Essay: Self-awareness In Leadership - Key Importance In Success." (70 Characters)

Upon completion of a variety of self - assessment instruments, you are encouraged to develop a deeper understanding of the importance of self-awareness in relation to leadership. Your learning journal is based on your insights and provides you with an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which the issues and concepts raised in the course affect you personally in your role as a manager and leader.

Understanding the Significance of Leadership

Effective Leadership has become inevitable to excel and achieve personal and professional success. Charry (2012) elaborated on the growing interest of academicians in understanding leadership during the early part of the twentieth century. In the current era, the corporate environment is undergoing major transformations as the need for better leaders is growing pace to meet the global challenges. It goes well with the transformational leadership theory which states that leaders are capable of creating progressive changes in the individuals to achieve excellent results for the betterment of fellow people as well as a group (Warrilow, 2012). However, I felt democratic style of leadership would be best suited for my company. Democratic style of leadership seeks the contribution of other team members to make crucial decisions (Bhatt et al, 2012). Over the last one year of my tenure as the project lead of ABC organization, I have come across various challenges to meet my professional goals to carve a long term career. I had 8 employees under me including some of my closest colleagues in the company. I thought it would be easy to manage the colleagues but I was up for a learning lesson in my career. I consider myself to be an effective team player as my values and beliefs have guided me well. Being a problem solver in my professional life helped me diffuse most of the issues. However, I witnessed some hard wired issues with some employees. Be it with the team members or my manager, I used my strong interpersonal skills to seam through most of the arguments. Salacuse (2008) stated that successful leaders are inadvertently good negotiators. But I felt I hat I failed to grasp the gravity of the issues between members. For instance, there was a conflict in my team to replace a team member given his temperament issues with other members. The guy had specialized skills in handing the coding, and was highly recommended by the manager. I had in-person discussion with all the members to address their issues. In fact, I conducted many group activities to help them bond during the spare time. However, the simmering tension lingered on almost throughout the remaining course of the project. It even impacted the pace of the project at one point. The management expected me to achieve the target whilst my individual focus was on resolving the issues within to fulfil the organizational expectations. So I kind of felt trapped in a vicious cycle. Still I maintained my calm and made consistent efforts to hold the team members together to achieve the target.

Choosing a Leadership Style

As a project lead, I had gone through my performance report in the last quarter to understand my expectations of my organization, and determine the skill gap. I had the desired knowledge and skills as required for the project. I was pretty confident of excelling in this new role as well though leading a team was something new for me. I discussed it with my manager and he had high expectations from me as a leader. However, after the project was over, I had a discussion with a fellow project lead to seek his neutral feedback. She reflected on the need to be more tactful in my approach to deal with the team members. Since she was more experienced in the company, she suggested me to seek help from my manager to get timely intervention if things continue to worsen. She acknowledged my concerns, but encouraged me to focus on the target lest it could dent my image in the company. Organizational culture demonstrates the shared values and beliefs that keep all the employees together to work towards achieving corporate goals (Tsai, 2011). I felt her assessment was more so in line with the corporate culture.. Whilst it is a practical solution, I found it unconvincing since I was focused to be a leader to my team wherein my aim should be to empower the employees as well as achieve the organizational goals. 

Many studies have asserted that individual characteristics such as knowledge, skills, demographics, competencies, and personality traits help in defining the nature of leadership (Mumford, Campion, & Morgeson, 2007). This is basically the premise of one of the primitive theories of leadership. Based on my values and personal beliefs, I found participative or democratic style of leadership as the most suitable approach to achieve the business goals. Being a self-conscious person, I have kept a close check on my behaviour with the team and the management as well. I believe its necessary to act as an interface between the management and the team members to achieve mutual benefits and engage the employees towards organizational goals. Democratic leadership strives to establish equality and freedom in the decision making process within group members. That’s why I insisted on making bond with every team member and amongst themselves to develop a cohesive unit. However, I felt that I failed to decipher the extent of the discomfort amongst the team members due to one problematic person. And this created difference between me and some of the team members. Though my approach was objective, the friction with other team members broke the momentum towards the second half of the project cycle. It impacted my reputation with the manager as the progress report was unsatisfactory. He guided me through to complete the project albeit downplaying the employee issues. Leadership could be defined as a process wherein one person has the tendency to influence the opinion of others in a group to attain common goals (Northouse, 2010).   My efforts diffused the tension in the group, but certainly the subordinates were not pleased with the way things were handled.  

Personal Experience as a Leader

After this experience, I have realized that I need to consistently work on honing my skills as a leader. I have the knack of formulating and executing business strategies which could be used to hone my convincing power and become a better negotiator. However, there are areas where I need to work on. Primarily, I need to learn to be more tactful to be a good interface between the management and subordinates. There were many barriers inhibiting the progress of the project and hindering my leadership plan. For instance, democratic leaders tend to win over the issues seeking support of the followers (Choi, 2007). But in this case, I somewhat lost the confidence and trust of some of the subordinates over a period of time. So I will effectively work to develop my interpersonal skills with the team members and learn more tactful strategies to deal with conflicting personalities in group tasks. Ideally, group members must resolve the conflicting issues within themselves and managers should only recommend (Kazimoto, 2013). Since the team members failed to do so, I had to make repeated attempts to find some midway resolution. Emotional intelligence allows leaders to be empathetic towards the needs of the followers (Batool, 2013). So, I need to develop more emotional quotient to pre-empt the impact of my actions or decision on other team members lest it could leave other employees disappointed. I would like to avoid the risk of straining my relation with the management and other employees. I need to rework on my leadership development plan to stay strong in front of such challenges in the times to come. Since the management is satisfied with the success of the project, I hope I get such opportunities to test my calibre as a leader as I commit myself to do better in the times to come.

References

Batool, B. F. (2013). Emotional intelligence and effective leadership. Journal of Business Studies Quarterly, 4(3), 84.

Bhatti, N., Maitlo, G. M., Shaikh, N., Hashmi, M. A., & Shaikh, F. M. (2012). The impact of autocratic and democratic leadership style on job satisfaction. International Business Research, 5(2), 192.

Charry, K. (2012). Leadership Theories - 8 Major Leadership Theories. Retrieved from https://psychology.about.com/od/leadership/p/leadtheories.htm

Choi, S. (2007). Democratic leadership: The lessons of exemplary models for democratic governance. International Journal of Leadership Studies, 2(3), 243-262.

Kazimoto, P. (2013). Analysis of conflict management and leadership for organizational change. International journal of research in social sciences, 3(1), 2307-2327.

Mumford, T.V., Campion, M.A & Morgeson, F.P.. (2007). The leadership skills strataplex: Leadership skill requirements across organizational levels. Leadership Quarterly, 18, 154–166.

Northouse, P. G. (2010). Leadership: Theory and practice (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Salacuse, J.W. (2008). Real Leaders Negotiate. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2008/02/real-leaders-negotiate-1.

Tsai, Y. (2011). Relationship between organizational culture, leadership behavior and job satisfaction. BMC health services research, 11(1), 98.

Warrilow. S (2012) Transformational Leadership Theory - The 4 Key Components in Leading Change & Managing Change. [Retrieved]. https://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Stephen_Warrilow