Reflective Essay On Personal Leadership

Prepare a reflective essay addressing the following questions:

1. How do you currently lead?
2. What are the core principles that underlie your approach to leadership?
3. In light of the ideas presented in this course, how you will lead in the future?
4. What kind of leader you want to be?
5. What do you want to make sure you keep doing?
6. What do you want to stop doing?
7. What do you want to start doing?
8. In your current or previous work setting, what specific changes will you make in how you lead and/or  manage?
9. Do you see yourself more of a leader or more of a manager, or both, or neither?

Introduction

Currently, most authorities on the development of leadership analyze and realize the importance of assisting the managers or the leaders, to get involved in self-reflection or self-discovery (Miller & Dalglish, 2011). There has been wide research on the need for self-reflection by leaders/ managers.  There are very vital and effective reasons due to which the leaders should be bothered regarding learning about themselves. Firstly, it is found that some people possess certain drawbacks in there for example narcissism, psychological disorders in personality, and such people should not be permitted to be the leaders, while most of them can enhance their leadership potential as well as performance through self-reflection. Moreover, research has also indicated that there is not effective bedrock for developing effective leadership than knowing oneself and developing a secured understanding (Miller, 2012) .

This paper reflects my personal journey and how I can evolve my understanding regarding leadership on the basis of my past work experience and studies. This essay will provide an insight into my current leading style and the core principles that underlie the approach of my leadership currently. In due course, this paper will also present the strategies that I plan to adopt in the future regarding leadership and what type of leader I want to be. To develop and innovate myself into the leader I want to be, what should I keep on doing,  what needs to be stopped and what should be started.  Moreover, in current work settings what kind of changes I need to make regarding the manner how I lead or manage, thus finding out whether I am more of a leader or a manager or both or neither of them. The main purpose of this reflective essay on leadership is to gain a better understanding about my personal values, skills as well as knowledge, so that I can learn more from my experiences while adapting to the changing leadership scenarios by responding to the new leadership challenges. 

  Currently, I can visualize that there have been many touch points that have really helped in shaping as well as influencing my leadership perspective (Freeman & Stewart, 2006). Fundamentally I can say that my experience in the role of a leader has been on the one who articulates while putting the vision into action for the future that also inspires the other people to join in. My style of leadership is the one where I  speak to people about my personal identity, what I am currently and what I can become, how do I live and how I can make things better for a living (Freeman & Stewart, 2006) . In the organizational context, the concept of ethics can be defined as a frank conversation regarding the values and issues mostly for the stakeholders as well as for the business. Basically, I am a person who does not believe in preventing people from doing the wrong things rather I am the one who enables subordinates to do the right thing (Yukl, 2006) . Thus ethical leadership,  although an ambiguous construct converse diverse elements and ethical leader according to my views is the one who lives up the principles of conduct that are really very vital for the leader. Being an ethical leader currently, my stand in the organization is to adhere to the more universal standards related to moral behavior (Thomas, 2001). However, I realized that there are few challenges as well associated with ethical leadership

While working with my first company I realized that although I was very hardworking, good at problem-solving and brilliant, I was not capable of doing everything. The project that was assigned to me was huge and teaming and leadership was a prerequisite to resolve the complex issues that I was not capable of resolving all alone. So I needed a team of people who can help in completing the project.  My team had varied skills and talents and the best part was that it had a wide array of skills which I alone did not possess, ranging from the marketing skills to analytical skills to all the required technical skills. Some of the advantages that I had of developing a team were that it helped me in generating many ideas for resolving problems as well as made it easier to resolve any issues. I also got a wide pool of talent in the form of various team members and every person worked towards a common goal, thus helping me in completing my project on time (McCallin & McCallin, 2009). I realized over a period of time that working in a team and through effective leadership, the bond between my teammates strengthened as well as lead to improved job satisfaction level of team members.

However, I also noticed that teaming had certain disadvantages as well like it slowed down the process of problem-solving because of a greater amount of discussions and disagreements amongst the team members. Mainly because my team was large enough to give rise to many disagreements and discussions. This sometimes led to the compromising of certain task deadlines of the project. Teaming also proved to be challenging for the members who preferred to work all alone or were not comfortable in working with other employees possessing divergent skills or backgrounds. But with the help of collaborative teamwork that involved many workers from different kinds of professional backgrounds come together and started working as a team and helping in coordination, problem-solving, while learning together as well as networking so as to deliver quality (Barr & Ross, 2009) . Collaborative teamwork also has certain consistent challenges that are related to communication, conflict resolutions, the ability to tolerate the differences, understanding the roles of other professionals as well as the willingness to collaborate (Suter et al., 2009) . I realized that the collaborative teams mainly are based on the team diversity so that they can function in an effective manner (McCallin & Bamford, 2007)  . However,  I also realized that diversity also resulted in creating tensions within my team because the different team members are into the habit of analyzing their attitudes towards other team professionals, handle them in a totally different manner to visualize the world and show a willingness  to talk through their differences with their colleagues (McCallin, 2005). Then to overcome this problem of diversity I held regular sessions in which we all talked through the differences, informally outside the team meetings, that also potentially promoted learning as well as brought changes in thinking. Thus over the time, I realized that having or possessing an attitude of complete willingness for collaboration helps in the long run (Suter et al., 2009) .

Thus, from the concept of collaborative teamwork is realized that I should adopt shared leadership that is important for me in the healthcare industry to which I belong currently. Interdisciplinary teams in my healthcare organization need the encouragement from the top and in such case, collaboration plays a significant role (McCallin, 2007, 2004). By implementing shared leadership I would create an environment where all the team members would act like active members, and would spontaneously take the team lead as well as in case where special inputs are needed for resolving particular client problems (McCrimmon, 2005) . The concept of Shared leadership is not similar to the traditional one in its aspects, also different from positional leadership wherein the service leader takes a general responsibility of taking care of client; however, very little control over the professional inputs given by colleagues has. This indicates that collaborative teamwork will work successfully in the field of healthcare because everyone in my organization will understand that with the help of shared leadership not just single person will have all the answers, whereas everyone in the team would be held responsible for nature and quality of collaboration. All I need to ensure for making shared leadership successful is that the specialist team should be well coordinated and the team leader and team coordinator should be two different people (McCallin, 2004, 2007).