The Fundamentals of Leadership: Strengths and Weaknesses

Leadership comes in all forms and not all leadership has a set direction. Some people can be described as born leaders and some people aspire to become the leader they read about or watched over time, the thing is, leadership can be found in everyone. With leadership, comes a great leader that can be found anywhere, in workplaces, at school, in sports or even at home. I want to write about leadership strengths and weaknesses in this essay. It's interesting how over the past couple weeks the students have been covering the fundamentals of what it takes to improve someone’s leadership skills. This leadership development plan will cover the material learned throughout the course and discuss the topics that the students believes to make the most effective leader. The plan will also cover topics that make leaders not so effective. The topics that are going to be discussed in this plan will be based from individual assessments and will differ from person to person.

The beginning of any leadership plan should be to understand what makes a great leader, this can be traits, hobbies, or even actions. The most important thing to understand is that not everyone will have the same description of a leader and that is okay. Personally, a great leader will show these traits: honesty, respectful, trustworthy and could balance their life to accompany others if needed help. In a recent 2019 post from a website called Task Due, Sarmad Hasan had wrote about top 15 qualities that make good leaders. Some of his qualities included: Honesty and integrity, good communicator, and emotional intelligence. Hasan continued to discuss each individual quality and provided how a leader might use them in certain situation. He also mentions in his conclusion that “…you must have all these qualities but if you lack some of these qualities, then you might struggle to make the mark in the world of leadership”, this is good to keep in mind because the road that leads to success might not be paved perfectly straight and might be a bumpy ride. After having a general understand of what makes a great leader, the next step would be to take a self-assessment.

After each chapter, there would be a self-assessment of the topic covered, this is proved to be beneficial because of the identification of my personal characteristics. The purpose of these assessments helps people understand their core characteristics and help someone understand what their strengths and weaknesses are. As mentioned before, the student had access to a book that had self-assessments provided at the end of each chapter, but that’s not everyone’s case. A self-assessment can be as simple as gathering family and close friends that have been in someone’s life for a length of time and they describe what they think of them. From this, someone gains information of their personality from another perspective. This can be very beneficial because it outlies traits that someone might have thought were strengths or weaknesses, might not be what someone thought, and it allows them to find out what needs to be improved.

Now, once the basic assessment is done, compare the results to an assessment found online and observe the differences and similarities. This is beneficial base this eliminates any bias if there is any. The most common online self-assessment is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. “The purpose of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) personality inventory is to make the theory of psychological types described by C. G. Jung understandable and useful in people's lives”. This assessment is very simple to complete and provides relative agreeable results that can be compared to someone’s “home-made” assessment. Personally, after taking this assessment, the student found out that certain traits stood out significantly more than others and the student was able to work on improvements for future leadership roles.

Another online source of assessment is the CliftonStrengths. This assessment is broken down into categories: myself, team, organization and students. Once the various assessments are completed, a report is created based and the site provides videos and material tools to help improve in the areas that scored lower than others. The website also offers coaches that personally review the assessments and contact individual and help guide them into becoming “the best version of you'. Personally, the student prefers this method over the Myer Briggs assessment because of the unique personification of the assessments and how in depth the assessment goes. The assessment provides the ability to assess more than oneself, and assess into one’s school groups, work groups or event one’s organization. This step in the development plan will take the longest but steps up information for the rest of the steps in the plan. By the end of the assessments, the person should be able to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Once the all the necessary assessments are completed, identifying core values will be next in the plan.

Core values can be defined as the fundamental beliefs of a person or organization, these beliefs dictate behavior and can help people understand the difference between right and wrong. Once the self-assessments are completed, the person should have a good understand of their core values already. From this website, a person can review their core values to examples provided. The website breaks down core values based on life events or work-related events and explains how to identify these values and what they may mean. It’s important to understand that at this section of the development plan, its completely personalized and others may have other core values and that’s acceptable. For example, when the student took the assessments; dependability, honesty, motivation and courage were the top core values. In any leader situation, the student wants to make sure others in the group has someone they can depend on and rely on in any situation. The student also felt that honesty and courage are key traits to have as well as a leader because its important to build community between others in the group and to have someone that can initiate and engage when others in the group might not have the personality to present in front of others. For more insight of how core values shape a person, the professor provided a link, of an article that was created by a person that shares his own core values and how he uses them in action and also helps others create their own. “Know that this process requires focused time and thought. I recommend doing it with someone you trust. Then you'll get honest feedback and you can help each other”. At this point in the leadership development plan, it’s okay to take time to focus on certain situations and the decisions a person made in life and think about the “how and why” the person made that choice and the outcome of that choice. Don’t feel pressured to make your own core values someone else’s, take time to reflect and gain knowledge of yourself. The next step in the plan is making a vision statement.

A vision statement in simpler terms, is a statement that reflects everything that has been done previously in the leadership development plan. From this statement, a person should be able to outline all their personal traits and values into one statement. “Give expecting nothing, thereof”, is an example of the student’s personal vision statement. The student believes their decisions in life should benefit others without expecting something in return. It’s a good way to stay humble and true to one’s self. This statement is also a reflection of the student’s Greek organization and all its members. The Greek organization regularly gives to their community and school and gain personal growth from helping others. “When thinking of making a vision statement these are good questions to ask: what you want to be, what you want to achieve, the principles you use to make decisions?” These are good questions to ask when making a vision statement, as they provide guidance and a constant reminder of why leadership is important to build on and continually grow. These questions can be answered from the character trait assessment that have been answered previously in the development plan. Keep in mind that people evolve and change over time, so expect the vision to evolve and change right along. Once the vison statement is created, assessing how others perceive you is next in the development plan.

