Leadership Strengths And Weaknesses: Strategies For Improvement

Strengths of Leadership

Question:

Discuss about the Psychological Capital and Relational Processes.

Leaders are the individuals who have the responsibility of developing the path through which other members of the team would easily attend their organizational goals and be benefitted in their career. They are responsible for setting the direction for the team members, help in building an inspiring vision and also create some new innovative options which help in meeting the organizational goals easily (Odomeru and Ogdobonna 2013). By their commitment towards organization and also to their team members, they sought to take the position of guides (Wang et al. 2014). They need to possess important leadership skills which help them to lead the teams properly. This assignment has helped me to realize some of my strengths and weakness as leader and therefore I have jotted down the strategies that I will take to overcome the weakness and emerge as an efficient leader.

Of the different strengths that I have identified form the leadership challenge is that I have strong communication skills. Speaking clearly to the team members and in effective tone and body language is very important (Li, Mobley and Kelly 2013). While communicating, I noticed that I was able to rightly follow the tone which was not dominant but was capable enough to instill excitement among the team members in achieving the goals. I noticed that I have well developed listening skills which helped my team mates to express themselves properly. Their innovative ideas were taken by me as effective feedback which is also applied together along with my own knowledge so that they also feel respected and loved by the organization. I gave them enough scope to maintain transparency and open mindedness in their discussion over the project which made them happy and satisfied. As a result, the work output was rapid and was both high on quality and quantity.

While tackling an entire team, other good characteristics that I realized from my leadership style is that I was confident about my will power which helped me to overcome various barriers. While handling the team, I faced several challenges like all the members of the team were not equally competent. Although at first, I felt drained out but I had the confidence in myself to not let myself and my team down. I have a very positive set of mind which never allows me to avoid or escape any situation. Rather I face the challenge and try to overcome them with my teammates with strategic planning. I follow the principle that if the leader stays calm and confident, the energy will flow into the team members as well and their confidence will be neglected in the work they provide. I try to be their role model for confidence and positive attitude which will eventually encourage them to act similarly in their tasks (Michell 2013). My positive attitude had helped to maintain a perfect balance between playfulness, humor and serious work which had made the team members overcome burning out and being steady on foot, happy and contented.

Communication Skills

Creativity is an extra ordinary skill that needs to be harbored by every leader as additional characteristics of leadership (Carmelo et al., 2013). I have seen to possess proper creativity which I tend to apply in many unconventional ways to achieve a hard target. Often I have seen that there are indeed some decisions which are not clear cut and following the traditional pathway does not being satisfactory results. In such situations a creative mind of the leaders becomes extremely helpful. During critical situations, team members often look for the leader’s guidance and I also faced a similar situations. However, I had a high creativity level from the university years which had helped me to handle many difficult situations effectively. As a leader, I helped my teammates by thinking out of the box and helped them by providing a solution which although not professional but helped us to overcome the challenge (Van wart 2013). Additionally, my teammates provided a feedback that my way of inspiring them had made them motivated. My sense of positivity, maintaining equity among members of all levels, operating on a bonus system, generating enthusiasm for hard work encouraging for high quality work and others had also resulted them to be highly inspired and made them aligned with organization’s mission and vision.

I have realized that I am quite poor in managing culturally diverse team. My team comprised of a number of team members who are coming from different cultures. Although I knew that multicultural teams have positive influences on the company’s productivity, yet found myself incompetent in handling the members of different cultures. I could not foster the sense of a collaborative team work among the members and could not even develop a sense of belonging for each other. The members were seen to disrespect each other’s cultural preferences and did not respect each other. Even I also found that I had developed a sense of biasness against each other which affected y delivery of care and suggestions for my team members. I noticed that a blame game prevailed among my team members for which the productivity was ultimately hampered. I also had no ideas about the different cultural traditions, their inhibitions, their preferences, their holidays and others which affected their emotions. A tensed situation was prevailing and formation of groups took place which was affecting the productivity of the organizations.

Another negative issue is that I am quite poor in developing social skills in the genre of emotional intelligence although I am moderately not facing any issue with my personal skills. The first skill is that I am quite weak at showing empathy. I usually fail to be aware of the needs as well as the feelings of the team members. I fail to judge the situations form their points of view. Therefore I fail to understand their feelings and often a sense of distrust and negative feelings occur against me in my team members. I fail to understand others and therefore could not orient services and fail to leverage diversity. Moreover I also fail to understand political awareness. Moreover besides empathy, I am also poor at developing social skills. I fail to encompass a wide range of relationship and different interpersonal skills. As a result, I cannot effectively manage conflicts which arise in my teams often and destroy the bonding among members. Often my team members complain that I am not easy to talk to and I do not socialize well by developing a sharing and trustworthy relationship among the members.

Confidence and Positive Attitude

One of the most important characteristics that every leader should have is the power of multitasking. A leader always has to keep his mind fresh and does not be affected by huge volumes of work. He should strategically plan and proceed so that all work is done within deadline with proper quality. However, I have noticed that I have seriously failed in this feature. I became too impatient when I saw huge amount of work to be done by me. I got quite nervous and could not understand how to overcome the feeling. These attitudes of me also made my team members nervous and therefore they made mistakes. Instead of keeping my head sorted and plan strategically, I bragged too much which resulted in wasting time. There were continuous complains from every stakeholder that their requirements were not met which made me more stressed. I totally failed in my multitasking arena which hampered the easy workflow of the team members. Hence, this had proved to be a weakness which if not handled by me properly may lead to failure in my career plans.

