Leadership Self-Assessment

Leadership Self-Assessment

Team learning has been very instrumental to my personal leadership development whether the experiences were positive or undesirable. Having been both a leader and a follower, the lessons learned out of team work experiences have allowed me to shape my collaboration within a team, capitalize on my strengths and develop on some areas of weakness. Taking the leadership assessment and getting feedback on my leadership skills have been first, reinforcements of my perception of leadership, second, contradictions to the skills I believed I was building on and last a realization of more areas of improvement. These findings have led me to strategize new ways of improving my leadership skills and new approaches to team work interactions. Interestingly enough, the leadership questionnaire displayed how I evaluated myself as an overall “high performing leader”. While scoring relatively high in coordination, confidence and continuous improvements, I scored low on interpersonal understanding, role building, goals and adapting. In parallel, my office peer also highlighted the need for me to be patient and listen to others.

Until now, I was confident that shared leadership rather than authority helps achieve goals through effective delegation and monitoring. In fact, I was certain great leaders excel in assigning functions only and shaping group dynamics by engaging in decentralized authority and entrusting their team to achieve the desired result. Such is how I sought to exert my leadership within a team. Now that I reflect on it, I have evaluated myself as lacking “people” skills. While I thought of myself as being a very interpersonal person, I realize that I have been focused on decentralizing my leadership and ensuring functions were accomplished and missed on the social dimension of leadership. Retrospectively, I have not focused on developing my “emotional intelligence”; rather my pragmatism and orientation for results and achievements have led me to omit the development of psychological safety.

In an attempt to expand my “emotional intelligence”, I intend to use specific strategies. First I will work on creating a psychological safety environment by creating a milieu of peer to peer feedback and recommendation at the end of each meeting. Also, I would like to expose my vulnerability by sharing my own weaknesses and displaying my desire to learn from the team and from my mistakes. Besides, encouraging my group to engage in creative thinking without a fear for slipping-up and inspiring them to express opinions even when conflicting, will be effective ways to cultivate