Leadership Development Plan

Reflection on self-assessment score:

There is definitely a trend exists in this table. The three highest scores are “Enable others to act”, “Challenge the process”, and “Model the way”, 21, 20, and 19 respectively. The other two scores are “Encourage the heart” and “Inspire a shared vision”, I scored 14 and 12 only. The scores above truly reflect my personalities and behaviors in a team.

Model the way:

I am a kind of person that really concern with consistency of my personal value and the value of the whole team, and I always willing to put as much effort as I can to work for a specific goal. For example, I took BA 361 several terms ago and our final project is to complete a 25 pages analysis for a selected country within a group of 5 members. I used and encourage the rest of team to use a sample essay from past as our writing example.

Inspire a shared vision:

This aspect is my weakness. I am unaccustomed to be optimistic before a goal accomplished and I do not usually talk to team members about things in future. Still using the example from BA 361 class, even though we finally got a good grade on the final assignment, I still think I failed in inspiring a shared vision. Firstly, we chose a “wrong” country, because none of us familiar with that. That is result from nobody stands out and confirmed a shared value of the team. Everyone wanted to be nice and let the intuition dominated our choice. Secondly, because it is a 25 pages-long essay, all of us were over pessimistic from beginning. Nobody thought of there was only 5 pages work for each member.

Challenge the process:

I consider myself as a challenger in a difficult situation. Even though I am not that optimistic during the working process, I will definitely try all possible way to solve the problem. An example from my voluntary education supporting program can show this. When I was a voluntary math teacher in an impoverished village, the villagers are surprisingly uneducated. This does not suggest that they are not good at science, but means they do not have a general idea of this world. They are willing to believe widely known commercial fraud instead of investing in education. Then I and the other two college students formed a consulting team and propagate basic knowledge that can avoid from being cheated. The process is unbelievably challenging. We have to start our program from the most traditional but ineffective way – door to door propaganda. Luckily, we finally have seen the village change little by little each day.

Enable others to act:

I got the highest score in this category and I do believe that I am a cooperative person and I totally respect the whole team. I had a short part time job at KFC in China. And I totally experienced the value of respecting and supporting team member. Because there was a lot of people applied job at the same time and the job does not require too much professional skills, the human resource department of local KFC set up a scenario which required us to come up as many as possible way to solve a board game. Then candidates were divided into a group of 7. That was the most impressive experience that I realized that people from different place, age, education background and past experience can quickly work in a positive atmosphere while approving others’ suggestions.

Encourage the heart:

This is the aspect that I think I have done the worst job so far. The other side of my willingness to work hard for a group is that I do not usually speak out loudly in a group.  There was another accounting class required us to work in group and write an analysis about a company. The outcome of that teamwork experience is sad. Because all members are too shy to speak up and give feedback or compliment to team member, a girl found professor and ask to withdraw from this group, because she thought this group is too “depressed”. Actually, each one of us was doing great job, we got the highest score in that project in the class. This loss is completely avoidable from my perspective.

Emotional Intelligence:

In terms of emotional intelligence, I consider myself as a good participator rather than a good leader, because a good leader requires not only awareness and management for him/her, but also requires awareness and management for others. And that is my problem. I can do so much on my own but I am unable to communicate other in an effective way. However, in terms of the emotion for a group, I enjoy the trust and work with group members.

Action plan:

  1. I rank myself in the middle of the list in terms of 5 practices. I decided to move up. And the following things are what I plan to do. Think more before I speak. Because I am afraid of making mistake, the only way to conquer this is to be fully prepared before I start a conversation. Each time I do this, my confidence will increase a little more. Next, find group member and has private conversation. Starting with private conversation can help me compare my value to their value, which is the other way to be more activated.
  2. To get better in emotional intelligence, my plan is to learn how to communicate with people starting from my friend. And then try to communicate with acquaintance, finally with a random guy on the street. The level of difficulties increase gradually, so that I can get used to it quickly.

 

 

 

The self-assessment score transferred from spreadsheet:

Self                              Rank

Model the way                                                19                                3

Inspire a shared vision                        12                                5

Challenge the process                         20                                2

Enable others to act                            21                                1

Encourage the heart                            14                                4