Leadership Reflection

[pic 1]

Leadership Profile

Leadership has always been a part of my life. I still remember during my school days, I used to captain my school football team, help people in studies and bond a close relationship with school mates. I had a knack of easily bonding relationships with people. Hence, during my school days, I had many friends and many people asked me for their advice.  After analyzing the stories from the ones who gave a feedback as well as recollection of my personal experience, I have found several common threads. Common threads I have identified are effective communication, effective people management, Initiative and risk taking ability, knowing and caring my own people and ability to take responsibility.

Strength and Passion

I have identified effective communication as one of my vital leadership strengths. From the responses I have received and from the recollection of my own stories, I identified effective Communication as a pivotal part that helped me to influence others through my ideas. From the response of my professional colleague where I have provided a process improvement idea to improve the process of work in a finance company (Appendix 7) to personal life responses where I was able build good and friendly relationship with people by building a Facebook group of new MBA students to get familiar and friendly with each other (Appendix 3), effective communication was crucial. Effective communication isn’t a personal priority, but a value I carry with me. I have worked across various countries at diverse workplaces and I believe that effective two way communication helped me to build a rapport and strong relationship with my colleagues. Effective communication by the means of effective listening has helped me to learn things that I lack by the way of accepting feedbacks from my friends and employees and thus helped to improve those parts of my personality. For instance, when I was working as a duty manager, effective listening helped me understand the problems faced by my employees and effectively solve their problems (Appendix 5).

Second, I also identified people management as a common thread and a strength. From the responses given where I have volunteered to manage the team of part timers after 5pm in the evening since there was no one to lead the team of part timer (Appendix 5) to my own recollection of story where I formed a Facebook group for new asper MBA students to connect with each other prior to start of the program in order to create a friendly atmosphere (Appendix 3), I believe that people management has helped me to bond relationships with people in professional as well as personal life. It has helped me to get everyone on a same page and work on a common goal subsequently helping me to persuade friends and colleagues to adopt my ideas. Certainly people management skills also helped to develop an ability to lead by example.

Third strength I identified from the responses I got and from my own recollection was habit of knowing and caring for people. During my childhood days, I always observed my parents caring nature. The way they helped people during their bad times, provided emotional and financial support during their bad times. I carried those values as I grew up. These values have helped me to be a better and rational person. After few instances where I offered people help such as lending money or helping them to secure a job by referring them in my organization, I observed that there’s a causal relationship involved, meaning that when you care for someone, they eventually care for you. This nature helped me to quickly make good friends, though there were some occasions where I felt I was exploited. However, pros of having a caring nature outweighed the cons and it helped me transform into a better person. These responses helped me to identify my passion to help other people without expecting much in return. While working as a campaigner for an election program, where my role was to communicate ideas of those people to the management with a view to solving their problems (Appendix 1), this nature helped me to win the trust of my people subsequently resulting in a successful campaign.

The other strength I identified is having a responsible nature and ability of problem solving. I have observed my parents since school days, when they took the responsibility of almost everything. This all factors helped me to be responsible. The response mentioned in the appendix which says I voluntarily took the responsibility to manage the part time employees beyond the normal office hours as well as the other story where I took the responsibility to initiate a process improvement idea and helped the company to implement and achieve that process improvement idea helped me to identify that ability to take up responsibility as one of my strengths. Apart from implementing the process improvement ideas, I was also involved in solving problems related to implementations of that process which eventually helped me to identify problem solving as a part of my strengths.