Leadership Development Plan (LDP)
Strengths
When it comes to leadership, I have several areas in which I am strong. The first area that I excel in is encouraging the heart. When I find myself in leadership situations, I make it a point to recognize the efforts of others and thanks them for their contribution to the group. For example, I make it a point to publicly thank members of my group who go above and beyond their portion of the group work. I find that when I do this, the people in my group feel better about themselves and my encouragement motivates them to continue engaging in the vision and activities of the group.
Modeling the way is another one of my strengths. I know that if, as a leader, I don’t show my willingness to respect my team members, turn in my work on time, or maintain a good attitude while under pressure, that the rest of my team is not going to be as willing to do these things either. Therefore, I hold myself to high standards of excellence in group situations so that my team is able to see my commitment to them. Then, they will hopefully show their commitment as well.
In regards to emotional intelligence, I find that I am good at managing my own emotions. I realize that, like the article pointed out, emotions can be contagious. As a result, I make sure that I deal with any anger or frustration that I might be holding onto before interacting with my team. I also make sure that my team can see my positive emotions (excitement, optimism, encouragement, etc) so that they might “catch” those emotions for themselves.
Areas for Development
The practice from K & P’s five practices that I need to work on the most is enabling others to act. Due to the fact that I hold myself to high standards of excellence in group situations, I often don’t trust the other members of my team to meet my standards. As a result, I either do most of the work myself or I end up redoing the work that my team already did. This limits my group’s success to my own abilities and does not leave room for synergy.
The area of emotional intelligence that I struggle with the most is social awareness. Many times I get caught up in my own emotions and don’t see the emotions of my team members. As a leader, this can be detrimental because I might do things that hurt or anger other people on my team and not even realize it. This can lead to misunderstandings and conflict within the team which keep us from achieving our goals.
Action Plan #1: Enabling Others to Act (Five Practices)
Currently, I am not successful at enabling the other members of my team to act. I don’t trust the members of my team to get things done or to do them well. I also don’t invest in them so that they have the tools and encouragement they need to engage with the team. In order to work on this, I plan to make sure that every member of our team has a voice by asking questions of them and drawing them into our team conversations. I also plan to offer my help to the other members of my team on their parts of the project but I’m going to make sure that I don’t take over their portions of the project.
Action Plan #2: Social Awareness (Emotional Intelligence)
Right now, I do not do a good job of recognizing the emotions of other people and how these emotions affect our team. Throughout this term, I plan to work on this area of emotional intelligence by encouraging open and honest discussion about ideas that are presented to the team. I will make sure that I ask every person for their opinion about possible ideas or strategies so that everyone’s voice is heard and I am personally able to see their emotions expressed. This will allow us to deal with any misunderstanding or conflicts and they occur and not allow them to continue to build and cause problems within our team.