Understanding of Effective Leadership Models

Introduction

During Fall term 2013, I enrolled in a course called BA 352: Leadership and Communication. One of the main goals of this course was to improve my understanding of effective organizational leadership so that I could apply it in the team project that the class was centered around. As a result, I was exposed to several important leadership models throughout this class that I not only read about, but that I also applied to my own experiences with the team project. Two of these leadership models were Kouzes and Posner’s Five Exemplary Practices Leadership Model and the Emotional Intelligence Model.

The Five Practices model focuses on a leader’s ability to model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart. The emotional intelligence model focuses on the ability of a leader to understand and regulate their own emotions as well as understand and regulate the emotions of their subordinates. Throughout this term, my understanding and application of these leadership models has both increased and improved as demonstrated by the following artifacts.

Artifacts

At the beginning of the term, I did not have much context with which to frame the concepts of leadership or communication. As a result, my views on these two subjects were a combination of random ideas that I had heard in various places and my own experiences. Learning about these established leadership models gave me the ability to frame these ideas and my own experiences into a model that made sense and filled in the gaps of my previous knowledge.

I was first exposed to these leadership models when I created my Leadership Development Plan (Artifact #1) at the beginning of the term. In order to develop this plan, I was required to read and interact with excerpts from Kouzes and Posner’s book about the Five Exemplary Practices of Leaders and to take a self assessment test to determine which practices I excelled in and which I should improve in. I was also required to read about emotional intelligence and identify which areas in this model I could improve in as well. This laid the foundation for understanding and applying these leadership models for the rest of the term.

Throughout the term, I documented my progress in understanding and applying these leadership models through reflective blog posts. For example, early in the term I wrote a blog entitled Improving my Emotional Intelligence through the Design Workshop (Artifact #2) that discussed how my understanding of the emotional intelligence leadership model was deepening. Before participating in the design workshop that I describe in the blog post, I had not truly understood the importance of being aware of the emotions of your teammates, of the user for your product, and of your audience. However, as I began to write this blog post and reflect back on my experiences in the design workshop, I began to make connections between the quality and usefulness of the product you are designing and the user’s emotions regarding the product. Often times, the user’s emotions reflect an important need in their life and by identifying this need you are able to make a more useful product.

Another example of my deepening understanding of these leadership models is my blog post entitled Silence is Golden (Artifact #3). This blog post describes a class activity that helped me to understand the practice of enabling others to act from Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices leadership model. In this class activity, I was only allowed to observe my team’s discussion about prototyping, but not participate. This was extremely difficult with my personality and was not at fun experience at the time. However, later when I was preparing to write the blog post, I reflected on how my team was able to come up with some great prototype ideas without my help and how my absence from the discussion allowed some of my other teammates more time to talk about their ideas than they normally would have. This reflection deepened my understanding of the of Five Practices model, specifically in relationship to the practice of enabling others to act.

Finally, by the end of the term I had improved in my understanding of these leadership models to the point that I could not only see how they impacted my personal leadership ability, but I could also see how they impact the leadership ability of my teammates. This is shown in Artifact #4 which is a Letter of Recognition that I wrote to a member of my team. In that letter, I praise this team member for her ability to enable others to act as well as encourage the heart. At the beginning of the term, I might have either taken her actions for granted or not even realized the traits that they represented. Now that I am familiar with these leadership models, however, it is clear that she was demonstrating leadership ability throughout the term and she benefited our team and our final project.

Conclusion

My understanding and application of the leadership models that I learned, such as Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices Model and the Emotional Intelligence model, has both increased and improved. Now that I am aware of what these leadership models are and how their principles impact team dynamics, I will continue to look for them in the members of teams that I am a part of later on in my college and professional career. I will also continue to demonstrate them as part of my own leadership ability in order to increase my effectiveness as a leader.