2014) supports my assertion by explaining that servant leaders operate on two levels: for the fulfilment of their subordinates’ goals and needs; and for the realization of the larger purpose or mission of their organizations. This description fits perfectly into my leadership style so well since I have experienced this when leading in my church women conference and my department as a charge nurse. Based on the assessment results and profile analysis, I am more of a servant leader whose main focus is progress, satisfaction, and wellbeing of my followers. This is buttressed by my scores in the sixth, eighth and ninth categories. As a leader, I get involved and do not just dictate instructions. I am people focused. I value relationship and put other first before me in decision making as a leader. And as a team member or player, I look out for others. The categories with highest scores denote my strengths while the areas with lowest scores are my areas of weaknesses that I need to work on. In other words, I think that I have some unique strengths the include seeking first to understand, then to be understood, I synergize. My areas of weaknesses on the other hand are an inability to balance life and work, I struggle to seek first to understand others, and I failed sometimes to begin with the end in mind undistracted. In this respect, I am a servant leader.

Three Strengths I Demonstrate as a Leader

The assessment shows that I have some unique strengths as a leaders, particular my ability to work with my team to achieve a corporate goal. The first strength is that I am a team player. My focus is in the team success and not in my personal achievement. The success of my team gives me an extraordinary joy and fulfilment, especially when we are able to render a professional help that leads to a successful completion of a difficult assignment (Heyler & Martin, 2018). As a servant leader, I just don’t serve in a group, I encourage others to serve as well so our overall goal is a truly win-win situation and no one take an individual accolade.

My second strength is my health lifestyle. I organize health fair for my team often because I believe in the whole being. Although it is a short 30 minutes monthly health fair, we talk about healthy lifestyle, physically, mentally, socially, and sometimes we talk about the spiritual aspect of it. We have been having positive feedback from some of the non-team member participants that it is helpful. I believe that the practice has created a more united team that is more productive to result in a successful organization.

My third strength is my respect for others. I respect the inputs of my subordinates and I believe that contributions from everyone makes a stronger and larger piece. This is reflected in my high score in the synergy part of the assessment. I acknowledge the leadership principle that although would can achieve a lot, many would achieve more through synergy (Russell, 2012). Being better together requires more than knowing you need different people to bring and apply their magic to the team project or task. Been a servant leader, I allow others to present their opinions before a decision is made. As a coordinator in a just concluded women program in my church, I allowed the women to contribute their individual talents to the planning and execution of the program. The end was a unique and successful program that everyone involved were happy they did. As a team leader in my unit, I always like everyone to brainstorm together and come to a unique solution about a project.

Weaknesses I Demonstrate as a Leader

The results of the self-assessment reveal that I have some weaknesses that limit my capacity as a servant leader. In fact, I have three glaring weaknesses that include difficulties in balancing life and work (second category of the assessment), beginning with the end in life (fourth category of the assessment), and seeking first to understand then to be understood (seventh category of the assessment). My first weakness concerns the aspect of balancing life and work. As a servant leader, I am expected to serve others first thus requiring that my life be well managed, particularly the time aspect. I have failed in this aspect since I face daily challenges and it is not surprising that I had a low score in this category. I focus a great deal of my time on what I believe in, that makes me happy often and tend to forget to consider the other important areas of my life that had the ability to make me happy later in life. This is crucial because an unbalanced life and work has left me stressed. It makes simple assignment look overwhelming, and makes me ineffective as a leader both at home and on my job. This in turn affects my ability to accomplish my set goal for that period and delay my completion time. In order to be an effective servant leader, I have to learn how to balance my work and life in terms of time. I have to be able to balance work, family, church, and social life because all put allow me to better serve others.

My second weakness is my inability to begin with the end in mind. As a servant leader who is expected to serve others, I am supposed to have a clear plan of action that guides all my activities. But I have been unable to address this concept since my objectives are not well structured. I understand that beginning with the end in mind is a virtue that impacts productivity. Most long-term goals begin with many short-term goals. Having the long-term goal as a driving force towards achieving the smaller goals thus making a leader more productive. As a people pleaser, I am not always concerned with the end goal. This explains why I get sidetracked easily when on a task. To be productive in a team, I found out pleasing everyone is practically impossible and I must have an end goal in mind as a servant leader before I am able to serve others.

