Leadership Journey Of The Writer: Self-Assessment And Improvement

Evolution of the Writer's Leadership Skills

Question:

Discuss about the Dynamic Leadership and Organization.

Leadership is actually a continuous process. Within time, a person who is ordinary can become an extra ordinary leader by developing skills, decision making power, traits and behaviors. If effective leadership is followed then improvement in the team work can be seen as well as the quality of work can also be improved (Greenfield, 2007). Leadership acts as a catalyst of the creativity of the organization. In order to achieve continues innovation, all leaders should establish environment conducive for renewal and build the culture which encourages organization’s creativity and innovation (Lanier, 2012). This essay explores the leadership journey of the writer. Earlier being a short-sighted decision maker, the writer had gradually become transformational leader. In the whole journey, the writer continuously evolved and developed the leadership skills. Leader is the one who can inspire others in order to make them identify their goals. The writer also strived to achieve the goal of the transformational leader.

Leadership can be best explained as a journey. It is actually an art of motivating, persuading and inspiring people so that they act towards achieving their goal (Bass, 2000). My leadership evolved as my life continued. Several situations, people and challenges made me look inside me and evolve with the qualifications which a good leader possesses. During the inception of my career, I had this idea that leaders need to create his followers which are set by the leader. But, with passing time, I gained experience seeing failure of the leading people and realized that a leader is the one who inspires people and help them setting their goal and also achieve them with the help of their own motivation.  During the initial years, I always used to control my employees. As a result, it always helped me to gain criticism and employee dissatisfaction. Hence, the loss is profitability too. During that phase, I also saw the employees who were adapting themselves to the control that I was putting on them and they were able to exercise it too. Then after some time, I found out that it was becoming impossible to challenge the growth in them and at the same time in the company. At last, I realized that it is important that a leader should always be democratic. He should let people share and communicate their views. It is said that a leader should always push his followers to achieve growth by making new innovation. To achieve that goal, the leader should always make sure that the employees should share their views and come up with the news ideas.

Self-Assessment to Identify Leadership Style

There is always a need of self-awareness for the growth purpose of the leadership style and the self-personality too. Assessment of self always provides a good insight of the personal style and the leadership style of any individual which helps in improving self-confidence and learns the trade of leadership.  There are a number of strategies that are used in the execution of the self-assessment. MBTI (Myers- Briggs Type Indicator) can easily be used for the identification of my own leadership style. Bales based on the theory of Carl Jung that MBIT model is only for self-assessment (Furnham & Crump, 2015). As per the divisions in the MBTI model, I set myself on the ISTP level. As per my own leadership style, the model can easily identify me as introvert. When I focus on my thoughts and the experiences of others and also myself, I consider myself as an introvert who is shy on some things. As time passed, I then realized that it is very important to concentrate on the listening than only on speaking.

For making decisions, I always prefer using my own experiences and the skills that I have learnt. I always believe in being a realist at the same time when I try to be a visionary for future. Hence, when I opt for any new strategy, I love being democratic because it is helpful in making me look at a bigger picture which is definitely hard for the person like me to sense personality. I need to develop N dichotomy when I make decisions.

In T-F dichotomy, I can easily place myself in the T position or thing position. I always prefer to take decisions which are based on the situations and sometimes on logic. As I already mentioned, that I love to be honest while I interact with the followers. I take impartiality and fairness as the most important value of life.

Lastly, for J-P dichotomy, I find myself as P or perceiving. I always like to take the challenges and I have no fear of the unpredictable situations. This helps in growing myself as a leader for the future too and also at the same time gives me confidence for implementing new innovations in life and in career too. Hence, I easily count myself as the ISTP leader.

Out of few, one of the partners realized that I am much more calculative then it is needed while I make decisions as a leader. Being calculative hampers my capability of risk taking. And, it is very important for the leaders to take risks in some situations. Risk taking help a leader in discovering the future. My partner’s feedback also was that my capability to take risks and my behavior is becoming too logical which is contradictory. Hence, I need to sort this out and make a subtle choice in between them in the way that it proves to be helpful for me in producing my leadership goals. By being too logical, I somehow once ended up taking wrong decision due to which I faced challenges in bringing one project in the organization and that hampered my image too in the eyes of my followers.