This step has been completed during the “self-assessment” part in the plan, if they choose to have others assess them and not used an online assessment tool. If that is the case, that is okay and use this time to reflect on all the information that has been gather up to this point. Reflection is very beneficial when making sure everything is aligned together and understanding that one step builds from another step. Remember that there is no right and wrong when reflecting on what others think of yourself and use the feedback as constructive criticism. Depending on how in depth of feedback the person wants, it would be a good idea to ask family and friends, co-workers or even professors/teachers, this leadership development plan will be good to use during any setting. Personally, the student used this time to reflect and gained more insight and asked a different group of friends as used before. The student gained a different perspective on some of his personality traits and learned that they changed from when first discussed. It is okay if at this point thing change, just make sure to record the differences and what was learned and gained from the experience. After reflecting on the past steps, the next step is designed to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of leadership skills.

At this point of the plan after taking all the assessments and reflecting over peer reviews, a person’s leadership skills should be known. As learned in class, leadership skills can be broken down into these groups: Personal, interpersonal, group and technical skills. Personal skills can be referred to as soft skills and majority of people learn these skills during school. Basic skills like “people” skills include, problem solving, dependability and motivations are usually taught during group projects and can be built on over time. Interpersonal skills build from personal skills and focuses on how someone interacts and manage with others. Some of these skills include active listening and coaching and motivation, like personal skills, these skills a can be improved on over time. Group skills focus on someone’s ability to delegate and build their team and improve the groups efficiency. These group skills tend to build a group into a community and focus on supporting one another. The last set of skills are technical skills. These skills focus on nitty gritty of the group, these include making presentations, statements and rules to follow within the group. Once someone has listed their skills, room personal and feedback from others, they should be able to outline the skills that are strengths and weaknesses. From here, people can focus on learning how to improve their weaknesses and ask for more insight from others on how they approach these skills personally. This step in the plan may take a while to work everything out, but its important to understand that not every skill can be fixed right away. Personally, the student had another class that had an assignment that focused on their leadership skills and was required to write every skill down on a piece of paper. Once all the skills were written down, the student was to then number which skills they deemed “more valuable” than other skills and wished to improve over the course of the class session. This allowed the student to become more focused on a select group of skills and was about to set an attainable goal by the end of the session. With the selected skills, the student created an assessment that was handed out to other students for feedback on how well he was at the skills and asked how they approached the skills personally. Once given the feedback, the student spent the rest of the session watching videos relating to the skills and how to improve them in the classroom and workplace, by the end of the class session, the student had other students re-evaluate him and reflected. Some students saw change in some skills but not all. From this personal example, its important to understand that there are many ways to improve leadership skills and its going to take time but creating a set destination helps. Leading into the next section of the leadership development plan, setting goals.

Now, depending on where someone wants to end up in leadership, depends on what type of goals to set. Goals can be long term and they can be short term, depending on what someone is trying to attain. The most important thing to remember when setting a goal is to make the goal SMART. A SMART goal is specific, measurable, attainable and timely. When being specific with the goal, the person needs to answer the three w’s: who, what, where. This allows them to understand the how and why they are setting these goals. The next step will be making the goal measurable. This can be tricky but setting time constraints and what needs to be done by that time is how to make the goal measurable. Making the goal attainable can be achieved by setting the timeline. Making the goal realistic is as simple as making sure the end goal is something that can be accomplished and something that they want to complete. Lastly making the goal timely can be achieved by making the goal have a timeline. For an example of a SMART goal, the student is part of a fraternity that has a yearly meeting to set goals for the upcoming school term session. These goals need to be SMART goals because they are reported back to nationals and used to measure the fraternity efficiency and making sure that the group is bettering themselves. The goals set by the fraternity have a specific timeline and check mark dates to stop and record what has been accomplished and what is next on the list. The most challenging art of this part of the goal setting is making sure to balance the timeline effectively so they won’t steer away from the path and get distracted. So, word of advice would start off by setting small short-term goals and work their way up to bigger and longer-term goals. Comparing goal setting to weightlifting, a weightlifter doesn’t start off by lifting the heaviest weight in the room, they start off by setting an end weight goal and gradually works their way up in weight. Once everything has been done previously mentioned in the development plan, its time to write the plan of action.

Finally, this part of the plan everything gets put into action. The action plan lays out the specific steps you’ll take, resources you’ll use, and the support system you’ll build to reach your stretch and SMART goals. This plan will eventually plan out every step need to take when and where to do it and any sources need to help guide the person achieve their end goal. An important tip when making the personalize action plan, is making sure its very organized and easy to follow to reduce any confusion. Personally, the student has created an action plan for their senior design group and used an ordinary yearly calendar. This way everything could be written out on the exact date needed for completion. This also provided a visual on how soon due dates where approaching. The purpose of the action plan reflects on where the person is currently and everything in between the end goal.

Overall, over the course of this class the student has learned about multiple online leadership tools that can help improve his current leadership style. The student is currently graduating in the upcoming spring that will be looking for full time employment and from pervious internships, leadership qualities are highly recommend in the workforce. Overall, the student believes that his leadership skills are above average but can be improved by the time of graduation. Watching all the videos that were provide were very helpful and listening and watching how leadership varies from person to person helps the student understand how to change his qualities depending on the situation. This class is very beneficial to have completed before graduation or for anyone to take.