Personal Reflection On My Leadership Style

Reflecting on my leadership style and personality it is easier to understand how I behave as a follower and why I do so. As a follower, I need a leader who is capable of utilizing the situational approach strategically. Inefficiency, micromanagement, lack of quantifiable rewards, and the inability to speak out irritate me quickly and I have no problem addressing it. I was in the National Guard for six years and I decided to leave due to the things I mentioned above. I felt like I wasted the time because I was able to act as a leader and learn great skills, but I have nothing to show for it in terms of rank and/or awards. During my last annual training I was performing the responsibilities of a person three ranks above my own and being a platoon …show more content…
That being said everything above is mentioned as a self-assessment based on my life experiences, a personality test, and my own perspective of myself. Using a source based off of a Kellogg School of Business website I was able to quantify some of my personal assessments to support and quantify my own assessment in order to create a development plan to improve myself as a leader. According to Whetten and Cameron (2011), my results to various self-questionnaires within their text are compared to the results of a sample of five hundred Masters in Business Administration students. From the beginning of myself assessment, I have stated a clear weakness in my sociability and essentially my people skills as a leader. In Figure 2 you can see how my intuitive and sensing scores are about average whereas my thinking score is above average and my feeling score is below average. This depicts my ability to think and strategize as well as my inability to handle the “people” aspect of leadership as demonstrated by my mentioned examples. This leads to a weakness that will affect any leader and that is the inability to influence others and gain power. In Figure 3 you can visualize my results from another questionnaire that how I attempt to gain power and influence other from my personal and positional attributes. According to Whetten and Cameron (2011), my results were in the bottom quartile compared to the five hundred students that took the same survey. This supports my own conclusion of my weakness as a leader. Figure 4 addressed which influential strategies I utilize on others. The reason strategy clearly takes a majority and the other strategies are split equality; once again matching my own conclusions about my own leadership qualities. Now that we have identified my major flaw as a leader it is important to take steps to improve myself. Below is my personal action plan that is structured as