LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PLAN (LDP)
Introduction
This assignment asks you to do an experiment—a one-term experiment on yourself. We begin with the hypothesis that leadership is an observable set of chosen behaviors, not a mysterious, innate quality. As such, leadership skills can be deliberately improved. Your task is to construct an experiment that improves your leadership in one of Kouzes and Posner’s “Five Practices” and one area of Emotional Intelligence.
You will start by engaging in self-assessment and then creating an action plan to improve specific skills. You will implement and adjust your plan during the term, report progress and obstacles through blogging on a regular basis, and you will report the progress you made on the final exam. You will not be evaluated on how successful you were in changing your behavior. Your overall evaluation on the LDP will depend on your efforts to change and your description of the learning process.
So, you will start with a self-assessment and action planning process described below. On your WordPress website, create a page titled “Leadership Development Plan” (or “LDP” for short). On that page, write your LDP as described below.
SELF-ASSESSMENT AND ACTION PLANNING
Start by reading 2 articles:
1. Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership – Kouzes and Posner
2. Emotional Intelligence – Daft (packet)
Next, complete the Student Leadership Practices Inventory Self-Assessment and transfer scores to the Scoresheet (insert this scoresheet on your LDP page). Note your scores. Which one is highest? This is the one you are most comfortable with. Which one is lowest? Do you see any trend in the scores?
Next, reflect on your own leadership within the framework of K & P’s five practices and Emotional Intelligence. Think back to times when you had to accomplish something with other people. Consider experiences in a job, club, volunteer position, class project, sports team, etc. Consider ways in which you helped the group accomplish it’s goals and things you could have done better. Frame your strengths and areas for development in terms of the 5 Practices and Emotional Intelligence.
For the first part of your assignment, describe these strengths and areas for development. Be specific and behavioral in your descriptions. What did you do?
After this reflection and self-assessment, you will write 2 action plans – a plan for one of the 5 Practices of Leadership and one for an area of Emotional Intelligence. You need to apply each of these action plans to your team project for this course. In other words, what do you plan to work on within this class project? This part of the assignment is described below.
Behaviors and Beliefs
When writing your action plan, you need to focus on behaviors and beliefs. This may seem obvious, but most self-improvement projects never get beyond good intentions because they are not concrete. We need concrete action plans. Moreover, we need to think about the reasons behind our behaviors. We act the way we do, in large part, because we think the way we do. Your plan should describe, concretely, the behaviors you do now and would like to do, and it should attempt to describe the beliefs that lie behind your current and intended behaviors.
For example, let’s say that you want to work on “encouraging the heart.” In groups, you tend to do your own thing. You’re self-motivated, and you expect others to be. For you, work is work. It’s not always fun, and things don’t always turn out as planned. But you’re able to manage your emotions, including demoralization, and you get impatient with people who are always complaining about being tired or bored or overwhelmed. Still, you recognize that you sometimes come off as cold-hearted, which is not the way you like to think of yourself. And you’re relationships with your classmates are often formal, even stiff, which is unsatisfying for you since you consider yourself a fun-loving, friendly person.
Now, what might an action plan look like for “you” as this person? Let’s look at behavior first. What do you do now, and what would you like to do? Notice that this is a different question than “What type of person are you?” You need to focus on observable behaviors, not personality traits. “I’m independent” is not an observable behavior; it’s a personality trait. Repeatedly expressing frustration about your team’s lack of progress—that’s observable. Spending most of your time typing on your laptop during team meetings instead of engaging your teammates about their opinions and feelings about the project—that’s observable. What behaviors do you do now, and what behaviors would you like to do?
Now, what beliefs might lie behind those behaviors? We’ve mentioned some already: work is work and people should manage their own emotions. What else? Maybe you really don’t believe in synergy, the ability of a team to outperform you. Through a history of bad team experiences, you trust yourself more than you trust teams. Or, maybe you believe that encouraging the heart is too personal, that it crosses a privacy border. These are the types of beliefs that could lead to your current behavior. If you really want to change your behavior, you will have to challenge your beliefs.
Action Plans
The form this experiment takes is up to you. Like any experiment or self-improvement plan, however, your action plan will need four ongoing steps: (1) seeing where you are now, (2) deciding where you want to go, (3) developing and implementing a plan to get there, and (4) measuring your progress and adjusting accordingly.
To make your action plan as practical and effective as possible, avoid being too:
• Vague. Goals and behaviors are often not specific enough (e.g., “Become a better teammate,” “Listen more”).
• Subjective. Measurement often relies too much on how you feel about your leadership rather than feedback from others about the effects of your actions (e.g., “I’ll feel more confident”).
• Artificial or mechanical. Some action plans have no emotional investment, reflected in “going through the motions” (e.g., “I’ll ask three questions every team meeting”).
• Disconnected from your team. Leadership behaviors are sometimes too disconnected from your team to allow for team feedback (e.g., “Talk more openly with my roommate”).
Most importantly: Pick something that you actually care about. Treat this as an opportunity to become more like the person you want to be and know you can be, not as an assignment for a class. You will get more out of the experience. See this document for a sample list of Leadership Behaviors for each of the 5 Practices of Leadership.
Evaluation
This assignment is a critical first step in your personal leadership development project for the term. For this assignment (worth 50 points), you will be evaluated according to:
1. How well you demonstrate understanding of the 5 Practices of Leadership and Emotional Intelligence. I will know you understand the concepts if you provide specific, concrete examples of experiences that accurately represent the concepts, and if your action plans describe changes that accurately target specific aspects of the 5 practices and emotional intelligence
2. How specific and actionable your action plans are.
3. How thorough and insightful your weekly blog posts are. Once this initial reflection and planning is done, your leadership development over the course of the term is up to you. I will be checking in on your progress through your personal web site. You will write a blog post at least weekly (due every Friday) about your experience in the class. At a minimum, relate each blog post to what you are learning about yourself through your Leadership Development Plan and your progress on the competencies described here. A blog post is a time to reflect back on the week and think about your experience and what you learned. A robust eportfolio will include more than one blog post a week. Sometimes I will prompt you on what to write. The rest will be up to you. Basically, anytime you notice something about yourself or your learning, write a blog post. When you get feedback from me or others, that would be a good time to write. See this page for tips on effective “blogging to learn” and what I will be looking for in your posts.
For each blog post, you should use appropriate “tags”. Tags are ways to organize and categorize information – they help the reader (for now, me and your classmates) find and comprehend your posts. For this class, use tags designated for each of the competencies, the following standard tags for specific items, and any other tags you think are relevant:
ei = any post about emotional intelligence
5ps = any post related to the 5 Practices of Exemplary Leadership
ldp = any post related to your leadership development plan
writing = any post related to your writing skills
presenting = any post related to your presentation skills
classID tag (for each post, use a classID tag in the form “ClassTerm” – for example, ba352sum12)
In addition to blogging regularly, you should also think about how you might want to showcase your competencies. Imagine that at the end of this class, you are going to demonstrate to a prospective employer how well you can perform the competencies learned in this class. How might you demonstrate to them, through your eportfolio, what you can do? You will submit your eportfolio as part of your Final Exam but it should be a work in progress throughout the term. Go here for more instructions on the eportfolio.