My third weakness is that I have difficulty in communicating. As a servant leader, perhaps the most important feature is communication that would allow me to understand what others expect in terms of their needs. Owing to my communication deficiencies, I am not able to act optimally as a servant leader. In fact, I often fail to understand thus making it hard for others to understand me. Given that communication is the process by which information is exchanged and understood by two or more people, usually with the intent to influence or motivate behavior, it is clear that I am not good at communication. For instance, if there is an assignment to be delegated, I delegate without giving out much details about expectations since I assume that my subordinates understand what is required. Sometimes, they do understand and many times, they don’t, leading to misinformation or misunderstanding which ends in poor outcome of assignments. I speak few words and don’t wait for feedback most time, always in a hurry to get task completed. As a result, I should address the three weaknesses to improve my capacity as an effective servant leader.

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My Theory-based Changes

Having identified my three weaknesses, it is clear that my performance as an effective servant leader is dependent on how well I address the three weaknesses. I understand that at the core of my capacity as a leader should be my ability to serve others. My leadership practice should revolve around the philosophy of enriching the lives of others, building better teams and creating a caring and just world. Firstly, I should always approach leadership tasks with the end in mind. I need to learn to be more focused by setting the final goal before me all the time so as to align my short-term goal with it. For instance, my ultimate goal is to be a solid, well rounded leader in my field. To do this, I need a master’s degree and an advance leadership training which is what I am doing right now. For me to achieve my master’s degree and complete the program as planned, I have to make some short-term goals to enhance my speed and keep me on track to completion. If I don’t have the short-term goals in place and work hard at meeting them, I may be distracted from my long-term goal, go off track, or get to my finishing late if at all I am able to. Part of this is making sure that spend at least two hours every day in studying. Also, I need to cut down on overtime at work, and reduce time spent on leisurely activities like movies, hours on Facebook, and other social media. This would allow me to better manage my time in the process of serving others as a servant leader.

My second change is to pay more attention to my work-life balance. I should be aware no one will do it for me if I do not take the initiative. I should be aware I am responsible for whatever happens to me. So, to be effective as a leader, I have to balance all that encompasses my life. I get stressed out by failure to balance my professional life, school, and family; this is easily noticeable by people around especially my family. It also impacts my ability to maximize my full potential on the job. Since every aspect of my life is of equal importance to me and I cannot continue to operate under stress, I have decided to make a schedule of all to do list including family time, and to strictly follow the items in the list. Also, I will seek the support of the people around me on how to have a good work-life balance. This would allow me to set achievable goals in terms of serving others as a servant leader.

My final change will entail engaging in effective communication. Since, communication is both ways, I have to seek first to understand and then to be understood. Failure to do this effectively results in misunderstanding. Misunderstanding builds discord, slows down performance, and organization productivity is negatively affected. To be effective means I have to learn to speak effectively and more importantly learn to listen and understand when others speak. This will help me build stronger relationship with my team, subordinates and superiors and at the end the organization benefit by having stronger workforce with high productivity. The three approaches will allow me to address the three weaknesses become more proficient as a servant leader.

Short-Term SMART Goal

As a servant leader, it is important for me to lead not just to benefit my followers, I have to continually put the organization vision and mission in mind, in other word, the organization goal have to be paramount. My first goal to achieve this is to develop my leadership skills in a classroom environment over the next eight months. This is to ensure that I gain more robust leadership skills. This is why I have decided to seek more advance education in management. I plan to complete my leadership program in twelve months and apply my learning towards leadership practice and contribute to my organization development.

My second smart goal is to improve my communication skill over the next eight months so as to lead more effectively. To develop this, I will research and seek more information on communication in leadership. Also, I will read literature on effective communication and try to put the knowledge into practice. I will evaluate my improvement by arranging a game every month for my team to rate my communication ability for next three month. This I will do by typing out a questionnaire that they fill up anonymously and return to me every month.  I will continue this until I have over 80% of excellent remark, less than 20% of average remark, or less than 10% poor review.

