During the course of the term, I have observed and learned many things about myself, and how I interact with others. I established at the beginning of the term that I wanted to improve my Challenging of the Process, and my self-management. Another small portion of my improvement was to work on Inspiring a Shared Vision. As my teammates mentioned in the first feedback session: “work on inspiring a shared vision, think more outside the box, be a little more open minded.” Those are all good critiques of what I needed to work on. This evidence suggests that what I decided during the first two weeks of the term lines up with what my teammates had observed in me during the first half of the course. It is encouraging to know that I was able to accurately pinpoint my weaknesses from the get go. The only caveat to that is those feedback responses were at the mid-way point of the class.

Obviously self-development takes a fair amount of time to start making changes, but I am a little disappointed that I did not seem to progress a fair amount during the first half of our project. I would say that my actions and behaviors I changed in the first half were listening more in group meetings, and changing my tone when speaking during those meetings. The reason I chose to listen more is that I could help to challenge the process. I am quite a vocal person, and I tend to command conversations in a group setting. I consciously worked to listen more so that I could ask those questions that would help develop our ideas for the proposal. When I would just speak freely to what we were discussing, I would lose perspective on what to think about, and was too busy thinking to infuse my own ideas rather than build on other members. In being aware of my tone, this really is an aspect I continually work on to manage myself. Group members are directly affected in how I present information, and how that information is framed. For example, when conducting research for our project, I could come back with the results in a very positive manner, but the results may not be actually helpful to our process. I could also relay the findings in a lower key fashion, which would maybe have less of an impact, at least on a surface level, but really be groundbreaking data. Granted, this level of self-awareness is hard to measure, but I feel that from the final feedback responses, I made less progress in this situation. Members of my team stated to me that I could be more enthusiastic about the class, and the project. In this situation it is tough because I do really care about the success of the group and our project, but I find it hard to convey that to others in order to inspire them. Schoolwork is the same at every level; my perspective has changed only slightly over the years. I have never been super excited about school related activities. I enjoy learning, but do not always find that in the format of courses I have taken. What I guess I am trying to say is that I have never been one to promote the fervor to love doing tasks for a grade. I think that is the main reason I struggle with inspiring others to work towards a goal that is seemingly fictitious in nature. With that said, I am still going to need to work on this aspect of my leadership development. I am certain that when I work in the real world, I will be faced with tasks that seem pointless and redundant, but need to be completed with precision and diligence. So in looking forward, I shall be aware of my tone and attitude towards projects and group work. The emotional intelligence aspects are much more difficult to work on compared to the 5 behaviors from Kouzes and Posner’s practices of leadership. These things are more engrained into my character, and will be harder to make drastic changes to.

I think the largest part of leadership not captured by these readings or this course is that leadership is not a one size fits all behavior. Everyone has their presuppositions of what great leaders should look like, but in reality, there are many different leaders with various leading styles. Some lead quietly while others are boisterous and charismatic. I would say that leadership in itself should not be completely confined by a definition, or research of academics. There is the one immeasurable characteristic of leading, and that is presence. Nobody in the entire world can measure an individual’s presence. There is no formula or way to teach presence. When someone can be commanding just by walking into a room, you know that they can bring many other attributes to a team. The fact that they have experienced enough to create the presence they exude in the first place should be evidence enough for people to look up to them. I could tell that by towards this conclusion of the project, a few of my group members would arrive and command respect just by their presence. It was great to see this and I hope to emulate their progress in becoming successful leaders.

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