Project 1: Assessing Your Strategic Leadership Capacity and Potential

Step 3: Reflect on Your Leadership Development

Developing your career, managing others, and becoming a leader begins with self-examination. An individual must first develop an accurate view of his or her own interests, values, skills, limitations, and preferences in order to make career choices and advance their career. A research-based relationship between personal effectiveness, career, and leadership development quickly emerges.

This step will provide the necessary knowledge to initiate a personal effectiveness and career development plan. The process will enhance your development plan by providing you with the opportunity to use a personality assessment tool as a resource to gain a better understanding of yourself. Finally, you will be able to incorporate these insights in your Week 11 LDP Reflections Summary.

The following readings and the assessment tool will allow you to achieve several objectives:

· Personal Effectiveness—This resource will increase your knowledge of self-awareness as a driver of personal effectiveness and the relationship between personal effectiveness and leadership.

· Personality Assessments—This resource will help you understand the utility of personality assessments.

Proceed to the discussion CliftonStrengths Overview and Instructions for taking the CliftonStrengths assessment.

The CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsQuest) assessment has been under continuous development for more than three decades. The major construct underpinning the assessment is that each individual has a set of core strengths that correlate to career growth, personal effectiveness, job satisfaction, and personal fulfillment.

Aside from the benefits that accrue to individuals who are conversant with their strengths and how to best use them, CliftonStrengths is useful to teams by indicating the strengths each team member can contribute to facilitate the achievement of team goals and projects.

During this week, participate in the Class Discussion on CliftonStrengths so that you can share your results and gain a deeper and fuller understanding of your unique strengths, as identified by the CliftonStrengths assessment. Moreover, as part of the project plan required for Project 4 later in the term, a CliftonStrengths team members grid must be completed. The team members grid is used to identify the strengths each team member can contribute.

In Week 11, you will submit an LDP reflections summary and gap reflections summary. As you conclude Project 1, think about what you learned during the course of this project. In your reflections, you will be asked to consider the impact of self-awareness on your career goals and leadership development, as well as the influence of taking an assessment, reading about other assessments, and participating in a week-long personal assessment discussion.

When you have finished the readings and the Class Discussion on CliftonStrengths, proceed to Step 4, where you will complete your final skills gap analysis.