Identify personal leadership strengths as well as areas for improvement
Leadership Assessment
Final Project: Leadership Assessment
Earlier in the course, you were asked to informally evaluate your leadership skills and qualities. In this Final Project, you use formal assessment tools to identify your areas of strength and areas in which you need further development. You may use the results of this self-assessment to develop a plan to gain the skills and experiences that will help you move toward achieving your short- and long-term professional goals and objectives.
Using the assessment tools provided in Introduction to Leadership: Concepts and Practice, conduct a self-assessment of your own leadership characteristics, style, and skills. Complete at least four assessment tools for this self-assessment. In addition, select one tool to give to a colleague or supervisor so he or she can assess your leadership skills.
Final Project (3 pages in APA format)
Evaluate your current leadership characteristics, style, and skills based on the assessment tools you and your colleague/supervisor completed. Be sure to:
- Include actual results or summaries of the results you collected using these tools
- Identify personal leadership strengths as well as areas for improvement
- Include references to the leadership concepts covered in this course and relevant issues related to ethics, diversity, and power in the organizational setting
Subject: Masters Social Science
link to get access to text book
To sign in to get the text book sign in with:
password: Justicea1
Textbook:
Lauffer, A. (2011). Understanding your social agency (3rd ed.). Washington, DC: Sage.
2 days ago
I will need 3-4 refrences/citations
The assesment tools:
Leadership and Management—A Personal Perspective
Leadership strengths are the abilities or behaviors that make leaders lead well, serving them to lead more effectively, motivate, influences and manage their groups (Winston & Patterson 2006). Social work leadership is very closely related to transformational leadership that is involved in identifying a need, the more excellent vision needed to effect the change and guiding and motivating people to achieve the desired result. I feel that my experience over the last 25 years being in the social service field and the last 15 years being in management and leadership roles has provided me with a great foundation as well as an awareness that there is always opportunities to grow and to be actively aware of this.
Strength and Weaknesses Assessment
Self-awareness is one of the critical strengths needed in social work. Others are high motivation, passion in one’s work and a skilled communicator. Awareness of one’s strengths, weaknesses, values, emotional state, and self-assessment goes a long way in knowing what to expect in others (Northhouse, 2014). Knowledge of one’s surroundings helps the leader to understand how to deal with people from different backgrounds harmoniously. An excellent communicator communicates the vision clearly and effectively motivates the members to work towards their expectations. A good leader listens to their followers’ output and inspires a free flow of ideas. Some traits may be detrimental in a leader and might need improvement on, for example, lack of empathy, poor integrity and lack of accountability.
These skills align better with leadership than a management one in a social work setting. A social work setting, as stated earlier, involves finding a need for a specific group of people and finding ways to bridge that need. Leaders in social work are highly motivated and passionate about helping people, whereas managers are focused on results like profits. A leader focuses on people as compared to a manager who focuses on procedure and process. Studies have shown that transformational leadership strengths discussed above get certainly linked to the readiness to participate in requested activities, perceptions of leadership effectiveness and approval with their leader.
Area of growth
Empathy is a crucial area to improve on while doing social work. Empathy is the ability to discern the feelings of others, understanding their experiences and using that to direct our actions. Dealing with people in social work involves understanding people’s backgrounds, interpreting that and helping them. Evidence shows that empathetic social workers are more productive, and clients who get handled with empathy have better outcomes. In saying that, social workers and those that are in management and leadership role are at a high risk for burn out and should have the structures put in place to alleviate this from happening.I feel that this is an area that I could work on particularly as I am juggling family, work, and school responsibilities.I feel that this is an area I need to pay attention and to prioritize self care time even more so now than ever before.
External factors
Stopping of external funding
A social work agencies suffer when funder (s) withdraws, impeding on its ability to deliver (Lauffer, 2010). A social enterprise leader has to have excellent decision-making skills and judgment to decide on the next course of action. A decisive leader can choose to find alternative ways of funding social enterprise. The leader will apply excellent communication skills to appeal to local leaders and other public figures to contribute to the social cause. For instance, I facilitate residential care programs and communicative behaviors programs to clients in our community.Currently, we are funded by 2 governments bodies.If there were to be cuts buts or one funder withdraw this could be extremely detrimental to the services we provide.As we develop risk management strategies, we have now reached out to other corporate agencies for sponsorships and supports to assist in alleviating this threat.
Political interference
Advocacy groups face political interference when the politicians deem them as a threat. An example is the Brazil environmental agency which has been fighting for a reduction in deforestation, mining and protection of indigenous people that live in Amazon. However, the Brazilian president has blatantly ignored their calls, and this tests the abilities of advocacy groups to negotiate with the relevant authorities and come up with a compromise. A good leader, in this case, would mobilize people from different backgrounds, for example, religious and community leaders to appeal to the government and in the international community.
Conclusion
Identifying one’s areas of strengths and shortcomings in leadership roles goes a long way in working effectively towards desired goals. Observations suggest that the nature of social work is more compatible with leadership than management. Improving on some leadership traits has been found to help leaders whether it is on mezzo or macro level to deal with external factors.
References
Lauffer, A. (2010). Understanding Your Social Agency, 3rd Edition (SAGE Human Services Guides) (3rd ed.). Newbury Perk , California : SAGE Publications.
Northouse, P. G. (2014). Introduction to leadership: Concepts and practice. Sage.
Winston, B. E., & Patterson, K. (2006). An integrative definition of leadership. International journal of leadership studies, 1(2), 6-66.
1 hour ago
The tools can be found in text book INTRODUCTION TO LEADERSHIP which is accessable:
link to get access to text book
To sign in to get the text book sign in with:
password: Justicea1
Answer preview ……………..
apa 977 words