Two Specific Actions I need to Reach My Set SMART Goals.

Having identified two SMART goals, the next step is to present strategies for meeting this goals. Firstly, I will develop my leadership skills through a formal education program and practice. The formal education program entails attending and completing a leadership training program that runs for twelve months. Also, I intend to subscribe to monthly nursing leadership journal in order to gain more insight to practical nursing leadership. Besides that, I intend to actively change my leadership approaches as a charge nurse on my job.

Concerning my second goal, I intend to evaluate and assess my progress and improvement based on my team rating and suggestion from the anonymous game. I also plan to engage in constructive communication daily to test and improve my listening skills. In addition to this, I also plan to do electronic recording of my communication with the consent of my team to know for myself how I sound to better rate myself.

Summary

The assessment and this activity has very helpful in determining my leadership practices, theory, and style. I discovered more about my leadership practices and approaches, as well as strengths and weaknesses. I also learnt from the profile activity what area I need to focus more for improvement as a leader. Overall, I learnt that in seeking to be an effective leader, I must be ready for change and not get stuck in old habits and ruts. Constant growth, development, and adaptability to change come through continuous learning to imply that I must be ready for positive change and open to learn more about leadership. I discovered learning is not a phase of life; it should be a way of life. As a leader, continuous learning is an important tool for improving leadership capacity and effectiveness.

References

Clemmer, J. (2018). Are you a learning leader on the grow? highly effective leaders are lifelong learners. Leadership Excellence Essentials, 35(6), 46-47. Retrieved from https://wgu.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=heh&AN=131463894&site=eds-live&scope=site

Covey, S. R. (1989). The seven habits of highly effective people: restoring the character ethic. New York, NY: Free Press/Simon Schuster. Retrieved from https://wgu.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsssb&AN=edsssb.bkw00021287&site=eds-live@scope=site

Daft, R. L. (2014). New era of management with coursemate (11^th ed.). New Delhi: Cengage India. Retrieved from https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=9069221310208537579042035&eISBN=9781285511597&id=6298351&snapshotId=37374&dockAppUid=16&nbId=37374&

Hargie, O. D. W (2004). The handbook of communication skills (2^nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis. Retrieved from: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=IVSxsljxndsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=communication+skills&ots=c2AVOH1Ht0HIHt0&sig=e3gPaolrtcz6U3BZvobKTJRxPTU#v=onepage&q=communication%20skills&f=false

Heyler, S. G & Martin, J. A (2018). Servant leadership theory: opportunities for additional theoretical integration. Journal of Managerial Issues, 30(2), 230–243. Retrieved from: https://wgu.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=heh&AN=130373169&site=eds-live&scope=site

Russell, N. S (2012). The titleless leader: how to get things done when you’re not in charge. Newburyport, MA: Career Press.

Trompenaars, F. & Voerman, E. (2009). Servant leadership across cultures: harnessing the strength of the world’s most powerful leadership philosophy. Oxford: Infinite Ideas. Retrieved from https://wgu.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=437022&site=eds-live&scope=site

A2b. Personal Leadership Weaknesses.

Unsatisfactory / Not Present 

Unsatisfactory / Not Present

The candidate does not provide a logical evaluation of any weaknesses of the candidate’s leadership practice using the same scholarly leadership theory used in part A2a.

EVALUATOR COMMENTS: ATTEMPT 2

11/11/18: The submission describes three personal leadership weakneeses as three weak areas identified in the Seven Habits Profile. Difficulties in blancing life and work,seeking first to understand then to be understood, and beginning with the end in life. The paper explains briefly how these are weaknesses for the leader such as focusing a great deal of time on personal beliefs neglecting other important areas that have a long-term impact. The evaluation is interesting and unique, however, it is unclear in the paper as to how each weakness aligns with the selected leadership theory. Please clarify and develop the response further according to task prompt instructions in order to complete the work. Leadership Practice Analysis Essay Paper