Self Analysis I

Tool Selected: How Good Am I At Building and Leading a Team?

This leadership self-analysis tool examines how you would organize and interact with a team as a leader. Many of the questions related to an individual’s sense of organization and depth of addressing fundamental leadership tasks in a group. To this end, the questions ask what you would do to connect with the group and engage them as a team. The second half of the questions related to results and what kinds of approaches you would take to make things happen.

The topic of team work has played a prominent role in our classroom discussion this semester, particularly the Manager’s Hot Seat exercise where we analyzed a meeting that suffered from a number of commonly seen problems in today’s workforce. In the tool, a measurement of the leader’s “team work aptitude” is noticeable as it queries whether the leader is communicating with the team members, motivating them, and actively seeking feedback.

Analysis of Self

The score I received was a 90, placing me in the upper end of the second quartile. On the whole, I felt this was a fair representation of my abilities as a leader, but I also noted some kinds of leaders that this test favored. For example, one of the questions asked if you articulate a clear, exciting, passionate vision of/for the team. I believe that there are excellent leaders that would shy away from doing something like that. In Good to Great, Jim Collins writes about companies that focused first on getting the right people on the bus before figuring out where the bus is going.

To shrink that down to a team or meeting level, versus and entire corporate management team, the principle still seems to apply. Get the right people in the room then facilitate a discussion that will lead to a clear vision that the team members will buy into, an attitude that I share.

Personally, I realize that I am a very young leader and have a lot to develop. While seeking feedback is a strength of mine, an unhealthy habit of mine is trying to do tasks myself. Simply recognizing this has already helped me in sharing tasks, responsibility, and authority.

With regard to feedback, my experience is that it relates partly to a fear of mine – that of leading and striking out in a direction only to look back and see no one is coming along. To hedge against this, my tendency is to constantly ask how people are doing and what they are up for. Sometimes, though, I have found that I need to escape this fear and require people to do things they may not want to do, regardless of how I may be viewed in the process.

As we saw in class, there are many different ways to crack the leadership nut. My own style is just that – my way of leading. At the same time, covering the fundamentals is critical. Beyond that, there is plenty of variation witnessed among effective leaders, often relating to personality.

Returning to my strengths and weaknesses, there are two action plans to follow. First, to become a more assertive leader and overcome my youth, I have outlined my SMART goals below:

• Set an example by getting to work on time or early this month.
• Practice 2 training sessions beforehand on Sunday nights in both Spanish and English in front of the mirror.

Second, my other goal is to become a Level 5 leader as described in Good to Great by Jim Collins. This kind of leader embodies the fundamental leadership quality but places the company’s goals above his or her own personal agenda. To achieve this, my goals are as follows:

• Refrain from personal use of the computer and Internet except during the designated break times at my workplace.
• Make a conscious effort to always include a co-worker at meetings with outside vendors and consultants to better distribute information and share decision-making. Note by May 1 the effects of this effort and ways to improve it.

D.A. Whetten and K.S. Cameron, Developing Management Skills, 3rd ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 534-35.