Self-Assessment Scoresheet: SLPT-Self Survey

Self-Assessment

On the Leadership Self-Assessment Survey, I ranked equally high in both “Enable others to act” and “Encourage the Heart”. These results weren’t surprising to me, because I actively engage both practices on a daily basis—one, as the women’s team captain of the University of Oregon Club Rowing Team and second, as a varsity coxswain.

 As a captain, I strongly believe that successful teams encourage collaboration, growth, and trustworthiness. Working with a women’s team is especially unique, because we tend to be more emotional and opinionated about the ongoings of the team and of individual teammates. Sometimes when morale is low and people are exhausted, emotions can run high and arguments will ensue. As a result, I must restore confidence, pride, and support back to each rower on my team. Every week, I will take time to ask each teammate about her health, stress level, and workload to make sure she isn’t overwhelmed. I found this to be extremely successful in maintaining positive relationships with my teammates. It has taken me two and a half years of experience working with rowers to understand that the mental strength of overcoming fatigue, pain, and exhaustion is more powerful than any muscle in your body. With that in mind, I recognize their limitations, but also motivate them to work toward being the best they can be. Today, I am making progress toward creating an environment where dedication and hard work is celebrated and recognized.

Unfortunately, one of my lowest scores is “Model the Way”. In the past, I always assumed that speaking too much of your values and your opinions was a negative trait. I didn’t want others to feel that I was pushing or forcing them to share the exact same point of view as me. I realize now that there is a difference between imposing values onto others and sharing values with others. Watching my current and past coaches speak out to our team gives me some insight on how that can be done. They often praise the uniqueness of our men’s and women’s teams, because we care for each other and work together to reach mutual goals. When they speak, I can clearly understand the standards, goals, and morals they want this team to uphold. From this term on, I will work on expressing my voice and values in order to “Model the Way” for my team.

Action Plan—Applied to Team Project

Model the Way

I want to focus this action plan on being able to set more priority to the assignments, projects, and tasks that are time sensitive. I want to ensure that the work I volunteer for is completed accurately and punctually. Throughout my leadership experience, this area of focus has always been a downfall for me. With a new action plan, I will take steps during the term toward improving schedule planning and time management.

Current Behavior

In a team environment, I am very eager to take on assignments and head projects. I usually have many ideas about how a certain task should be implemented and what the results should be. I am a brainstormer, but on occasion, I lack the discipline to accurately follow through with the assignment I volunteered for. To me, the idea generating portion of a project is much more exciting than the implementation portion.

Goal

My goal for the rest of this term and the rest of my leadership career is to practice “follow-up” skills. This means I need to actively finish projects I start, understand the time constraints and manage my plan accordingly, and complete the projects as accurately as possible. “Follow-up” also encompasses the promises I make to my teammates. I want to pursue the promises I make to my teammates by asking questions if I don’t understand their request completely, complete the request to the best of my ability, and report back on the results.

Action

In order to successfully complete my action plan, I will take initiative on a series of tasks to maintain continual awareness of my behaviors:

• Create “To Do” lists and agendas for my tasks.

• Take on a fair share of the work load, but not more than I can handle.

• Organize documents into finished and unfinished tasks.

• Write down promises I make to my group members

• Request feedback on progress from my teammates

• Organize my daily schedule into a calendar.

Relationship Management

For the most part, I consider myself to be very self-aware and socially aware. I reflect on my feelings and the actions of others on a daily basis. I enjoy evaluating a conflict in order to better understand the interactions and roles of a person’s personality and the situation. Even though I believe I have strong emotional intelligence in those two aspects, I want to work on better carrying it into the relationship management component.

Current Behavior

Through my leadership experiences, I have maintained many positive relationships with friends, family, peers and authoritative figures. I use my skills in social awareness to create unique bonds with specific people in my life, but I currently struggle with finding balance between having authority as a leader (professionalism) and creating deep personal relationships within my team. I understand that teams work best when each member genuinely cares about every individual on the team, beyond the means of the team goal. My leadership experiences will progress significantly once I learn how to create cohesion, and influence compassion and communication throughout my team.

Goal

My goal for this action plan is to create positive relationships by having more emotional understanding of my peers and applying it to developing a stronger team.

Action

In order to successfully reach my goal, I will work on a series of practices to be more aware of my teammates emotions and how those can improve our team operations.

• Listen openly to teammate opinions

• Create group cohesion through quickly resolving conflicts

• Give productive criticism/critique

• Be sensitive to other teammate’s beliefs and opinions

• Create an open environment for individual expression of ideas