Strategies that I need to take for development of my three weakness identified would follow the Smart Test. By the word Smart test, it means that the goals which I would be setting should be specific, measurable, action oriented, realistic and timely. The first goal which would be set by me is to develop my multicultural skills which are indeed necessary to develop a global team with high productivity.

In order to mention the strategies that need to be taken specifically, the first is to develop cultural knowledge which is composed of knowing the content and the process knowledge about how different cultures work, how peoples of that culture express disagreements with each other and how they give and receive feedback. This can be achieved by allocating me to workshops where mentors provide knowledge about different cultures and how they work in different professional environments. In order to develop it, I can follow multiple channels like movies, newspapers and books. Moreover I will try to friendly with team members of my groups in order to understand their exportations. Four important domains need to be worked upon by me which am perceptual acuity, adaptability, tolerance of uncertainty and also relational skills. These goals would be measurable by the rate of success and development of the skills which when applied in the teams will help me manage the workforce effectively (Day et al. 2014). The effectivity of the initiatives can also be known from the reduction of the displeasure of the team members and also from the various feedbacks they would be providing me. Moreover the workshops that I will attend will also handle tests where the mentors can also measure the development I made in the feature. This initiative will be action oriented as it will directly help in development of my poor skill so maintaining a multiculturism environment among my teams. The new knowledge that I will gather will help me enhance the skills and I will able to understand each and every cultures’ preferences and inhibitions. Moreover, the initiatives which are set are realistic as all of them are possible to be achieved. Moreover besides taking admission in the workshop, all other initiatives will not require extra funds and hence can be easier for me to afford. I will mainly be requiring about 8 months to be culturally competent in my leadership.

Creativity

The next goal that I need to set is to develop my social skills. To be very specific, the initiatives that I need to take is to find out ways by which I can develop particular traits which would help me to be more developed in my social skills and develop empathy for my team members (Daft et al., 2014). The best way I can adopt to master this skill is to go through different journal articles in order to gather various evidences and see how researchers are commanding us to tackle such situations effectively. Many researchers suggest ways which are easier to adopt and can be fruitful. This can be explained by an example. They have recommended that leaders should not interrupt or change subject of the team members, not judge or edit their own feelings too quickly, try to connect your feelings with that of the members, listening to the inner self rather than always thinking strategically and many others. The way about how researchers have given rationale behind the actions will help me to be more efficient and understanding and at the same time help me to develop emotional and social skills. The initiative is measurable as better I can conduct the initiatives and learn properly form the journal articles, books of renowned leaders, internet articles and others, the better I will handle my emotional intelligence and this would be automatically reflected in my interaction form team members. Therefore in this way it can be measurable about how I am fairing in the work. The initiatives are action oriented as the actions to be taken by me for developing the skills will ultimately guide me and help me alter my habits in a way which would make me more efficient as a leader. This would help me develop my own skills. Moreover this procedure would also not be much costly and therefore would be achievable by me. Moreover the initiatives of going through works of researchers and expert business leaders (to gain knowledge form their experiences) are very much relevant as I can adapt their traits and understand their rationale. This would help me understand the different reasons about how they have been successful in developing emotional intelligence and I would also do similarly to succeed as a leader. I would be requiring a time of 3 months for mastering this skill.

The next skill that I need to master is my multitasking skills. Similarly like the other skills, I can also engage myself in workshop where the mentor would give me important tips and help me develop knowledge about how to handle different task by rightly setting priorities and managing the tasks strategically. Moreover, I can also learn about the experiences of the experts business leaders who have provided motivational tasks and have provide strategies to manage multiple tasks at the same time. Not only that, I would also visit different seminars on stress and anxiety control as  believe that if I am able to handle my stress and anxiety, I will be more capable to develop my multitasking skills (Goleman et al. 2013). The initiatives are measurable as I would set myself an evaluation period after attaining workshop, reading advices of experienced leaders, visiting stress and anxiety control seminars and others so that I can measure the effectivity of the initiatives and how they are helping me to overcome my inability to multitask. They are definitely action oriented as the initiatives will ultimately help me to develop my skills. Moreover they are relevant as the initiatives taken will not be much costly and can be afforded by me. Moreover I can choose workshops, seminars session cording to my will so that I do not miss my university classes (Northhouse 2015). Therefore the initiative will not clash with my university timings and will thereby be helpful for balancing both. I would be requiring about 6 months to develop my skills.

Conclusion:

Therefore from the leadership challenge; I came to understand my different strengths and weakness. I understood that although I have high communication skills, creativity and also Confidence with positive attitude, I fail miserably in managing multicultural teams. I also do not harbor social skills and empathy and also do not have multitasking skills as I get anxious and stressed. Therefore I have developed different strategies to overcome my weakness by setting SMART objectives which would help me to plan strategically and thereby undergo the best training and grooming sessions for developing the best leadership skills.

References:

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Daft, R. L. 2014. The leadership experience. Cengage Learning.

Day, D.V., Fleenor, J.W., Atwater, L.E., Sturm, R.E. and McKee, R.A., 2014. Advances in leader and leadership development: A review of 25years of research and theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), pp.63-82.

Goetsch, D.L. and Davis, S.B., 2014. Quality management for organizational excellence. Upper Saddle River, NJ: pearson.

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R. E., and McKee, A. 2013. Primal leadership: Unleashing the power of emotional intelligence. Harvard Business Press.

Li, M., Mobley, W.H. and Kelly, A., 2013. When do global leaders learn best to develop cultural intelligence? An investigation of the moderating role of experiential learning style. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12(1), pp.32-50.

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Wang, H., Sui, Y., Luthans, F., Wang, D. and Wu, Y., 2014. Impact of authentic leadership on performance: Role of followers’ positive psychological capital and relational processes. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 35(1), pp.5-21.