Final Blog Post- Personal Leadership Development
Overall Goals:
When I made my Leadership Development Plan in the beginning of the term I wanted to improve on a couple practices of leadership. The two main leadership qualities I wanted to accomplish were to Challenge the Process and Social Awareness. Challenging the Process was one of the Five Practices of Leadership and Social Awareness was an area of Emotional Intelligence. I thought if I can take action in these two areas my overall direction of leadership would improve by the end of the term. I measure my success in these areas by the impact I had on my group members through the evaluation reports and also on personal experience I had during the term.
Challenging the Process
As for Challenging the Process, I wanted to become more involved with group discussion rather than agreeing with every idea. Before this class I was hesitant to speak in groups and never thought about challenging other opinions. As I learned in this class this practice of leadership was a perfect opportunity to try this in a group setting. Ideas are always stated and agreed with because people fear hurting someone’s feelings, so this term I tried to improve some of those ideas by offering an opposite view. During the entire proposal process I would make sure that each topic that was discussed had multiple viewpoints. This allowed the group to recognize each opinion and then as a group we would settle on one idea. Sometimes I would challenge and my idea would be the one thrown out, but at least it allowed our group to generate more ideas than just agreeing with one.
During the mid-term evaluations I saw my improvements made right away. Although none of the group comments actually stated I was challenging the process, a couple comments talked about voicing my opinion when I disagreed. These comments reflected my progression in challenging the process. As we shift now to the final evaluations, my strengths as indicated by a couple of my team members was Challenging the Process. These comments gave me a measure of success on how I went about challenging the process throughout the term. My ability to challenge other opinions was seen as strength by my group so I feel successful in reaching this practice of leadership.
Social Awareness
I knew coming into this class that I needed to take necessary action to realize and understand others in my group in order for the group to create good chemistry. This goal was harder for me just simply because it is just one of those ideas that it hard for me to accomplish with my personality. I will always try and work on it and by having this attitude I feel like I will accomplish this goal. Saying that there were some positives that I accomplished over the term with social awareness.
The mid-term evaluations reflected my ability to respect the group always, but did not emphasize the signs of respect I demonstrated. Saying this it goes to show that my effort in social awareness still needs to improve and I recognize this. On the final evaluations, I took it as making progress but also still needing to work on this type of leadership. My feedback was both positive and negative in this area. I will continue to develop this leadership quality to make a stronger impact on my groups moving forward.
Process Success and Failure:
Success
Even though I was trying to improve these two ideas of leadership and saw success, there were also processes that did not work. As for what did work was how I came prepared to every meeting with questions or ideas I could bring up that could challenge the process. This process gave me the proper preparation when I arrived at meetings and topics came up that I had already noted down. If a group member had a different idea on a specific idea on the proposal I would challenge that idea with the notes I prepared before the meeting. Moving forward, I will use this same technique because it was a positive process that allowed me to excel in group meetings.
Failure
As for a process that did not work out was trying to remain positive each meeting by telling each teammate how they are contributing to the group. I thought this would encourage the heart so I planned on trying this each meeting, but never actually did it. I feel this could have impacted the team in a positive way and kept team members engaged by always giving them positive reinforcement. I feel like I was always too worried about getting tasks completed during the meetings that I looked past encouraging the heart. Looking back, I feel as if trying to complete the task in a convenient fashion can distract someone from actually acknowledging the quality of work being done. As I progress as a leader, I will continue to try and recognize effort that should be recognized.
Improvements to be Made
Moving forward, I still need to work on Social Awareness. During one of the last meetings I discouraged the conclusion of our proposal that one member worked hard on and it was not taken lightly. I need to continue to focus on what others contribute and make them know that I appreciate their effort. I feel like over time in my time at the business school and even after this skill will improve. Over the course of the term, I appreciated team member’s work, but made a few mistakes like the one mentioned above. No one is perfect, but I can learn from my mistakes and improve on those mistakes that will make me a better leader.
What Did I Learn
Over the term, I realized that people in my group demonstrated types of leadership that they did not recognize. When writing the peer and final evaluations I assessed areas of leadership that the group member did not even recognize. I learned after analyzing the way group members work is that leadership can just be the use of eye contact or even a handshake that people relate to either good or bad leadership skills. Saying this, I was critiqued on some leadership skills differently than I would have assessed myself. Leadership is a powerful word that can be interpreted in many ways and because of that I have experienced that people fail to recognize traits of leadership that they do indeed possess.
Although I did not perfect my goals over the ten weeks, I recognize that my leadership skills are still in the beginning stage and will continue to improve over time. As I continue my professional career I feel confident that the traits of leadership I have learned in this class will help me succeed when I am put in a real professional setting.