As I stated in my leadership development plan, my goal to advance in my leadership development was to improve on the two practices of leadership I ranked low in which were “inspire a shared vision” and “challenge the process”. I also wanted to improve on my emotional intelligence. This consisted of learning how to recognize and manage my emotions and understand those of my team members. I aimed to be socially aware of the emotions each team member expressed and the effect they could have on our meetings.

I successfully improved on challenging the process. In big part it had to do with how comfortable I felt with my team members. The atmosphere we created welcomed ideas and suggestions. As for me, it allowed me to play the role of devil’s advocate, I challenged the process by asking questions for clarification or simply disagreeing and suggesting a new idea. My way of measuring my improvement on challenging the process was through my teammate’s feedback.  In the midterm feedback one of my teammates wrote, “She will speak up and voice her opinion but withdraw when others disagree… She should stand her ground about her position…”  Indeed I was speaking up to challenge the process but it was not making any impact if I withdrew once someone disagreed. My next step was to improve in this aspect, and so I did as proven by one of my teammate’s feedback: “[Cecilia] provided very good insight and direction.” By expressing my opinion and following through I provided direction for my team, creating a shared vision.

Inspiring a shared vision was the second area I wanted to work on to improve my leadership development. This practice interwove with challenging the process. As I questioned our proposal and the small details, I made the team vision clear. I also measured my progress in this practice through my teammate’s feedback. In the midterm feedback one teammate suggested: “Inspiring a shared vision by spending more time explaining her stances.”  I needed to explain my ideas, similar to the struggles I faced when challenging the process. My improvement in explaining my ideas was noted when I received the final feedback and a teammate commented on my strength to: “Inspire a shared vision by making sure we were all on track for completing the same desired goal.”

My Leadership development plan had two aspects to it, being aware of my personal behavior and taking actions to directly influence people’s participation. Working on my personal behavior worked best for me. I asked questions to improve on the practice of challenging the process and was self-aware of my own emotions. Evidence that this aspect of my leadership development plan worked best for me was reflected on the results of my leadership development plan mentioned above where I improved in most of the areas I aimed to.

What did not work so much for me was taking actions to influence others. For example, in my midterm feedback a member wrote, “If I could tell you to improve on anything it would be in inviting other group members to speak in group meetings.” I focused on improving my own weaknesses to improve my leadership and failed to consider the importance my teammates input was on my growth.

I still need to work on not only focusing on my personal improvement but incorporating the rest of my team to help me improve. I plan to create some changes to improve my contribution to a team. As I wrote on my final individual critique, “I want to continue working on creativity and innovation by incorporating every team members input.”  I will do this by not being self-centered and focusing on improving my leadership development through my team.

Leadership development as explained in the articles and modules appears to be a simple task. Determine what it is you need to improve on, how you will improve it, improve it , and tah dah improvement! However this is not the case. It is not easy to change ones ways and incorporate new ways to improve leadership. Once changes are applied the response from the rest of your team is unpredictable. When I challenged the process I did not know what kind of response I was going to receive from my teammates. At times they liked that I played the role of devil’s advocate but at other times they were not too happy about my doubts and concerns. Applying what is taught in class to the real world is not simple as writing portrays it, but it certainly is a learning process.

This week my team and I met on Monday right after class to look over the feedback we received from the professor.  We concluded that we needed to gather further information to support our claim. A couple weeks prior I had attended a networking event that was similar to what we were proposing. It was the first time this event was held by both the Career Center and LCB Career Services. I proposed to meet with the people who ran the event to get further information relevant to our proposal. We set up an appointment the following day and interviewed the coordinator of the event. She was able to provide us with useful information that would help us support the claim my team and I make in our proposal.

The following day the entire team met and we worked on how to incorporate the information we gathered into our proposal. While doing this a bit of frustration started to rise amongst the team and I quickly mentioned what I observed and that allowed for everyone to check themselves and helped settle down the frustration.  I was also able to implement one of my action plan goals shortly afterwards.  While revising our proposal the team was starting to doubt the entire proposal and wanted to take a new direction. I reminded them we all had agreed upon a team vision “to successfully complete our proposal” and changing the direction of our proposal would not allow us to successfully complete it. We decided to stay with what we had initially and worked on improving it based on the professor’s feedback.

I left that night to a conference I am attending this week and planned to meet with them on Sunday when I would be back. I was glad I could provide a way for the team to gather information that would benefit our proposal and clarify the direction the team was going before my departure.