The overall purpose of this assignment is to identify and build on your strengths as a leader.
You will solicit feedback from at least 10 individuals to describe your key strengths as a leader and articulate a vision for how you can build on these strengths to develop as an effective and principled leader. Understanding other peoples’ perceptions of our strengths is critical for becoming more self-aware, which in turn fuels our personal development and growth as a leader.
By asking people about your strengths, you will create a sense of your “best self.” You should obtain short descriptions of who you are and what you do when you are at your very best from a diverse array of significant people in your life. From this feedback, you will learn important things about yourself that you never realized before. This exercise has three specific goals:
To generate awareness of how others see you when you are at your best
To enhance understanding of what kinds of work situations bring out the best in you
To create leadership development plans based on the reflections in this exercise
In addition, outstanding papers will draw from in-class inventories (personality, emotional intelligence, etc.) and exercises to demonstrate superior levels of self-awareness. Gaining self-awareness is an important aspect of leadership development and growth. You should also use appropriate leadership theories from the course to describe your preferred styles, behaviors, and areas for future development (note: materials from class, and in particular Goleman’s article, will be very helpful for you). You should assess the contexts where your preferred styles would be most and least effective, and suggest specific recommendations for further developing your leadership capabilities in ways consistent with your vision for principled leadership.
I expect you to write these papers clearly, concisely, and follow guidelines for APA or MLA formatting. This paper requires you to collect primary data so you should start working on it as soon as you can. I don’t expect you to use secondary sources beyond our course materials.
