Reflective Leadership Journal - Assignment 1(b)

Assignment Components

Assignment 1(b): Reflective Leadership Journal. This assignment is a reflective assignment that is evidence-based. The evidence will be diary entries that will be used to inform your reflection. Learning to be reflexive is a key skill to develop in the work place as people will be telling you things about yourself. You have to decide how true or untrue they are. Assignment 1b has two parts: diary entries and the Reflective Journal. The link between the two is that the diary entries will form the evidence, together with your Hero and Zero moments, that you will reflect upon in your Reflective Journal. If you have no diary entries, you can only reflect upon the Hero and Zero moments using the lenses provided by concepts in the course. Diary entries: No marks In week 1, you will decide on how frequently you will make your diary entries. These diary entries can only be viewed by you and teaching staff in the unit. No one else can view them. Diary entries are voluntary. Please number your diary entries. What are the diary entries about? Every week, you are expected to complete the required readings and complete the pre-seminar activities as well as the post-seminar activities from the preceding week. Many of the seminars will also have activities. The outcomes of the activities form the evidence to support any conclusion you draw about yourself in the Reflection. The central issue in relation to these diary entries is quality. Of course you can simply answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, but the question is ‘Why?” – Why did I get this result? Why did the seminar group react in this way? What assumptions did I make that led to the outcome? How did those assumptions come to be? Why didn’t I do it the other way? Why didn’t I recognise that my classmate would react in that way? Your answers to these questions can, and should be, used as entries. If you find yourself writing “if only… then….” you are going off track. You will also need to apply the course concepts to the Hero and Zero moments. In relation to the Hero/Zero moments, and for the diaries to be useful, don’t make it about hindsight i.e. “I should have done X, or I should not have been quiet”. The central question here is why did you do X in the first place? Or Why were you quiet in the first place? Reflection (25%): (2,000 words) See the LMS site for the deadline.; Submit in Word Compatible format; fully referenced (diary entries as well as academic references) please include your name in the file name. Reflect upon your Hero and Zero CV and your diary entries to enhance your understanding of yourself. The goal of a reflection is to gain insight to the lessons of your experiences. This is the most important part of this assignment. There are three components to the Reflection: 1) report, 2) analysis and interpretation, and 3) action. Report Report your findings about yourself. The activities, readings and questions are experiments that you conducted upon yourself. What happened when you undertook these activities, read the readings and answered the questions? Summarise and report these results from your diary entries. Analysis and Interpretation: You are expected to look back retrospectively at the results you reported. Adopt a high level view to tease out the patterns that exist in your experiences in the course. Apply course concepts to look at the Hero and Zero entries, and other diary entries you may have made to draw conclusions about your understanding of leadership, what it means to be a leader, your assessment of your leadership capabilities, assumptions that drive you, and default approaches to situations that may exist within you. Here are some starter questions to focus your analysis and interpretation. Please note that these are trigger questions only and are intended to aid your reflection. Do not use these trigger questions as headings, or structure your paragraphs around each of them. - Did you have difficulty identifying Hero moments? Why? What does that say about what you know about yourself? Similarly for Zero moments. - Are there patterns in your Hero and Zero moments? What is (are) the common element(s)? Note you can make comparisons between Hero and Hero moment, Zero and Zero moments as well as between Hero and Zero moments. - Why are they common? - Did you learn anything about why your Hero moments occurred? That is do you understand enough about them to reproduce them mindfully? - What are the key assumptions that drive your actions as a leader? Why do you hold these assumptions? - Do you have a default approach to problems? - Did this affect your Hero/Zero moments? - To what extent do you practice the capabilities of the DLM? o Are you a good Sensemaker? What evidence do you have? o Are you good at Relating? What evidence do you have? o Are you good at Visioning? What evidence do you have? o Are you good at Inventing? What evidence do you have? o Why do you rate yourself this way? Do you think your peers and subordinates would rate you the same way? o Did you treat an adaptive challenge as a technical challenge? Why? - Can you see patterns playing out in other parts of your professional or personal life? - How effective have you been? - How might you be more effective in your positions (or even in life)? Interpretation: Having analysed your Hero/Zero moments, ask yourself what does this mean? Essentially, you are sensemaking your results and analysis. This answers the question of what have you learnt about yourself? This is a big picture perspective. You may find contradictions; you may find hidden strengths or unknown weaknesses. Link these insights back to the capabilities of the DLM i.e. the extent and quality to which you practice these capabilities. Action: The last part is to inform action. Having gained an insight to yourself, you need to develop - What have you done well and should continue to do? - What specific behavior should you stop engaging in? Why? - What specific behavior should you start engaging? Why? In this last section, it is more than just 3 sentences. The identification of these behaviours should be flow from the data to your analysis and your interpretation. You must relate these actions back to the capabilities of the DLM.