Developing Leadership Skills: Role Model Analysis And Self-Assessment Essay.

Choose a Suitable Leadership Role Model

A leader can be seen as a person who inspires and motivates people to work with enhanced productivity and also engages the working teams with the vision of the organization (Daft & Pirola-Merlo, 2009). Thus, leadership is one of the most important elements behind success of any business organization. Also, it is the leaders who have the inherent ability to push the teams and individuals to overcome their barriers and lead the organization to envision heights. The assignment here is a research report which is basically divided into two sections.

The first section will identify and discuss a suitable leadership role model from any industry and critically evaluate the leadership style of the person and the rationale for choosing the person as a leader. The report in the first part will also entail the qualities and traits which make the chosen person as the successful leader. The choice for leader in the first case is Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the reason for choosing Jeff Bezos is the change and disruption he has brought to not only the e-commerce industry, but has changed the entire landscape of internet shopping and marketing.

Part 2 of the report is more of a leadership self- analysis, wherein I would undertake 5 quizzes to identify three areas of my leadership self -analysis.  Based on which a leadership development plan will be created describing how I can work on these areas to become a better leader in the future.

Role model can be any person and preferably even from any walk of life, the underlying point here is role model is a person whom one can look up to for suggestion, ideas, inspiration, motivation, encouragement, shares common beliefs, ideas or even believes in their ideology (Ford & Harding, 2018) .A role model thus not only helps the individual learn, grow and develop one’s own capability, but also shows him the vision for sustainable development. Jeff Bezos, born on January the 12^th 1964 in Mexico, studied at Princeton University and later in the year started his own company Amazon in the year 1994. Jeff Bezos right from his schooling days had a very inquisitive mind, this lead him to pursue two Physics, computers and engineering, thus he received two degree (Dugan, 2017).

The point here is that Jeff Bezos as a person even in his college days was inquisitive, visionary and innovative in his approach. Jeff Bezos started his company as an online book seller under his basement and even parcelled books himself (Carini & Norman, 2017). Inception of Amazon can also be seen as an inspiring, while driving back from New York to Seattle, Jeff Bezos was stuck with the idea of starting his own business, he formulated the plan in his car and started with his business at the back of his garage, the rest now is history (Watkins, Fehr & He, 2018). It is not just the story of Jeff Bezos or the giant feet he has achieved in such a short time which makes him a great leader, it is the overall personality, brain, futuristic thinking, visionary approach and a knack of spotting things earlier than anyone could which makes him one of the greatest leader of all times (Kottler, 2018).

Identify Qualities that Make a Leader Successful

Jeff Bezos who had some working experience up his sleeves before he started with his company Amazon in the year 1994, although he still did not have much of an experience to conceptualize just the idea of online book selling and turn it into a full blown largest online store on the web. It was his vision, his ability to turn Internet to best possible use, business knowledge and ecosystem understanding and willingness to do something great for the world which made him one of the greatest leader worlds has even seen.  Amazon at present earned a revenue of over $ 180 Billion in 2017 and ships products over 164 countries (Bratton & Gold, 2017). Undoubtedly, Amazon is the largest e-commerce company and most certainly a threat to the retail giant Walmart. The facts and statistics clearly reflect that Jeff Bezos is most certainly an exceptional leader to start from nowhere to become the richest man on the planet earth, all this certainly speaks a lot about his leadership style (Fuller, Galvin & Ashforth, 2018).

Jeff Bezos is known to be a transformational leader, which is he displays transformational style of leadership which is much akin to the styles of Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Martin Sorrell, and Walt Disney among others. Transformational leadership is defined as the leadership approach when a leader works closely with the teams to create a vision, identify change and execute through inspiration and execute the change in tandem with the committed members of the group (Lang, Handley & Jablokow, 2018). Transformational style of leadership is reflected and lies within the growth of the company, the company which is a living example of the ability of Jeff Bezos to envision, inspire and innovate even when a lot of people did not believe in his vision. However, Jeff Bezos did not lose hope easily and was steadfast on his vision, eventually people reached out to him and so did the investors. The result is in front of the 7 Billion populations, Amazon has rose to become one of the largest company the world has ever seen, and the second only to enter $ 1 Trillion club, after Apple (Deprez & Euwema, 2017). The three elements which Qualify Jeff Bezos as the transformational leader are:

This implies that Business has to consistently reposition its business, whilst actively looking for and invest in other avenue of business. Jeff Bezos has been doing the same with Amazon, example being Amazon store, Amazon Web Services, online streaming content are some of the examples which shows the transformational leadership of Jeff Bezos (Belitski & Herzig, 2018).

Jeff Bezos has been successful in creating new products and services, for instance, Amazon Fire Stick, Amazon Alexa, Amazon Cloud services and more others are examples of Jeff Bezos’s innovation and creativity which is a harbinger of its new growth.(Borins & Herst, 2018).

