CAREER CONNECTION: Leadership Development Journal - Final

Journal Entry 1

Leadership Development Journal: Entry #1

Sahaboob Yassin

LDR/535

May 1, 2017

Dr. Terica Pearson, PhD

Leadership Development Journal

Leadership traits are fundamental for any leader who wants to be successful in whichever enterprise they are taking. In this respect, when I gauge myself against some the critical leadership traits I find myself to be an average leader. For instance, a leader ought to have phenomenal emotional stability, enthusiasm, self-conscious / awareness, socially bold, tough minded, confident, team oriented, empathetic, charismatic among others. These traits enable leaders to sail through their daily endeavors and as result achieve their set goals. Rating myself against these traits in scale of 0-5 I find myself to be an average leader but I hope that I will improve my leadership skills as carry on with this course. Basically, my strong traits are; am a good team leader who believes in achieving general group objectives as one. I have in several occasions held leadership positions in different groups and the results have turned out to be great. Secondly, am always confident at all that I do and I normally believe in achieving the goals that I set out to achieve. This is enabled my enthusiasm and charismatic characters that enable me to be energetic, active and expressive in all I do. Lastly, I usually put myself in the shoes of others sometimes when making decisions. I have always believed that empathy is a paramount trait that a leader ought to have in order to care for others the same way they would love others to care for them.

On the other side, am struggling with improving my emotional stability especially when working on some tasks. Sometimes I find myself being stressed up especially when I don’t meet my desired goals and as result tend to loose morale easily. I hope the leadership theories we are going to learn will help me in advancing this skill. Lastly, as I indicated in the above paragraph, I sometimes find myself pitying other people and as such, my toughness tends to be low. I will also work on this so that I can develop a skill that will enable me to weigh out situations and adhere to the best decision. I scored 41 marks in the questionnaire and that shows that I have higher potential of being a leader. I believe as we carry on with this course I will be able to work on my weak areas and as such improve them.

Chapter 3 Leadership Inventory

The three broad types of leadership skills (technical, human and conceptual) are great to ensure a balanced leadership in any organization. Striking a balance between the three items has never been easy to me. I find myself to be stronger in some than others. Basically, my human and technical skills are above average based on character traits I described earlier. Making things to traverse between the human perspective (that includes, putting the human force together and doing all I can to deliver has never being a great challenge to me) to technical expertise (that entails understanding things I ought to do as spelled by terms of contract) has been relatively easy for me. My technical skills are always anchored by human skills as to me both work in tandem. For instance, through strong team force, am able to learn key things that are a challenge to me and vice versa. Honestly, am struggling with the conceptual skills that entail organizational structure majorly derived from theoretical basis. I believe this course will sharpen my skills in this regard and enable me to comprehend major theoretical perspectives that will in turn help me in applying real life situations into theoretical perspectives more effectively. Generally, I have scored well ( 23 scores that interprets to high range) and as such I look forward to strengthening my skills as we carry on with this class.