Introduction
At the beginning of the course, I was a transfer student from Cuny college to Baypath after a very long interval. My self-evaluation skills and my understanding of my career goals were not bad, but they needed some fine-tuning. A lot of the skills I have translated over were from my work experience and from attending community colleges. I am good at getting information and laying down a foundation for my career and always found people skills to go better with my work experience once I have the career foundation. However, after starting the wellness program, it was apparent to me that I needed more detailed skills for a career in leadership and needed to improve my leadership skills which will not be a quick fix and can be difficult for me to understand without the proper leadership skill. Despite my lack of leadership skills, the wellness course has helped me to fix what was missing in my career foundation and what I need to improve when it comes to a career in leadership while strengthening my proficiency in other areas.
Experiences
Despite my lack of leadership skills, the wellness course has helped me to fix what was missing in my career foundation and what I need to improve when it comes to a career in leadership while strengthening my proficiency in other areas. Specifically, completing the tasks associated with building project conventions and project management skills served as the pivotal point in my professional development as a future leader. Managing projects and being able to coordinate the performance of team members is one of the fundamental skills of an effective business leader, which was why accomplishing the relevant tasks served as a major step on my way to improvement. Linked inextricably to the idea of continuous improvement, the specified tasks introduced me to the foundations of project management, including the key frameworks typically used to implement and further promote change within an organization.
Among the essential experiences that I have had during my progress in this course, the ones that have expanded my skills in organizational leadership should be mentioned as well. Specifically, the ability to address conflicts in the workplace was an essential step toward personal and professional progress. Although communication has always been one of my strengths, confronting conflicts and the related situations involving disagreements has ways been a challenge for me. In turn, the course has introduced me to the principles of conflict management, effectively showing me how to use conflicts as the starting point for building a cross-cultural dialogue and sharing experiences.
At the same time, I must admit that a significant portion of the skills that the course has promoted and helped me to internalize was translated from my workplace and the responsibilities that I had to meet there. Specifically, while I have completed the course assignments associated with communication and information management particularly well, they did not represent a significant learning curve for me since most of the ideas that I used were also lifted from my experiences at work and in the community college.
In turn, the experiences associated with the entirely new material that I had to learn and integrate into my professional leadership framework were much more challenging, yet truly invaluable. Thus, the wellness course has allowed me to complete the gaps in my understanding of leadership by offering the material, theories, and practical experiences that have illustrated the framework of leadership in its entirety. Whereas my previous ideas of leadership were lifted from my professional and academic experiences and, therefore, represented a rather fragmented substance, this course has helped me to fill in the missing information and structure the obtained knowledge into a single entity, thus, providing the foundation for my professional leadership approach.
Among the key assignments that have shaped my professional skills and defined my course for self-directed learning in leadership was the development of the annotated bibliography. Implying an independent search for the relevant resources and an in-depth analysis of their strengths, as well as the significance that they had for my work, the specified assignment has guided me toward the use of critical analysis in learning. As a result, I became able to assess my actions based on the goals that I pursued and determine their value for me in my self-directed learning journey. Thus, the development of the annotated bibliography, while being a seemingly insignificant task, turned out to be one of the formative experiences throughout the course.
Finally, the role of the theoretical part of the course must not be underestimated. While practicing the skills of leadership was admittedly essential, it was also critical to dissect how rhetorical knowledge and critical thinking are trained, as well as apply the specified concepts to the management of actual leadership issues.
In this context, working with texts as one of the crucial parts of the experiences that I have had during this course was an important puzzle piece in building the general picture of organizational leadership. Specifically, by analyzing texts, dissecting their structure, identifying rhetorical devices, and performing other types of textual analysis, I have learned how to be an effective speaker and convince my target audiences. The specified skill is instrumental for s leader since it allows for keeping the motivation levels within the eta, at the required level, maintaining the team members’ investment and engagement in the workplace tasks. Moreover, the experience of textual analysis has also helped me to develop the skills of conveying information with clarity and accuracy so that the target audience could have an accurate understanding of the main goals and their tasks. The experience of analyzing texts seemed tedious at first, but, after learning how powerful the right combination of words could be, I became enthralled with the opportunity to learn to structure texts in a way that will guide team members toward the expected outcomes, as well as further accomplishments.
Results
Due to the plethora of diverse experiences that I have had during this course, the results that I obtained have also been quite numerous. First and most important, I have realized the importance of continuous, self-directed development both for a leader and for team members. Additionally, I have gained the skills needed to navigate my self-directed learning, as well as guide others toward an independent approach to professional learning.
Additionally, I have become much more confident in my learning as a leader, having recognized the importance of continuous self-improvement. The need for being able to navigate my progress independently was another vital revelation since it has helped me to recognize the importance of relying on myself and not to be dependent on others. The course has shown me that, while embracing the experience of others and considering the available recommendations and opinions that come from reliable sources is vital, one must be self-reliant in one’s professional development, setting specific goals and designing the methods of achieving them. Overall, learning to be in charge of my professional progress and performing independent research to seek the required sources and the further direction of my professional evolution represented some of the vital results that the course has provided. Overall, the insights into the role of an effective organizational leader have guided me toward creating my leadership framework.
Lessons Learned
Learning about Action Research was one of the crucial experiences that I have had during this course. Specifically, the knowledge of Action Research and how to achieve success in performing it has shown me the path toward implementing learning-based leadership in the target setting. Particularly, I have realized that the application of the Action Research framework will help me not only to conduct the assessment of the problems observed in the target environment, particularly, among specific stakeholders but also to assess critically the key factors that shape the team members’ communication and behaviors, thus, isolating the issues that create obstacles to mutual understanding. As a result, I will be able to introduce effective conflict management tools and approaches toward building cooperation and cross-cultural communication within a team.
Moreover, gaining a better grasp of planning as a part of the organizational leadership process was vital in building the skills of promoting change within an organizational environment and guiding a team toward success. For instance, the emphasis on self-directed learning and the accurate assessment of the target environment allowed me to embrace the complexity of change as a combination of personal and organizational changes. Specifically, the issues of staff motivation and the need to adopt culturally sensitive strategies to create the foundation for learning and improvement were woven into the fabric of my leadership strategy.
Furthermore, as a future organizational leader, I was enthralled to learn the key premises of organizational and social justice. The role of justice in a business setting might seem secondary, yet it is vital in addressing issues winning the relationships within a team, as well as managing the needs of individual staff members, particularly, in assisting them to develop new skills and improve their talent, as well as work on some of their disadvantages (Schmidt et al., 2017). With the specified knowledge, I will be able to become a successful leader and promote self-directed learning within a team.
Conclusion
Since most of my leadership knowledge and skills range was largely fragmented before the course, enrolling in it and completing it has helped me to fill in the gaps and build a clear system of leadership, which has inspired me to apply self-directed learning to my progress as a leader. As a result, I have recognized the importance of continuous education and am willing to engage in it actively. Therefore, the course has been of utmost importance to me as someone who needed to create a coherent structure of leadership knowledge based on fragmented experiences and focus on continuous learning.
Reference
Schmidt, E., Groeneveld, S., & Van de Walle, S. (2017). A change management perspective on public sector cutback management: towards a framework for analysis. Public Management Review, 19(10), 1538-1555. Web.