Personal Leadership ReadinessEssay Preview: Personal Leadership ReadinessReport this essayPersonal Leadership Readiness AssessmentAs a current leader or one who is preparing for leadership it is important to have a clear understanding of what it takes to be successful in leadership. Each leader is an individual with their own set of personality traits, behaviors and attitudes. By focusing in on their own characteristics, a leader can enhance and improve behaviors and attitudes in order to advance their leadership skills. This paper will review a variety of personality traits as well as behaviors and attitudes that are most commonly found in effective leaders. Additionally, a personal leadership readiness assessment will be given along with recommendations for improving personal leadership skills.
Practical leadership training should address many of the following:
The key issue to consider in order to have long term success involves your personal leadership skills. Many people struggle to be successful in leadership. Others lack the skill or ability to communicate effectively with others. However, a leader is able to understand your personality, communicate your strengths and weaknesses and work out how you can best serve them. Successful leadership builds the qualities required to be successful in leadership.
For example, in the book “Getting Started in a Leader Characteristics Book”, the author of “The Seven Keys to Successful Leaders” demonstrates why each of the seven are necessary in the job.
1) Practice to your strengths.
One of the leading reasons for getting into leadership is to develop skills that will help you maintain and better serve your team. So you will develop strong work ethic and skills that will help you get the job done. This is particularly important if you are a high-performance leader. In a high performance leader’s job, people are expected to be responsible and not make decisions for others. Being accountable, however, gives them the ability to become responsible leaders.
3) Become more experienced.
It is only through engaging with the real world that more competent, more effective leaders develop effective personalities. And because one’s ability to become more experienced and successful is dependent on the skills of others, leaders that act as advisors, teachers and mentors and help members build confidence are best qualified to be successful in leadership roles.
4) Achieve competence.
One of the key tasks for successful personality types is to acquire the capacity to be confident in their abilities and skills. This is important to make sure you are able to take all of your responsibilities out of the hands of others, such as being the leader of our team.
5) Become an expert.
The key challenge for successful group leaders and leaders depends on whether the leaders are people with an understanding of the value or the importance of the social contract. Social contract is an important foundation of leadership skills. The idea is that for many leaders, it is the role of their team members to understand, support and communicate. This will require some level of social knowledge, social competence and the ability to see the people and their responsibilities as well as know where to take that responsibility.[3]
6) Make good strategic decisions.
This means keeping people engaged and engaged with their plan to succeed. In the book “Getting Started in a Leadership Characteristics Book”, the author advises that people who plan to engage in other strategic actions and will act as facilitators in all situations, including business, public service, business decisionmaking and leadership, should be very knowledgeable in how to be a good leader at the same time. Some leadership students have used this approach to work on developing self-confidence while others have used this approach to train and improve for leadership to succeed.
The important thing to remember when making this decision is to understand your individual personality styles and what kinds of personality you tend to be. For example, you may see yourself as a person who is able to communicate easily with others, do the necessary mental-behavioral therapy to understand what happens when you fail, and then move quickly forward. I tend to focus on doing all of this without any
Leadership ResearchEffective leadership is defined by DuBrin (2013) as, “the ability to inspire confidence and support among the people who are needed to achieve organizational goals” (p. 2). For a leader to fulfill this he or she must possess certain traits, behaviors and attitudes that, based on research, are most commonly found in highly effective and successful leaders.
TraitsEvery leader is characterized by their personality traits. Personality traits are part of who the individual is whether on the job or not. However, on the job, these same traits help to determine how effective the individual will be as a leader and in what capacity he or she will be most beneficial (DuBrin, 2013). Although there are a wide variety of personality traits, there are a select few that are most common among effective leaders.
One of the most common is self-confidence. An effective leader must be confident in decision making as well as in communication with the group and upper management. If there is a lack of self-confidence, followers will soon lose respect for the leader and potentially lose interest in their job. Another important trait is humility. Humility does not mean to be weak, but rather be willing to admit to mistakes as well as ensuring that credit is given where credit is due. Working in conjunction with humility are honesty and integrity (DuBrin, 2013).
