Students and professors alike, welcome to my blog!

My name is Stephan Splitstoser and I am a junior here at the University of Oregon in the Lundquist College of Business. For this Fall term of 2014, one of the classes I am taking is BA352, which focuses on leadership and planning on both an individual and group level. I have already learned so much from Professor Bramhall’s teaching and I also learned a lot about myself after completing the Student Leadership Practices Inventory Self-Assessment. Here were my results after taking the 30 question assessment:

As you can see, my areas with the highest developmental potential  are Inspire a Shared Vision and Challenge the Process.

Tied for second is Model the Way and Enable Others to Act.

And lastly, my greatest strength is Encourage the Heart.

Inspire a Shared Vision

This may be seen as one of my primary areas for development because sometimes I get too caught up with what I’m doing and forget to convey my vision of the overall goal to those around me. For example, we were once assigned a somewhat tedious group project for my Military Science class and we were all stressed and frustrated with its parameters. I was so preoccupied with my task that I failed to remind my fellow cadets that although this assignment may seem pointless, it is shaping us to become better future officers in the Army and also better leaders overall. Had I reminded my group of our common goal and vision of being in such a prestigious program, we most likely would’ve had a better attitude during the project and completed it earlier.

Challenge the Process

This is a HUGE area for development for me and I can again reference an experience that I had in the ROTC program. I was in charge of my platoon which means I was the one yelling out orders in front of my peers. A part of Challenging the Process is being willing to fail and learn from those mistakes, and I have a huge fear of making mistakes in front of so many people. This fear resulted in me speaking without command presence, acting nervous, and thinking too much about what I could do wrong instead of what I could do correctly. Throughout this course I hope to become comfortable with taking risks and not beat myself up over petty failures and mistakes.

Model the Way

Modeling the way is extremely important because it makes sure everybody is on the same page and on board with what has to be done. It’s about conveying to the group what your guiding principles and personal values, as well as setting the example for the rest of the group. I sometimes fail to do this in group projects when I forget to mention how I believe that everyone should do their own equal part for the group and also that I would personally like to receive a high grade on the project. I would also say that I have been capable of leading the way. I have been the leader of many workouts and field training exercises in the ROTC program and it is extremely important to have an upperclassmen there to show the underclassmen how to perform tasks correctly and proficiently.

Enabling Others to Act

An essential part of leadership is the development of others. This cannot be done with a leader who never shares his power and never creates a sense of shared ownership of the task at hand. Looking back at a project that I completed in Management 321, I can see now that I definitely failed to enable some members in my group to act. It was a group of six and three of the members were in my fraternity and the other two were international female students studying abroad. What happened was us four dominating all of the group work without taking the time and seeing what the two girls had to say. When we failed to do that, not only did we miss out on their insight, but we also ended up doing more work than we really needed to do. Enabling others not only helps develop those being enabled upon, but it will also improve the group overall.

Encouraging the Heart

I believe that this is my strongest attribute because I can easily see how it affects the attitudes of a group. Whenever I’m struggling in a workout and someone tells me that I’m doing an amazing job, I step back from the edge of failure and start to give more effort. When somebody tells me how hard I’m working in school and that they’re impressed, I become happy and continue to study and work harder. From these personal experiences I began to give out the same praise so that they too can persevere when the going gets tough. This past summer I read a book titled How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and he touched on this subject multiple times. He explained that just a small amount of genuine praise and recognition can do wonders in the world of interacting with people. It is important to be genuine with your praise and to not twist it into flattery, however even a little false praise can help somebody get through hardships. As we say in the Army, “False Motivation is still Motivation”.

Action Plans

1. For this group project I am really going to focus on Enabling Others to Act. If we are discussing a certain aspect or plan of our project, I am personally going to make sure that everybody is heard. We have a few shy members in our group but their thoughts and ideas are still critically important to the success of our project. So after one person shares their idea, I will go around person-by-person to get their thoughts on what we’re talking about. I feel like that I sometimes dominate conversations so I need to understand when my time is up and share the power with others.
2. My goal in terms of Emotional Intelligence for this term is to improve my use of empathy and increase my social awareness. I think that it is very easy to hear what somebody says and simply brush it off because you either don’t agree with it or you’re just too caught up with your own ideas. So for this term I am going to make sure that once somebody has proposed an idea to the group, I will expand on it whether or not I agree with the idea. A part of empathy is being able to understand how someone feels and where they’re coming from. If you don’t agree with what they said, ask why and see what they believe. One might find oneself agreeing with a person after they presented their thought process. I will also make sure that everybody is on board with what the group is doing. If we make a decision and I notice a group member looking down at the table with a disappointed look on their face, I will ask for their thoughts and make sure that he/she has a say in the matter.

Thank you for taking the time to read my Leadership Development Plan!