The Essay On Self-Awareness In Leadership's Importance.

The critical analysis requires you to: 
• Present a brief review of your personal self-assessment findings. 
• Present a detailed critical analysis of the findings. A detailed critical analysis includes the use of 3rd party evidence and references to explain and support the meaning of your findings. 
• Reflect on your critical analysis, discuss what this means for you as a future leader or manager.
• Outline an action plan based on these findings to develop your leadership skills for the future.

Overview of Personality Assessment Tests

Self -awareness is the key to becoming a great leader and a manager thus it is critical to be self-aware and leverage on the strengths and minimize the weakness. The underlying purpose of being self-aware is to better understand oneself, and accordingly creates personal and professional goals. The purpose of the report here is to give a brief overview of the self-assessment of MBTI, Big 5 Personality traits, McClelland Needs Analysis and Thomas-Kilmann conflict model instrument. The report will also critically analyse the findings and reflect on the same. Towards the end, the finding will be linked to my future aspiration as a leader or a manager; additionally an action plan will be created on the basis of these findings to develop leadership skills for the future.

The Big Five Assessment measures the scores of an individual on 5 major dimensions of the personality; Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (Azucar, Marengo & Settanni, 2018).

The high score in Openness reflects that I am a creative, adventurous and an intellectual person who has fun playing and experimenting with ideas. High score in openness is also a reflection of my interest in art and culture.

The second personality trait of Conscientiousness explains the ability of the person to exercise and define self- control and discipline in one’s own life. My score here is moderate, which I believe is right as I have not much self- control and lack discipline.

This trait determines the inclination of the person to seek stimulation from the outside world, which is related to attention from other people. I have a high score in Extraversion which implies that I am friendly and have an active social life.

This is one trait which determines the tendency of a person to put others needs over their own. I have high Agreeableness which reflects that I have a high level of empathy and is always willing to help other people.

This personality trait determines the tendency of the person to experience negative emotions such as fear, sadness, anxiety and other such emotions. My score here is low which shows that I am least likely to be get affected by negative emotions (Gilpin, Olson & Alrashed, 2018).

INTP (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving) is one of the 16 personality types as described in the MBTI test. The general perception is that INTP types of people is deep thinkers, quiet and are involved in analytical thinking(Buchanan, 2017). According to the statistics, only 1 to 5 % of the people have this type of personality, which defines the uniqueness of a person (Furnham, 2017).

Big Five Assessment

Introverted-Prefer spending their time with close friends or in smaller groups.

Intuition-Always focus on the larger picture and stay away from micromanagement.

Thinking-Very logical in their approach, and based their logic on objectivity.

Perceiving-These kind of people keep their all options open and are limited due to the structure and planning.

My Dominant Style is OWL

My Back up style is Teddy Bear

• The conflict management style of Owl values goals and relationship while managing the conflicts in the organization. Owls are always focussed on finding solution to the problem and creating a win-win situation for both the parties. It takes a lot of time and energy to resolve the conflict, but the outcome is always positive (Einarsen et. al., 2018).
• The accommodating teddy bear always emphasize on human relationship while resolving conflict. This type of people compromise on their own goals, to deliver what the parties expect. The biggest advantage of this strategy is accommodating others whilst maintaining relationship with people (McKibben, 2017).

Based on the 15 question test, the answers and their scores are recorded in Achievement, Power and Affiliation in the following manner. The result can be summarized as:

(Source: Schauber, Hecht & Nouns, 2018)

25 22 18

The result here demonstrates that I have a high need of achievement. It is achievement and recognition which motivates me at the workplace, which is also the reason behind by innate desire to work hard towards my personal and organizational goals.

The result of my Big 5 Personality test can be summarized as:

Big 5 Personality test helps to ascertain the personality of the individual according to the 5 factors. These factors are important to ascertain the future career direction of an individual. This physiological test influences the behaviour, thinking style and emotions of people. The result shows that I believe in openness, the openness can be in every domain in the organization such as communicating with others, discussing a situation and others. Another factor on which I have scored excellently is extraversion, which implies that I actively engage with people and seek simulation from them.

This clearly reflects that my leadership style will be open, as I promote a culture of openness. It means that I would make sure that the culture of organization is open door policy and people can work and communicate in a free environment. At the same time, high score in extraversion is a reflection of my innate nature to involve people I decision making. I strongly value the contribution of other employees, and employee empowerment is another feather in my leadership skills.

My assessment of MBTI test is INTP, which is part of the 16 Personality traits. Only 1 to 5% of people display INTP type of personality. Some of the characteristics exhibited by INTP type of people, which includes me are:

• The people are reserved, quiet and thoughtful in their day to day activities.
• These types of people mostly rely on theoretical learning’s rather than experiments.
• These type of people are highly flexible and tolerant towards others views or comments.
• This type of people displays high level of logical reasoning and objectivity in their behaviour.
• These are the best thinkers who have the ability to think outside the box.

