BA 352

Final Blog Post

December 10, 2013

In order to develop my leadership skills, I set some goals at the beginning of the BA 352 class regarding K&P’s 5 Practices of Leadership and Emotional intelligence. I made a leadership development plan at the beginning of the term highlighting my weaknesses as a leader and a plan to improve them. Under K&P’s 5 Practices of Leadership, I noticed that I am deficient in modeling the way and challenging the process. Specifically, I made it my goal to receive feedback well, build consensus for my team which would make it easier to challenge ideas and the process, and to exemplify my values to my team members. For emotional intelligence, I wanted to focus on self-awareness; I can get frustrated easily in group projects, so I wanted to develop self-awareness on how my actions and attitude affected the team attitude and progress. In order to improve upon some of my underdeveloped leadership skills under modeling the way and challenging the process, the team had feedback meetings after a couple of our regular meetings to discuss our progress, reiterate our goals, and give feedback to one another. Also, I challenged myself to step up and contribute to the team meetings in ideas and questions about others’ ideas. These meetings were successful at allowing for feedback that I specifically knew I needed to work on. Additionally, it added more focus and positivity to the group as we discussed how much we had progressed and learned in the class. Challenging myself to contribute ideas was somewhat successful, I was given feedback that I still needed to contribute more. To work on my goals regarding emotional intelligence and self-awareness, I decided to take time after each meeting to reflect on my attitude and how it affected the group. This self-reflection often occurred in my blog posts. It was successful in helping me curb some negative feelings I had in group meetings, which would bring down the morale of the group; also, my self-reflections enabled me to see frustration within different group members. I could understand their frustrations and help to ease them. My work in self-awareness also strengthened my awareness of others.

The primary aspects that worked for me from my leadership development plan were the self-reflections. I primarily vented my frustrations through my blog posts. One of my posts was one that showed how frustrated I was doing the proposal. These self-reflections allowed me to self-reflect on how my attitude was affecting that of the group as a whole. The main aspect of my leadership development plan that did not work was setting goals to challenge the process better. The goal-setting was too abstract that I would often forget about it. My goal setting did not have the effect I desired; my evaluations consistently said that I could have “contributed ideas more”. I plan to gain more confidence that will allow me to challenge ideas more.

In order to become a more successful leader beyond this class, I need to work on challenging the process further. I plan to work on my balancing inquiry and advocacy by trying to consciously think about inquiring more in my group projects. Before meetings, I will set individual goals for myself to develop my leadership skills. In my finance group this term, I worked on challenging some of the conventions in the team near the end of the term. We ended up being more successful on the projects because I challenged the way group members were looking at some of the problems. Beyond the course, I plan to gain confidence in some of my ideas; part of this confidence stems from knowledge of the material, so I will make sure to gain a thorough understanding of some of the ideas in the group work. Also, I want to work on gaining the confidence to speak up in my groups, and that will come with practice working with groups in later semesters. I also want to continue my team feedback sessions as well as my individual reflections to become even more proficient at accepting feedback.

By working with my team and working on developing myself as a leader, I have learned a few things about leadership that were not emphasized in any of the articles I read. The first thing I learned was that leadership is not just about the individual. The articles emphasized individualistic ways to approach leadership development, but working with my team showed me that sometimes leadership transcends the individual. To be a successful team, you have to have a mixture of different leadership types. The second thing I learned was that sometimes focusing on improving one aspect of emotional intelligence or K&P’s 5 Practices of Leadership helped to improve a different aspect. For example, I learned how to become self-aware, which also allowed me to view other’s frustrations and become aware of others and their attitudes.

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