Introduction
It is the utmost desire for every individual in leadership position to exhibit the best leadership skills and competences. While good leadership skills can be acquired through capacity building and training, it is imperative to mention that personality plays a central role in shaping the leadership styles and ability of an individual. For a long period of time that I have interacted with my peers as well as colleagues at work, I have come to comprehend my various strengths and weaknesses, leadership philosophy, personal skills, team building ability and problem solving skills.
In addition, I have also appreciated other intrinsic elements such as ethics, integrity and spirituality that add value to leadership. This paper offers a succinct personal reflection of a leadership self-assessment journal based on various experiences that I have gone through for a considerable length of time.
To begin with, I would like to stress the importance of personal assertiveness in leadership. Personal effectiveness refers to sufficient use of time, energy or talent as a resource. It deals with concepts like goals and success while integrating ideas such as positive psychology and positive thinking. Personal effectiveness is important in an organization as well as in an individualâs life for the sake of self worth, satisfaction, and continuous strife in order to achieve requisite potential needed to succeed in life.
Although personal assertiveness may appear to be an unpopular leadership characteristic in some cases, I have found out that it augers quite well with me especially when leading a small manageable team that has been assigned a particular task. Leaders who are assertive also tend to maintain their integrity levels at all times and end up developing trust among those who are being led. For example, in most cases when I have been assertive over certain issues within a group, some individuals have perceived me differently. This is exactly what happens when a leader takes a particular position or course of action and opts to defend it up to the end.
Perception can be viewed as an act of attending, searching or paying attention to the immediate environment in order to make sense out of it and derive an outcome or a conclusion. Various views on perception usually involve a sense of contact with stimuli in the environment that causes an individual to attend to it either through mental activity, interpretation or verbal communication (Lee, 2003).
Therefore, perception can be seen feeling or opinion toward something which may not necessarily be true. At work place, these views help employers and the employees to know how to perceive issues in their environment as well as how to understand each other. As a leader, I have observed that perception of a leader among the junior members of a group or team has significant impacts especially on the effectiveness of a leader.
There are several factors that may affect either an individual or group perception. To begin with, our perception can be influenced by the unique characteristics of the perceiver. One of the intrinsic characteristics of the perceiver is the mood. The latter can affect how we perceive people, events or even situations in life (Salaman & Asch, 2003). For instance, individuals tend to behave and perceive things differently when they are happy or depressed. For example, the outcome of my leadership skills is sometimes affected massively by my prevailing mood. Secondly, attitude is yet another driving factor that may affect the characteristics of the perceiver (Tate, 2009).
Some people have negative or positive attitude towards various gender roles. For example, while some believe that women can also perform male oriented jobs; there are those who may categorically differ with womenâs ability to perform male-based tasks such as masonry. Other personal characteristics include self-concept, motives, interest, cognitive structure and expectations (Storey, 2004). Both the characteristics of the target and situation can significantly affect perception of a leader and those who are being led.
All the aforementioned factors tend to explain why leadership characteristics and effectiveness of an individual may vary a lot with that of another person. That is why I have never made a mistake of comparing myself with another leader due to individual uniqueness and myriads of dictating factors.
In terms of expectations, it is highly likely that our perception can be influenced by the kind of outcome that we expect from a given situation. Research findings on this area have found that it is quite cumbersome to see others in an accurate way unless you know yourself well. In addition, it is definite that a leader may visualize the behavioral patterns of other people based on hi own character traits. Finally, it is possible to see (or perceive) positive characteristics in other people once an individual has positively accepted him or herself. One such example is the external looks or physical appearance of a leader. People who are attractive are likely to be perceived in a favorable way compared to those who are unattractive either by the way they dress or generally appear.
The next category of leadership determinant is communication. The ability of a leader to communicate well at workplace is important as it facilitates exchanging bits of relevant information between two or more parties. Communication of information can be through various forms such as mass communication, spoken words between groups of people or individuals or it can be through written materials (Pareek, 2006). In this regard, it is important to point out that communication is an important tool in an organization as it ensures maintenance of personal relationships as well as the aspect of ensuring efficient transmission of messages (McKenna, 2000).
Therefore, everything that an individual or organization does is controlled by communication. It is also worth to mention that communication can be verbal or non-verbal. For instance, facial expressions, gestures and body postures can be actual communication existing between two individuals without them actually talking. Non-verbal communication can be more genuine and extremely powerful than actual talking.
The effectiveness of a leader depends on the communication system in the working environment as well as the ability to listen and to speak. It is important to observe that in all the various forms of communications that take place in an environment, many people tend to get and remember half of what they listen to, understand and believe. Additionally, personal effectiveness of a leader is greatly affected by ineffective communication that comes from cliché, jargon, inappropriate language and too much information. Also, there are instances when individuals communicate messages that are unclear as a result of poorly structured thoughts (Peper et al., 2005).
This becomes a barrier to effective communication and personal effectiveness. Other barriers include a verbal messages that conflicts with non-verbal messages, distractions from other activities or noise in the environment and misinterpretation of the intent or content of the communication by the receiver. In my case a leader, I suppose that the ability to communicate with large groups has been a challenge for long. I tend to feel comfortable with small teams at any given time. Since my leadership philosophy ha always been to impact positively even one person, I hardly engage bigger teams for fear of being overwhelmed by myriads of challenges presented by such complex groups.
Furthermore, individuals at workplace respond to stimuli that make them interested, angry, sad or happy (Kang, Oah & Dickinson, 2003). Communication is of significant importance in creating such emotions at a particular time in the lives of the workers. Good communication would mean motivation and effectiveness which is the opposite of bad communication manifested by an arrogant, presumptuous and patronizing way of passing information that would exist between employersâ and employees (Tate, 2009).