Feedback and Improvement

While I was mentoring my partner’s leadership style, I realized that he acts as a situational leader. This leadership style is helping him to modify his approach as the situation challenges him according to the requirements. To maintain a good culture in the organization, leaders should always try to maintain one approach instead of multiple approaches (Luthra & Dahiya, 2015).  Hence, I gave my partner this feedback that he should choose one approach of leadership in order to avoid any kind of risk. He should become considerate before giving any decision. He has a responsibility of the team and his followers. So, he should use trial and error in life but in case of other people responsibility, this could not be counted as a good step. I also suggested him from my own experiences that it would be good if he look at the bigger picture for the future growth. Mostly leaders have good intuition of their personal lives which helps them in creating their own future instead of moving on to the path which is carved by someone else. Their intuition helped them in becoming memorable till today (Velema, 2015). Therefore, I suggested my partner to become more intuitive in his leadership. I suggested him all this because he faced a lot of challenges by depending on situational leadership and he did not know in one or two situations to what exactly could be done. Hence, he should try to get out of that.

I have always accepted the fact that many organizational cultures have developed my pattern of leadership for today’s world. I believe that the culture of the organization influences a leader and his style too. Culture is all about norms, practices and the values (Erkutlu, 2012). Culture of the organization influences the leadership by identifying in between right and wrong. According to me, the good leader needs to have democratic views. Leader should make people aware of decisions and help them include in them (Girma, 2016). This will help in establishing faith and the security in the followers. With autocratic decision making, democratic attitude will never be the future of the leadership. I like transformational leadership style. In the bureaucratic organizational culture, it is always hard to exercise transformational leadership style. Yet, in an orthodox nation, innovative ideas are not much encouraged. Hence, it is very important to become democratic support transformational leadership style.

Communication skills always play an important role in the effectiveness of the leadership pattern. A good communicator can always be a good leader. The communication skills which I can apply are:

Role of Organizational Culture in Leadership

Listening: It is very important to be a good listener in order to become a good leader. If the leader is good with listening, he can gather more followers and their trust (Bourhis, Dube, & Jacob, 2005). This is helpful for the leader too as he gets to hear new ideas.

No Judging Attitude: A good leader will also be open for all emotional possibilities (Martins, pak, & Martins, 2013). I also need to become apt in having my emotions focused and attentive. This might help me to obtain confidence followers.

Open Channel for Communication: In leadership, it is important to have an open communication channel. By doing that, taking feedback will be helpful from the followers about the leadership that I follow and then I can direct myself according to that.

One on One Communication: Face to face communication is always helpful in knowing the followers more closely and I then might be able to help them and motivate them easily. One on one communication is always significant that way and will help me be successful in following transformational leader (Suher, Bir, Engin, & Akgoz, 2016).

Leadership theories and models are so many in numbers which helps identifying one’s own leadership pattern. The trait theory suggests that a leader should have some qualities which definitely should differ from the qualities of his followers. This theory always considers truthfulness as the major trait which is helpful for an effective leader (Silva, 2015). I might have this quality within myself as I always take decisions with integrity.

Behavioral theory on the other hand is the theory in which the actions of the leader differ from the followers. The traits which are inner will not help the leader to become effective if his behavior will not make him different from others (S. & R., 2014). If the structure is initiated as the character, leader becomes concentrated on conducting activities of employees and on the other hand, in consideration, leader will always focus on the welfare of the employees.

My behavior which is democratic makes me different from others. In my personal belief, democratic leader always gains confidence and trust from the employees. This helps in recognizing contingency incidents (Avolio & Gardner, 2005). I also have an employee centric approach which helps me to make myself a considerate leader.

Leadership theories always talks about many leadership styles. I personally prefer transformational leadership style. The leadership style which initiates change within followers is the transformational leadership style. These leaders are always self-motivated. I also have this quality within me. Being self-motivated always helps in motivating others. Transformational leader is always inspiring people (Metwally, Bishbishy, & Nawar, 2014). They just don’t believe in providing formal acceptances and treat followers as the valued individual. I need to have this quality within me. It will help me motivating employees. Transformational leader also has vision. They can easily communicate vision in their followers and can inspire them to be committed and have a purpose. I also want to develop intuition with me. Being ISTP leader, this is the quality that I lack in. Transformational leader is considered to be the best in today’s career world.

Importance of Communication Skills in Leadership

Ideally perfect leaders do not exist in the practice. Leadership can be considered as the progressive development (Mostovicz, 2009). Humans cannot be completely conscious of the emotions. So, we cannot completely mobilize them to understand them and attain their goals. From the discussion above, it can be concluded that my journey of leadership is from being autocratic to democratic transformational leader. Though, all the qualities of the transformational leader are not in me yet but I am trying hard to have all those qualities within me. This journey has made me realize that success can be easily achieved if a leader follows effective skills of leadership. By doing my personality assessment, I found out that I also have qualities of a good leader, although, it is a need for me to develop behavioral patterns to be inspiring other people.

References

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