Individual Leadership Growth Reflection - Essay Example

? Individual Leadership Growth Reflection Analyzing my past experience through the reflection papers and self-assessments convicts me of my leadership abilities. I am an optimistic and social person, who loves his work and is determined to achieve the set goals. I have exhibited my leadership tendencies in various settings. In the organizations where I held leadership positions, I learnt of ways to motivate employees to realize organizational goals. My supervisors guided my understanding of leadership and shaped my leadership style to a great extent. Even the leadership traits that I considered to prevent the achievement of organizational goals educated me on better leadership approaches. Therefore, this paper gives a reflection of my growth in leadership, aiming to be a school principal, based on transformational leadership theory. Transformational leadership has been associated with desirable organizational performance irrespective of the context. According to Boerner, Eisenbeiss, and Griesser (2007), this style of leadership causes positive results by promoting leader-follower relationship. This reflects my approach to leadership. It is an approach that I used when managing my father’s company to cause the company to post positive results. I associated with the employees and got to understand them better. This informed my decisions that proved to be effective. Being social, transformational leadership best fits within my personality traits as it promotes relationships. Considering my prospect of being a principal in a school, I work towards ensuring that I develop a relationship with my students. This will enable me understand them better and therefore make informed decisions on leading them. Hence, transformational leadership promotes the leadership traits that I exhibit hence my choice of basing this paper on the theory. One of the strategies in transformational leadership is to inspire followers to attain extraordinary results. According to Boerner et al. (2007), this entails the alignment of goals and objectives of followers to that of the organization and provision of the necessary support, coaching and mentoring to achieve the desired goals. This was the approach I used to cause positive outcomes when tasked to manage my father’s company. As my chosen style of leadership, I led the workers from the front. I did what was expected and thus set a standard for them to follow. I motivated them into achieving the set objectives. This led to a reduction in time wastage at work, misunderstanding among employees and negligence of duties. This would be the same approach that would be applied when I become the principal. My greatest role as a principal would be to promote positive relationships among parents, teachers and students so as to positively impact on students’ performance. To achieve this, I would be needed to make it clear to each of these parties what their roles would be. I would ensure that they understand the reason for giving them the respective responsibilities is to see the school perform well. As a way of motivating them to work towards this goal, best performers would be rewarded. This follows the inspirational motivation argument in transformational leadership which according to Boerner et al. (2007) calls for leaders to motivate their followers and encourage them to share in the future vision. This arouses both the individual and team spirit. The second strategy that I would use would entail individualized consideration. Leading a mixed group such as a school entails leading many people from different backgrounds. First, the students vary in ages, gender, behavior and even racial background among other distinctions. The same applies to parents, teachers and support employees. Thus, each of these persons would have distinct needs that require individualized attention. In one of my refection papers, I gave the example of Toyota, a vehicle manufacturing company, whose success could be linked to this argument. Toyota manufactures cars that meet the demand of the locals in which it sells. It considers the terrain of the region and customizes its vehicles appropriately, hence their popularity. As a leader, it would also be important to customize leadership to meet individual needs. In transformational leadership, this concept is referred to as individualized consideration (Boerner et al., 2007). Paying attention to the individual needs of followers enables the learning of individual needs and desires which should be considered when making leadership decisions. Understanding the individual needs of students would be important in enabling me make adjustments to the interaction of students among themselves and with other employees. This would see to it that all students are satisfied and work towards achieving the vision of the school. Furthermore, listening to the concerns raised by individual teachers would be important in formulating better approaches to teaching so as to post better performance. Finally, I would adopt a strategy of intellectual stimulation. This is a strategy borrowed from transformational leadership theory. According to Boerner et al. (2007), this approach entails leaders stimulating followers through reframing problems, questioning assumptions and taking different approaches for old practices. Followers do not get ridiculed or criticized for their mistakes in public according to this argument. This goes against the behavior that I observed in a director of a certain school. This director did not accept the mistakes he did and reprimanded wrongdoers in public. As such, both students and teachers in the school feared him and were not free to share their needs. This saw the school post poor performance over years. As a school principal, I would seek to cause positive change. I would engage the students and teachers to find out why they do what they do. I would make my office open to suggestions on ways of improving the school. So as to incorporate ideas from even the shy members of the school community, I would set up a suggestion box where such information would be placed. This way, I would be able to improve the practices in the school and further develop better and effective approaches in the daily activities. This will improve the life of all members of the school community and improve performance. Therefore, this course has been important in shaping my understanding of leadership. It has made me identify with transformational leadership as the desired leadership style to cause positive outcome in my prospective career as a school principal. As such, I intend to use idealized influence, individualized consideration and intellectual stimulation leadership approaches. Having been proven as effective approaches in transformational leadership, I expect these strategies to enable me lead the prospective school to achieve greater than the desired performance. Reference Boerner, S., Eisenbeiss, S. A., & Griesser, D. (2007). Follower behavior and organizational performance: The impact of transformational leaders. Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 13 (3), 15 – 26. Read More