This can be seen as from the successful numbers Amazon has posted, also tits stocks listed on NASDAQ are trading at an all-time high. This entire figure clearly reflects the profitability and success of Amazon (Lovelace et. al., 2018).

Undertake Self-Assessments to Determine Areas for Leadership Development

The vast knowledge which Jeff has acquired over the years owing to his experience makes him understand the change which is required in the organization. He unabashedly leads the change with his vision and involves the employees to attain the end goal of sustainability.

Vision Matters

Jeff Bezos is a leader who always takes a long term perspective; this is one of the biggest reasons that all its shareholders and stakeholders are happy with the performance and path of the company. The vision of Amazon is to build one of the most customer centric companies on planet earth, he wants to build a platform where customers can come to find and discover anything to everything that they would like to buy. The same holds true even today, along with the fact that Amazon obsesses over its customers by and large. Thus, it can be drawn that Jeff has a clearly articulated long term vision, effectively communicates with internal and external stakeholders and creates and makes product on the basis of his vision (Allio, 2018).

Any fool can make something complex, but it only takes a genius to make things simple, these words serve as a preamble to the above mentioned point. Great visionary Leaders like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and many others have this habit of putting their vision and ideas into the simplest of words. Jeff Bezos in his head go over his idea so many times, that he has the ability to state even the complex of things in the simplest of words for his employees to understand it at a deeper level.  Thus it can be said that clear communication results from deep thinking, simple explanation is the best explanation and using a mental model to improve the understanding of a topic are the key takeaways from Jeff Bezos successful leadership (Warrick, 2017).

Amazon right from the start was clear in its head about its vision to become most customer centric company on earth. It was this vision of Jeff Bezos which made him create policies and procedures in tandem with the likes and dislikes of the customers. He was focussed on the most important element of the business ecosystem, its customers and till date every employee in Amazon is customer obsessed (Cote, 2018). This goes onto prove the commitment of Jeff Bezos towards his vision and the culture he set for the organization.  Thus, it can be said that Jeff Bezos become hugely successful because he had a sold plan with himself, had a skin to deal with criticism and not to get wary with the signs of trouble (CHaston, 2017).

At Present Amazon has its offices in over 16 countries and ships and delivers products over 165 countries. The company is second to Apple to reach a valuation of $ 1 Trillion and Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the Forbes list. All this has been possible by a careful understanding and research of the market in which Amazon operates. Jeff Bezos adopts a GLOCAL strategy which stands for Going Global and Think Local, this strategy helps the company to collaborate with the regional players and also get the pulse of its audience before creating a shopping list for its customers (Davenport, 2018). The key takeaways here are that one should understand the market in which they are operating, get a hold on the future trends that can cause disruption or threat to the business and at the end predicting the customer journey with the company (Kennedy, 2018).

Create a Leadership Development Plan

I was born into an ear of Globalization, technology evolution and the emergence of Internet and social media. Thus, since start I had this curious nature and I was intrigued how Internet works. Hence, in the early days I got my hands on computer and on my own used to learn how to consume knowledge of internet, play games and others. During my school and college days I started reaping the benefits of online shopping. After trying my hands at E-Bay and other companies, I finally started using Amazon. It was ever since I became a fan of the company and I started researching on its story and its leader. Ever since, Jeff Bezos has settled in my head, and both of us being curious in nature, motivational and inspiring in nature have a lot in common. I have seen over 100s of interviews of Jeff Bezos in a bid to understand his leadership, his people skills, his business acumen and also his views on the competition and his own company. It is only after absorbing so much content on Jeff Bezos and Amazon, and knowing my strength and weakness I have started resonating closely with Jeff Bezos. All these reasons go ahead to make Jeff Bezos as my role model. Jeff Bezos in his recent interview tweaked the concept of work life balance to work life harmony, this helped me realize that it is really important to get the positive synergy from work to home and vice versa. Such a simple concept, but nobody could state it as simply as Jeff Bezos did, thus making him my idle role model (Sosik & Jung, 2018).

This section will first analyse the result of the 5 self- assessment I underwent to analyse my leadership skills.

This self -assessment test measures the scores of an individual on 5 parameters namely; Conscientiousness’, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

The high score in openness is a reflection of my creative, adventurous and intellectual fun person. It is also a reflection that I am inclined towards art and culture.

This attribute goes on to explain the ability of an individual to exercise self-control and discipline in one’s own life. Here my score is neither high nor low, which depicts I am a balanced person.

This attribute helps to determine the inclination of a person to look for simulation from the outside world; it can also be seen as the attention the individual requires from other people. A high score here reflects that I have a friendly attitude and a very active social life.