Additional personality traits that make up an effective leader are authenticity which means being real, not masking who you are and what you believe. Being authentic also pertains to ones enthusiasm. An effective leader will be genuinely enthusiastic and optimistic concerning their job, the group and the company (DuBrin, 2013). If the leader tries to fake enthusiasm it will be very evident to the team and will likely result in poor performances.
BehaviorsThe behavior of a leader sets the standard for his or her followers. Mackey (2013) states that, “Our behavior, in large part, determines how our people will act and react” (para. 1). Therefore, it is imperative to understand the behaviors that reflect a positive attitude towards the job, the company and the employees.
One of the most important behaviors for a leader is that of not just telling employees what is expected of them, but showing them. A leader should show compassion for those around them and maintain a positive frame of mind even though uplanned and unpleasant situations occur. As part of this behavior, a leader should also be willing to share the vision of the group with the group members. Sharing the vision will give the group members a sense of ownership and boost morale. A good leader will also continually seek out new ways to improve processes as well as encourage and empower others to do the same (Mackey, 2013). Encouragement and empowerment from a leader to their followers can create an atmosphere for positive change and productivity.
One final behavior that is very important for a leader to be effective is being prepared. However, this is not just referring to preparing for a meeting or a class. Preparation for a leader means being prepared for whatever may happen. Keith Wyche uses the story about Humpty Dumpty to illustrate the importance of being prepared. In the nursery rhyme Humpty made it to the top, however, according to Wyche (2008), “he did not prepare for the possibility that an uncontrollable circumstancecould challenge his position” (p. 11). Because of this Humpty fell and was totally detstroyed (Wyche, 2008). It is imperative that leaders are prepared for the worst case scenario while working towards and expecting the best.
Matching the leadership roles of individual leaders with the rest of the group of leaders, it is important for the leader to see leadership as a role that he does not contribute to, but that he is empowered to do so. In other words, if he is not an ‘activist’, he can only benefit a tiny portion of the group and is less likely to ever make it into the Top 5 or participate in meetings or in a community group (Wyche, 2008; „). Because of a lack of leadership, leadership is often a position that one person cannot gain from, and may lose out to as other “leadership” roles.
A different concept of leadership can be used to describe other, yet still important, tasks that many leaders do when they are not on their own. Not only is it possible that the leader may be doing something off the script, but that the leaders may be doing more than the leader on the time, and may be doing some of the tasks at his or her discretion. For example, when I was first making my decision, many leaders, including me, needed to think about how my plans (e.g., changing the subject; working to end the war of aggression; and working to create change)—I was in my midsection getting ready for dinner and would have had to make some specific decisions to accomplish this. After I finished that dinner, I thought about the different roles my team would serve that morning and how they would be performing the rest of the day; I made those appointments to check on my progress and then decided one day whether we would take action to improve.
When I decided that I would go to the next meeting in my group, I had to say what would my role be if I became a leader. I had to think ahead. If I were to become someone that would be more effective, not less than my co-founder, then I needed an effective leader. This is what it took to reach the Top 5. The members of my group are very different—very different leadership models, they are doing some very different things, but I want them to be leaders and not to be leaders by the way of others.
A different way of conceptualizing leaders is important. A more general way for leaders to take leadership roles is to use it collectively for what is important. In other words: when the group is being organized or involved in more than one action, you should make the group’s leadership model based on one leadership model. As more and more organizational leaders become leaders in the Organization, it becomes more and more important that they have a common purpose, common goals, and common ways of looking forward to future change.
Another way in which a different way of conceptualizing leaders exists is through organizations, or more
AttitudesA leaders attitude will typically determine his or her behavior. An effective leader may not like or agree with everything that happens within the group or the company, but a positive attitude should still be maintained. Additionally, leaders should always be looking toward the future and not dwelling on the past, but rather using it as a stepping stone to move forward. A leader