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Leadership is about understanding an individual’s own strengths and weaknesses, understanding the skills and shortcomings of other team members, and making appropriate adjustments in order to optimize communication and performance. Some business managers are also natural leaders. On the other hand, there are some managers that are poor leaders and merely fulfill the basic duties of their management position. After taking the self-assessment, I have gained a clearer picture of my own skills and shortcomings, and I have discovered good ways of improving my weaknesses while also using my strengths to my advantage.
Understanding my own strengths is an important part of being a successful leader.
Self-awareness is a trait that many successful leaders possess (Van Velsor et al., 1993). Some individuals may be born with a strong ability to understand their own strengths and weaknesse4s and how other group members perceive them. On the other hand, other people can learn about themselves by taking self-assessments and listening to feedback from peers.
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“ Ok, let me say I’m extremely satisfy with the result while it was a last minute thing. I really enjoy the effort put in. ”
I have not always had a great ability to identify my own strengths or weaknesses and how other people perceive me. However, I have learned that it is a skill that can be developed over time. By paying attention to feedback from assessments and other people, I have been able to improve my own self-awareness.
According to the self-assessment, one of my main strengths is authenticity. Authenticity is the ability to relate to others in a courageous and high-integrity manner (Eagly, 2005). Authenticity is composed of integrity and courageous authenticity (Eagly, 2005).
Integrity refers to the extent that a leader upholds a set of values and principles, even in situations where other people may not be watching or holding them accountable. It is particularly important in the business world because many positions of responsibility place a level of trust in a leader. The executives of a company trust that the leader will not try to cheat them out of profits or otherwise secretly take money or resources away from the organization as a whole. Courageous authenticity refers to a leader’s ability to speak things honestly and directly, even in the face of things like conflicts or negative feedback. Some business situations exist in which an unpopular topic must be brought up. For example, one employee could have been crossing the line with regards to something like sexual harassment. An authentic leader would choose to address the issue with the employee in private, rather than merely avoiding it on the basis of confrontation or an uncomfortable topic to talk about. The same is true of worker performance. Some situations exist in which employees are not performing up to expectations. Even if the leader has close personal relationships with workers, there is also a time to take stand and bring up those issues in a respectable way. Without authenticity, people in a company may get the impression that a leader is being fake and always politically correct, and they may have less trust in the leader as a result. According to my own self-assessment and my past experiences in life, I have no problem being honest and direct with people. I appreciate when others reciprocate and are honest and direct with me.
Achieving is another one of my strengths. I scored a 5 in the area of achieving. This category is based on a leader that provides a strong vision for a team and motivates people to achieve their goals. I agree with the findings of the self-assessment. I have always had a high level of energy, particularly when I am working with teams of other people. I feed off of the energy of other people around me, and it drives me to work even harder. In the past, I have been involved in projects that required my team to develop a plan and timeline for completion. Throughout the process, I would work as hard as I possibly could, while also taking the time to motivate other members of the team. Sometimes people focus too much on short-term difficulties. I realized that a good strategy is to constantly remind people of the long-term benefit that will come about as a result of the team performing well on the task at hand.
Although it is typically thought of as a negative thing, I scored the lowest on protecting. Protecting refers to the belief that a leader can protect themselves by being distant, aloof, and superior to others (Heifetz & Laurie, 2001). I scored a 1.05 in this category. A high score in the dimension of protecting can serve to limit a leader’s ability to creatively express themselves or to take other risks that could potentially improve the performance of an organization. In situations where a team fails, the leader may blame team members rather than taking personal responsibility for the shortcomings of the team. Although my score in protecting was low, it was still not a zero. This indicates that even in a small way, I still sometimes display protecting tendencies. I can work in the future to reduce and even potentially eliminate any of my leadership habits that are related to protecting.
My second lowest score on the assessment was in the dimension of complying. Complying refers to the extent that a leader chooses to take courses of action to satisfy the needs or wants of other people (typically in order to gain approval), rather than acting on what the leader knows or believes to be the best course of action (Dailey & Brookmire, 2005). It can cause many different problems within an organization. A leader’s focus should not necessarily be on being liked or accepted by all team members. Some workers may naturally have a negative attitude towards people in positions of authority over them. If a leader always tried to please everyone, they would likely miss out on important decisions and objectives that may be unpopular, but may be in the best interest of the organization and the people working there. My own score on complying was low, which indicates that I do not place a high amount of value on the opinions of other people that are in my group. I must admit that I still do care about what other people think, and the overall morale of my team is important. With that being said, I do not make important decisions based solely on what people will think and whether or not they will like me afterwards. Sometimes people cannot immediately see what is best for them in the long term. I also got a medium score on the controlling dimension, which could potentially represent one of my greatest weaknesses. I find that sometimes I am too domineering and controlling whenever people seem to be performing in a way other than I expected them to. Such behavior stifles creativity and may reduce the level of motivation that workers have to perform well in the organization.
My long-term goal is to become a well-rounded leader. Although some traits like being controlling are negative when overused, they can also be helpful in specific workplace situations. I plan to eventually become an all-around good leader that can adapt to different workplace scenarios. I plan to accomplish this by doing a few different things. One is to put myself in challenging leadership situations by volunteering and local organizations that I am unfamiliar with. It is easy to perform well in groups that I know all of the members well. It is much more challenging to be thrown into a new environment and have to adapt to the team members and the task that needs to be performed. I plan to improve my own flexibility by practicing my leadership skills in volunteer organizations in my spare time. In addition, I plan to use regular feedback from my employees in the future in order to constantly identify any changes in my own set of strengths and weaknesses. I will not always tailor my decisions based on feedback I receive, but having that feedback will allow me to be much more self-aware than I otherwise would have been.
My Long-Term Goal to Become a Leader. (2024, Feb 23). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/my-long-term-goal-to-become-a-leader-essay
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