This trait goes on to determine the tendency of a person to put the needs of other over him. A high score in this trait shows that I have a high level of empathy and I am always willing to help others.

As the name suggests this trait determines the tendency of a person to experience emotions which are negative such as sadness, fear, anxiety and others.  I have scored very less hear which shows that I am least affected by negative emotions.

MBTI is another of its kind self- assessment test and the outcome of the test results in any of the 16 personality type for the individuals. My result here has been INTP and these kinds of people are mostly deep thinkers, quiet and much involved in analytical thinking. If statistics are to believe only 1 to 5% of the people display this type of personality trait, thus defining the uniqueness of a person.

Introverted-I prefer time spending alone with some close friends or families, not much of a social person

Intuition-This goes on to say that I do not believe in micro management, rather I look at the bigger picture.

Thinking- I use logical approach in any of the decision I make and do not take decision randomly.

Perceiving-I tend to keep all my options open and limit myself towards the structure and planning.

Conflict Style				Total
Forcing Shark/Competing	1	1	2	4
Accommodating Teddy Beer	1	1	1	3
Avoiding Turtle	3	4	3	10
Collaborative Owl	1	1	1	3
Compromising Fox	1	2	1	4

Here the style Dominant is OWL; also the back- up style is that of a Teddy Beer.

• The management style of conflict here is of OWL gives more emphasis on relationship and values while resolving a conflict in the business organization. As an OWL I am focussed on finding a solution to the problem on the lines of WIN-WIN and make both the parties happier with the outcome.
• The second style is accommodating teddy beer; here the emphasis is on the human relationship while resolving conflicts. These types of people mostly compromise on their goals to better accommodate other parties involved in conflicts.

It is a 15 question test, on the basis of which the scores of person are recorded in the category of Achievement, power and affiliation. The result along with the scores can be summarized as:

Achievement	Power	Affiliation
5	5	3
5	5	4
5	5	5
5	3	3
5	4	3

The result here clearly reflects that it is achievement which motivates me and I value achievement more than anything. This is also one of the strongest reasons why I am always inclined towards my personal goals.

Gallup Strength is another self-assessment quiz which determines the personality of a person into 5 signature themes. My assessment goes on as:

Deliberative-This goes on to say that I am a very careful person and also evaluate risk at each and every step of decision making. I am much closed when it comes to making friends and I mostly like to plan ahead for the goals achievement.

Achiever- This theme is also in accordance with my need for achievement, this goes on to prove the same that my day ideally with zero and by end of day I must and should achieve something to close the day on a high note.

Activator-I believe in action, hence most of the times I do behave like a catalyst in my group and initiate action towards a task.

Command-As mentioned earlier in the section, I am the kind of person who wants to lead, is vocal in his communication and does not feel shy or scared while communicating my views to any other person in the same or different group as me.

Strategic-This theme goes on to state that I often look for the most sought after solution rather than following a clutter route. It implies that my rationale is to mostly makes the things simpler than complex.

After taking these 5 quizzes I have got to realize the focus areas for my leadership development. The identified areas are:

• Conflict Management Style
• Exercising self-control and Discipline
• Communication Skills

What to do	How to do it	The outcome	Time duration
Self-disciplinary issues will be eliminated along with adopting new controlling measures for becoming a better manager in the future.	Conveys time management matrix will be used for evaluating the time consumed for performing each activity. In addition to this, a to-do-list will be prepared which will notify me as per their significance.	I will be able to prove myself as a self-disciplined and controlled manager.	12 Months
Root cause of the conflicts will be identified and decisions will be taken after hearing both the parties without favouring anyone of them.	According to my personality, I could consider myself as a big thinker and with the help of this quality; I always tries to implement the solution which could create win-win situation for both the parties involved in the conflict.	This will fill positivity at workplace along with developing positive image and respect amongst the teammates. This ensures success and growth of the organization.	24 Months
For being a transformational leader, openness in the communication will be adopted	Different communication channels will be implemented for enhancing engagement with the employees and relevant stakeholders to understand the cultural difference and other factors which are acting as the reason for conflict and disputes amongst the employees along with bringing change at workplace comfortably.	By this way, I will be able to make myself as an effective transformational leader.	12 Months

Conclusion

The research report here is divided into 2 parts; the first part entails the discussion on a role model for leadership whilst the second part is based on self-leadership analysis on the basis of the five self- assessment quiz. The first part goes on to say that I am personally moved by Jeff Bezos transformational style of leadership and I always look up to him to become a good leader in the future.  Based on the assessment result of MBTI, Big 5 Personality Traits, McClelland, Gallup test I got to realize that I have to focus on communication, keeping a high degree of control and discipline and conflict management style to fill up the lacunae in my personality and to excel at leadership role.

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