These types of people are mostly inclined towards science related careers. This also defines my leadership style, which is based on promoting and nurturing creativity and innovation in the organization and setting up a culture of questioning before making a claim. Such leadership style creates a positive and fruitful work environment for the employees.

MBTI Assessment

My conflict management style based on the assessment is Collaborative owl and accommodating teddy bear. This can also be seen as best of both the worlds, because as an individual I always look up for solutions to the problem, and how the solution can create peace among both the parties(Rahim, Civelek & Liang, 2018). The idea here is that I always look to create a win –win scenario out of any conflict by focussing on the goals and relationship between people. As an accommodating teddy bear my focus in on the human relationship, I at times compromise on my goals and interest to give value and advantage to other people. This is part of my compromising style in my leadership(Merolla & Harman, 2018).

The assessment for my leadership quality here is that I can be logical, fierce, collaborative and problem solving to maximize the output from a given scenario. On the flip side, if I have to compromise, I would keep the interest of other above me, which is exactly what an able leadership is in reality.

McClelland need assessment test, which explores the motivation level of people on the basis of Achievement, Affiliation and Power, is a perfect assessment to determine the rationale of motivation for a person. My assessment reveals that I value need for achievement over any other factor in my personal and professional life. This holds absolutely true for me, as I am a self-starter, I have high hopes and aspiration for myself, and I create goals to reach my destination in a systematic manner (Howard, 2017). I do not like mundane work, I always prefer challenging roles and tasks, and I also value feedback of other people, as it help me to analyse the lacunae in my personality and work towards them. Leadership in need for achievement can be translated to what I expect from other people, I would reward people who are aspirational, have big dreams in their eyes and want to make it big in life. I would help such people by giving those challenging roles and responsibilities which would help them in their present and future professional endeavours (Kou, McClelland & Furnham, 2018).

The action plan will be based on the SMART objectives I set for myself for a period of one year. These objectives will help me to create an action plan to achieve those objectives. The SMART objectives are created for one year, and it goes as:

• Be a transformational leader and communicate effectively the rationale for change in the organization and lead the wave of change uniting every employee and engaging them in the change process.
• I often tend to compromise and put the interest of other people over me, I have to work on changing this situation and convert it to win-win style.
• The third weakness which I want to overcome is increasing my score of conscientiousness. This reflects that I lack discipline and self- control in my life, the factors which are extremely essential for the success of a personal in professional and personal life.

Conclusion

Self-awareness is the key to become a great leader and a manager and in order to assess one’s own personality, plethora of online tests are available which helps an individual ascertain his own personality. Assessment of one’s own personality helps in finding the strength, which can be leveraged to create advantage for oneself, and can also be used to remove the weakness. The self-reflection here implies that I am a people’s person; I am a thinker and value objectivity, rationality and analytics in evaluating a situation or arriving at a decision. I want to me a transformational leader in the future, and make this world a better place.

References

Azucar, D., Marengo, D. and Settanni, M., 2018. Predicting the Big 5 personality traits from digital footprints on social media: A meta-analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 124, pp.150-159.

Buchanan, H., 2017. Matching communication styles to the personality of web visitors. In Personality, Design and Marketing (pp. 109-114). Routledge.

Einarsen, S., Skogstad, A., Rørvik, E., Lande, Å.B. and Nielsen, M.B., 2018. Climate for conflict management, exposure to workplace bullying and work engagement: a moderated mediation analysis. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 29(3), pp.549-570.

Furnham, A., 2017. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). In Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences (pp. 1-4). Springer International Publishing.

Gilpin, L.H., Olson, D.M. and Alrashed, T., 2018, April. Perception of Speaker Personality Traits Using Speech Signals. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. LBW514). ACM.

Howard, M.C., 2017. Let's Keep Looking for Other Roads: Improving Approaches to Identifying and Addressing Key Drivers. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 10(2), pp.258-264.

Kou, S., McClelland, A. and Furnham, A., 2018. The effect of background music and noise on the cognitive test performance of Chinese introverts and extraverts. Psychology of Music, 46(1), pp.125-135.

Lou, H.C., Changeux, J.P. and Rosenstand, A., 2017. Towards a cognitive neuroscience of self-awareness. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 83, pp.765-773.

McKibben, L., 2017. Conflict management: importance and implications. British Journal of Nursing, 26(2), pp.100-103.

Merolla, A.J. and Harman, J.J., 2018. Relationship-specific hope and constructive conflict management in adult romantic relationships: Testing an accommodation framework. Communication Research, 45(3), pp.339-364.

Rahim, A., Civelek, I. and Liang, F.H., 2018. A process model of social intelligence and problem-solving style for conflict management. International Journal of Conflict Management.

Schauber, S.K., Hecht, M. and Nouns, Z.M., 2018. Why assessment in medical education needs a solid foundation in modern test theory. Advances in health sciences education, 23(1), pp.217-232.