In any workplace, it is expected of the employees to increase their input in order to improve the levels of production and their practices. However, these employees at times lack the platform to express themselves or are hesitant for fear of retaliation should they express their concerns (Jones, Conway & Steward, 2001). Due to this, most employees remain silent since they lack ways of effectively presenting themselves.
Personal effectiveness in self presentation of a leader involves being in a position to express his opinions or views about matters related to workplace such as job related issues, need for changes in the working environment and contributing towards other peopleâs ideas, thoughts and actions (McKenna, 2000). To achieve this, effective leaders must develop a system of monitoring themselves so as to be able to control, regulate and observe how they display themselves in interpersonal relationships (Kakabadse, Bank & Vinnicombe, 2004).
Personal effectiveness in self presentation requires modification of behavior through high self monitors (HSMs) since this will help an individual to portray a desired public appearance. Individuals at workplace will be able to guide their behavior by having a presentable image that first the nature of the workplace situation (Haas & Hayes, 2006).
Personal reflection
At workplace, I am relatively a good listener when being addressed by a colleague or my senior. Although it is strength on one side, overdoing it has made me branded as too much a submissive worker who finds it hard to reject unworthy offers. I usually stop everything that I am doing and then fully concentrate on the communication between me and the other party(s) concerned. By so doing, my fellow workmates have complimented me several times by reiterating that I value, dignify and also respect them. To me, the ability to give attention to others by keen listening and giving response wherever necessary has been my strength in creating the right impression that anyone would desire.
In addition, being attentive to my fellow employees as well as the senior officers has undoubtedly won me credentials since it is a strength that cannot be misinterpreted or misunderstood by anybody. On the overall, people perceive me as a good communicator though I donât talk much. However, when I overdo this strength, it turns out to be a weakness in my self presentation as a leader. For instance, I sometimes give too much attention to others until I delay performing an important task which is time-restricted.
As a result, some co-workers perceive me to be a very flexible person. Sometimes, I am unable to communicate my needs. This is apparently my major weakness bearing in mind that I often find it cumbersome to say ânoâ to demands from my colleagues. The reason why I often fail to self-present my feelings is because I fear being perceived as a weak leader or somebody who does not measure up to the standards. I better maintain a submissive character than face the reality of being criticized.
Individuals at the workplace must demonstrate assertiveness and do it the right way to avoid being misinterpreted. Assertiveness involves speaking out what is in the mind in a tactful and productive manner with an aim of getting results. Other issues that making up assertiveness include being straight forward and honest. Workers and employees must be assertive when expressing their rights or what they want done to them.
At my workplace in an Indian store, my employer had the habit of delaying our salaries by a week and still demand our maximum input at work. My fellow workers and I thought about it many times but my passive-aggressive nature could not permit me to arrange a meeting with the employer (as a team leader of the group) and present the grievances of the team. I remained passive-aggressive since I could not particularly bring myself to challenge my employer. Due to this inability to be voice-steady in demanding for the rights, my suffering intensified and our behavior and attitude towards that work changed.
Due to the myriads of frustrations at workplace, I sometimes acted in a very firm way as if trying to be assertive, by loudly voicing our concerns especially when I am with rest of my team members. I suppose by being assertive, I would have controlled my emotions by quietly but firmly addressing the salary dispute between the two warring parties. In addition, the ability to be steady in my speech pattern would have been an added advantage because I came to realize that I end up stammering whenever I am overcome by submissiveness and unable to exercise assertiveness.
In spite of being less assertive or passive-aggressive, my colleagues at work have often reiterated to me that one of my strengths is dedication and commitment to work. I have the ability to plan and deliver my roles perfectly well at workplace especially in regard to specific areas that I have been assigned. In addition, my employer has also been positively commenting on my awesome ability to meet deadlines set by the department on various projects.
As a result, I have emerged as the best team leader in our department, capable of organizing small team projects from time to time. I am quite convinced that one behavioral feature that has enabled me to achieve this is the ability to create harmony among team members by expressing myself to the rest of my co-workers in an open way without causing harm or infringing on other peopleâs rights. Being straightforward requires a leader to understand his or her rights as well as pursue those rights in a cordial manner.
On the other hand, my greatest weakness at workplace is lack of self confidence when executing some duties and especially those that I am not familiar with. Due to this weakness, I once found myself in dilemma between meeting the targets of the company and the initiative to assertively deny my group members the desire to engage in unhealthy lifestyles when we were on a week-long community outreach program organized by the company.
References
Haas, J. R. & Hayes, S. C. (2006). âWhen knowing you are doing well hinders performance: Exploring the interaction between rules and feedbackâ. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 26: 91-112.
Jones, O., Conway, S. & Steward, F. (2001). Social interaction and organisational change: Aston perspectives on Innovation Networks. London Imperial College Press.
Kakabadse, A., Bank, J. & Vinnicombe, S. (2004). Working in organizations. Burlington: Gower Publishing Company.
Kang, K.., Oah, S. & Dickinson, A. M. (2003). âThe relative effects of differing frequencies of feedback on work performance: A simulationâ. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 23(3): 21-54.
Lee, G. (2003). Leadership coaching: from personal insight to organizational performance, London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. McKenna, F.E. (2000). Business psychology and organizational behavior. East Sussex: Psychology Press.
Pareek, U. (2006). Organizational Leadership and Power. Punjagutta: ICFAI University Press.
Peper, B. et al. (2005). Flexible working and organisational change: the integration of work and personal life. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.
Salaman, G. & Asch, D. (2003). Strategy and capability: sustaining organisational change. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Storey, S. (2004). Leadership in organizations: current issues and key trends. New York: Routledge.
Tate, W. (2009). The search for leadership: An organisational perspective. Devon: Triarchy Press.