Introduction
Leadership is not a singular term as it contains within itself a variety of approaches and types of leadership. Each of them holds its own strengths and weaknesses and applies to different types of people. This paper will provide a reflection on my personal leadership approach, and how it applied to some of my previous experiences, as well as my plan for the future improvement of leadership abilities.
Leadership Approach
After completing the leadership questionnaires, I found that my current leadership approach falls under the skills approach label. Since the skills approach is divided into three components, I think it would be useful to describe how they apply to my leadership style. The first is technical skill, and it describes the ability to perform a specific type of activity. I found that I am able to perform my work assignments with little issue and I am quick to learn new tasks. I enjoy my work, and it helps me improve my proficiency for it. The second component is the human skill. It describes the ability to work with people.
While I was intimidated at first when working with strangers, I made a concerted effort to improve my social skills because I understood its importance in my line of work. Now I pay close attention to other members of my team when I assume a leadership position and try to make sure everyone’s needs are met, and everyone is properly motivated. The third component is the conceptual skill. It describes an ability to talk about ideas and concepts. This aspect is the closest to my approach because I believe that a strong vision is essential for effective leadership. When I was the leader on various school projects, I made sure to create a clear and well-defined vision before the team could start working on the project (Northouse, 2015).
Strengths and Weaknesses
I believe that my greatest strengths and weaknesses lie in the following aspects. I am a highly motivated person when it comes to leadership. I learned to love working in an interconnected team. To make sure it operates at maximum efficiency I try to do my best in communicating with team members, taking their feedback and addressing it as soon as I can. I find that feedback, in general, is one of the essential parts of teamwork which led me to believe that it should be freely shared between team-mates without any concern for hierarchy positions.
I would be a much worse leader if I did not listen to people from the teams I worked in. I also hold problem-solving skills in high value because I found that many problems can be avoided at an early stage of development if people in my team or I am aware of them. Studies show that problem-solving skills are highly beneficial to many types of workplaces, and I try to work on mine as much as I can (Carmeli, Gelbard, & Reiter-Palmon, 2013).
Another skill I find to be a strength is my capacity to assess the needs of team members. People often refuse to ask for help before they really need it. Unfortunately, sometimes they do so much too late which forces the team to urgently address the problem to avoid delaying the project. This is why I attempt to make sure everyone has all the information, and materials they need while working on a project. It has proven very successful in my personal projects where a team is small and is afraid of taking up anybody’s time. We were able to avoid a large delay when the materials provided for the project turned out to be insufficient for the task.
However, I do have a few crucial weaknesses that I hope to address in the future. At times I find it very difficult to balance my vision with the suggestions from team members. I understand that it is one of the aspects of successful leadership, but sometimes it is hard to agree with a suggestion when it seems like it would compromise a part of the vision. Perhaps I need to focus on combing suggestions with the vision or assessing suggestions to see if they could be implemented for a better result than the one expected without them. I also found that when talking about motivation with team members I get too invested in their personal lives even though I am supposed to be professional.
Leadership Plan
In the future, I hope to further improve my leadership skills. However, with recent research showing that Authentic Leadership style is one of the more beneficial ones I thought about adopting it, as it seems to be both respectable and effective when working in a team (Leroy, Anseel, Gardner, & Sels, 2015). When I am a member of a team, I enjoy having a leader that works as an example for his subordinates.
To adopt this style, I would need to improve my social skills through training and reading of appropriate materials. In authentic leadership transparency of communication is crucial, so I would have to be able to communicate my vision clearly. Subsequently, I would need to learn how to balance my personal vision with team feedback. I believe I could achieve that by analyzing my previous projects where feedback led to better results.
Summary
At the moment I use a skills approach to leadership. It helps me improve my skills and helps create an effective work environment. I enjoy leading, but still, have weaknesses I need to address if I want to adopt the authentic leadership style.
References
Carmeli, A., Gelbard, R., & Reiter-Palmon, R. (2013). Leadership, creative problem-solving capacity, and creative performance: The importance of knowledge sharing. Human Resource Management, 52(1), 95-121.
Leroy, H., Anseel, F., Gardner, W., & Sels, L. (2015). Authentic leadership, authentic followership, basic need satisfaction, and work role performance. Journal of Management, 41(6), 1677-1697.
Northouse, P. (2015). Leadership: Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.