3-4 pg paper

Analyzing my Leadership Skills

In this analysis, I will state a few leadership skills that I consider attributes that I possess and often use while in a leadership roles. I will review times these skills have enabled my personal and team goals to be met and how they helped. I will also bring attention to my sub-par leadership skills that should be cultivated so my full leadership potential could be attained. I will also look at the negative effects of where my lacking of abilities thwarted my team from completing their tasks successfully.

Some of my most prolific leadership skills are my ability communicate with my team what needs to be done and what timeline we are anticipating. I try to be clear and concise when giving directions to a team. I try to break down tasking in to multiple smaller goals so they will be easier to understand and accomplish. I believe that this also will give the team multiple moments of fulfillment during the entire process. My mentors in the past have led me to believe that accomplishing small tasks will benefit them and allow them to experience the feeling of marking something off the list

I also tend to articulate my leadership styles in ways that fit well with my team members. This subject is spoken of in the class reading referring to the Path-Goal Leadership Theory (Path-Goal Leadership Theory, n.d.). If it is a technical subject and I know that some of my team members are not experienced in the subject matter, I relate the current task to other tasks that they have previously completed. The more that your team can relate to the subject matter the more prone they are to completing their assigned tasks.

I believe that corresponding with your team is of utmost importance. I try to use technology to my advantage to make the entire process easier. I prefer to talk face to face but if for some reason, I am not physically available during the day I will initiate a group text message or emails throughout the day. I have even made smaller Facebook groups for my teams to communicate through, send out meeting makers, or even group activities after working hours (Social Media for the New Social Leader, 2019). If for some reason, these avenues of communication are not accessible, I will have morning meetings to put out pertinent information.

I enjoy disseminating and receiving constructive criticism to and from my team. If they can give their thought on how to make a job easier the next time or even during the current evolution, I encourage them to speak up and let me know. If it were to be after the fact, we can get together as a team and discuss lessons learned. I feel that this is an important part, especially in during the debriefing process. Feedback is the only thing that will help you evolve as a leader and a team member.

There are things that I can improve on in order to evolve in to a better leader. It is important for a leader to know his/her weaknesses and limitations. I am a horrible public speaker; and I must work on this area. I may one day be in a situation that I will have to speak to large groups of people or other city officials. This is when I have problems expressing myself and it causes an issue for me.

I sometimes become overwhelmed due to taking on to many mundane tasks. I also need to work on my abilities to delegate responsibility to my team and let them be in charge of smaller ticketed items. This is hard for me, not because I do not trust my teams, but because I sometimes forget to verify that tasks are being completed correctly because I become engrossed on what I consider more high priority items.

Positive reinforcement is another area that I need to improve on. Many times that I have not even told my team thank you until a day or so after a project is completed. I know how far that little gesture can go when you work extremely hard to complete something. I have attempted to implement programs where I recognize a team member every week for the jobs they have done. Fortunately, in the private sector I can recommend to award employees time off or even monetary bonuses.

I am extremely unorganized and I have to write things down regularly. The issue with that is I have 10 different notebooks with training notes, assignments, and meeting dates in them. I constantly lose these notebooks, so what I have begun doing is taking notes in my phone. I have found this easier to keep track of time lines and other things such as meeting and appointments, because it will automatically set reminders for me.

Other skills that I would like to develop to make myself a more efficient leader are communicating better, become more flexible, motivating my team, thinking outside of the box, become more diplomatic, and become more proactive rather than reactive. Out of these, I think that becoming more proactive would benefit me more in a Public Safety position. Being a proactive leader in the public safety field would mean that you are actively looking for faults in the current system and making those corrections ahead of time. Waiting for something to fail in this form of work could mean that lives are lost and that would be counterproductive for us.

Analyzing these leadership skills has brought up the good qualities that I possess as a leader. It has also shown me the skills that I should make efforts in to become a more effective leader in the future. This will allow me to develop a plan to achieve these goals to benefit my teams and myself in future endeavors.

References Path-Goal Leadership Theory. (n.d.). Retrieved June 19, 2019, from UMUC: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/lead_path_goal.html Social Media for the New Social Leader. (2019, June 20). Retrieved from UMUC: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/social_lead.html

Feedback from the Professor,

Good job identifying and explaining the skills you feel are strong, and articulating why.  You also identified through honest self-reflection those skills you want to approve upon.

I did want to see some type of formal feedback tool utilized to support your leadership skills assessment.

Strong work

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