As shown above, my strongest practice of leadership according to this test is enabling others to act while my lowest is challenging the process. There’s a trend for me toward the practices of leadership that more lean toward interacting with teammates and helping them accomplish their tasks and goals as opposed the practices that more deal with coming up with ideas and thinking critically about a task.

Strengths and Areas For Development

In the past I’ve had a few leadership roles. In high school I was on student council, but I was a terrible leader. I didn’t do what I promised others I would do on time, I didn’t care about the vision of anything we were trying to accomplish, I didn’t encourage anybody to do well at what they were doing, and by doing all of this I set a terrible example for others. The only thing I did well was give commendation to people for picking up my slack. So really, I pretty much missed every single practice of exemplary leadership. Every single one of them.

I like to think I’ve come a long way since then. In the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to work on many group projects with other students here at the University of Oregon. One in particular that comes to mind is our Marketing 311 group project. Everyone in my group was very quiet and kept to themselves. I took it upon myself to facilitate conversation in the group for pretty much the entire project. I feel I was strong in helping to create a shared vision among all of us by creating a comfortable atmosphere and by asking questions that got everyone’s gears turning (so to speak). I also felt I was good at encouraging my teammates to do well at what sections they were working on and helping them with what I could help them with. I also feel I set a good example by showing up on time ready to work and get things done with a positive attitude while keeping with what everyone agreed upon. So basically, my strengths were modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, and encouraging the heart.

I feel I wasn’t so good at challenging the process and enabling others to act. We set off on our project, thought up one idea, and went with it. Very simple and nothing creative or boundary pushing at all. We didn’t try to learn anything from the project and we didn’t try experimenting and we didn’t challenge our abilities. We split it up into sections and chose the ones we were best at. I feel kind of guilty about doing this, but I also more or less dictated what my teammates slides (we were making a powerpoint presentation) should look like. I was very bad at challenging the process and even worse at enabling others to act, even though I encouraged them to act anyway. Encouraging without enabling is a harsh combo, and I feel like I may have come off as commanding as a result. It’s interesting how my highest score is the category I feel I am most weak in.

Action Plans

For practices of exemplary leaders, I’d like to work on  enabling others to act. I tend to dismiss teammates ideas for tiny details (only small details, never big concepts) and I think that’s because I want so badly for group projects to be perfect that I subconsciously an image in my head and believe that that image is what we need to create or else it won’t be as good. I want to work on stopping this by communicating what this “image” I see is to my teammates and then talk to them about what they think and maybe work on a compromise or even just accept that they’re doing what they think is best and maybe my “image” isn’t what is best for the group. I need to remind myself that tiny details are never important enough to completely dismiss a teammate for. I’ll attempt to measure progress by keeping a log of how many compromises (I can’t think of a better word than this, it makes it sound like I have to have a say but I have no other way of putting it into words) I make with my teammates over small details and also by asking my teammates if they feel I act dismissively towards them. It’s kind of an abstract thing to measure progress on, so I’ll do my best.

For emotional intelligence, I’d like to work on my social awareness. I feel that I’ve very rarely found myself legitimately empathizing with a teammate or coworker. I think this may be because I’m too focused on how I feel and what I’m doing to notice how others feel. Is that selfish of me? Or maybe just unobservant? I’m not sure, but it’s something I definitely need to get better at. I think maybe the best way to accomplish this is by learning more about my teammates other than just “they’re in the same class as I am.” or “they’re from this place.” I’m going to learn something new and interesting about each of my teammates every week to hopefully help better my understanding of who they are and why they make the decisions they do.