Leadership Development Plan
After taking the Student Leadership Practices Self Assessment and reading the two articles that were assigned, I learned that my strongest attribute is Enabling Others To Act, while my weakest is Inspiring a Shared Vision. I think that’s pretty accurate since as I was taking the test I was imagining myself in a work environment rather than a school or home environment.
When I think about the way that I lead, I see myself as someone who encourages people to be the best they can be. I also like to think I bring a positive and upbeat attitude to every project I work on to help motivate the people around me. A recent experience I had that I believe I showed some leadership qualities in was at work when we were working towards winning our fourth quarter company wide competitions. I kept a positive attitude about our success in the competition even when things weren’t looking so good for us, which highlights my emotional intelligence. I motivated my co-workers to keep trying even when it seemed like we were going to lose in order to try and Inspire a Shared Vision. In the end, we did end up winning and we have a big party waiting for us in a few weeks. One way I could’ve improved during those last couple weeks of the competition, is not giving up once I had reached my own personal goal. Once I hit that number that I had been reaching for all quarter, I felt like I could breathe again when my branch really needed me to keep trying in order to better the entire branch. I was a little short-sighted in that regards, and did not Model The Way as described in K & P’s Five Practices. Challenging the Process is something that I would also like to work on being that usually my brain is just wired to do what I’m supposed to do and not break away from the norm. In order to stand out in your life you’ve got to make that additional effort to try something new and different.
K & P’s Five Practices Action Plan
The one practice that I would really like to improve on personally, is the Challenge The Process practice. In my daily life, I often find myself just going through the motions and not really taking initiative when I see that there is a problem. I’m just trying to get through the day so that I can go home and relax in my pajamas. This attitude is not allowing me to live up to my full potential, and I realize this even though I do nothing to change it. My beliefs are that I don’t have enough power to change the processes in my life. I think that’s what is really holding me back is my lack of confidence. I often will see a structural problem and have a good idea pop into my head, but then say nothing because I don’t think anyone will listen to me anyways. I don’t see myself as someone who has authoritative qualities so I just let others do the decision making.
Right now, I’m at a stage in my life where I feel unimportant to society. I don’t feel as if my actions or ideas will make any bit of difference in the grand scheme of things. I would like to change this mind set by gaining more confidence in my ideas. It’s hard to do this on your own, I find myself gaining the most confidence from compliments that people give me randomly, without any prompting from me. In order to do this, I will take the time and effort to spend more time soaking up the information around me. By doing this, I will be creating a better situation for good ideas to flow into my brain, and the better the idea is, the more confident I will become to share it. Specifically, I will ask more questions about how things work, for example at work when I don’t fully understand a process, I will simply ask how it works and spend some time milling it over in my brain. Hopefully this exercise will train my mind to think a little deeper about things that matter. I will be able to measure this by seeing how many of my ideas are put into action or not. I could also simply measure how many times I speak up when I have an idea I think is worth mentioning. With this plan in action, I should see a change in my behaviors and beliefs!
Emotional Intelligence Action Plan
Most of the time, I like to think of myself as a positive thinker. Unfortunately, when I really sit down and think about it, my days are often fueled by bad thoughts and energies. Often, my brain is consumed by thoughts of mediocrity and failure. I’ll think about how much I have to accomplish and get overwhelmed, or I’ll think about how hard it is to make new friends and connections at a new school. My beliefs are the opposites of my behaviors in this instance however. I honestly believe that I can succeed and I can make friends, but my negative thoughts sometimes overrun those beliefs. In a team setting, this skill of self-management is extremely important because your team members are depending on you. I feel as if my efforts in teams are satisfactory, but they could be improved if I just had a little bit more positive thoughts about my work. As stated in the article we read, “Leaders learn to balance their own emotions so that worry, anxiety, fear, or anger do not get in the way, thus enabling them to think more clearly and be more effective.” I need to let myself be free of those negative thoughts so that I may be able to clear my mind and think efficiently.
I’m starting this experiment out as someone who lets negative thoughts get the best of them, near the end of this experiment hopefully I will have good news to report! I would love to see that my positive thoughts and energies are so strong that they affect other people. I want to be that person that someone can just tell radiates positive energy, that person that’s joy and love for the world is contagious. In order to achieve that goal, I will plan on waking up everyday and thinking about what I’m grateful for. I’m even going to set an alarm on my phone especially for that. Once I change my inner most thoughts, I can change the world. Measuring this change will be hard, once again, but I can do so by observing the people around me and how they behave when I’m around. I will try and keep a record of certain people’s behaviors in order to document those changes or non-changes if that is what happens with this experiment.