Leadership Managerial Aspects – Project Manager

Assignment Instructions

For this paper, examine the leadership and managerial aspects of your most recent professional leadership role. Using the Welch Way principle(s) and 8 Essential Rules specifically, assess your key strengths and your areas of potential development. Fully explore the nature of the identified
strengths and areas of development, providing examples from your experience. All that you write should be in the context of all we have studied to this point in the course.

Sample Answer – Leadership Managerial Aspects

Introduction

My previous professional leadership role was operating as a project manager in an organization I used to work in during part-time. The work mainly involved managing the project development team to ensure effective completion of different project milestone without exceeding the budget or time limit. The project development team contained about 11 members from different cultural ground, age, gender, religion, professional levels, profession fields and different personalities among other diversities. In this regard, effective leadership skills were highly required to ensure sufficient contribution by individual member and sub-groups provided with different tasks and provision of quality output.

Leadership Experience, Aspirations and Goals

My leadership position provided me with an opportunity to develop my leadership skills and to implement the previously learnt skills. I had an opportunity to manage the development of a middle level project from the scratch to completion, a process that involved a high level of resources management which included human resource, time, and finances. Among all the resources that were to be managed, human resource management who needed more of leadership skills than management skills was the most challenging task to handle. Human resource management efficiency determined the effectiveness of time and finances management quality and also the quality of the output. In this regard, I had to provide expand my knowledge on effective leadership skills to be able to influence my followers and to foster good team culture that would enhance effective operation in the project.  My aspiration was to be able to positively influence morale and determination to enhance successful completion of the project. In this regard, constant meeting, briefings, guidance and training was provided to the entire project team or sub groups handling a specific task to improve their morale, skills, knowledge and information with intention of improving their ability to handle individual or group work tasks. My main goal was to ensure that the team remained focused to the true vision and mission of the project. The other goal was to develop a conducive work environment which boosted members’ morale, spirit and enthusiasms during their work. This would gave them more energy to research or to work as a team to solve even the most difficult and challenging tasks that they came across.

Leadership Strength

One of my greatest strength is my ability to influence people and to make them see things in my perspective. This made it easy for me to make team members worked even extra hard to obtain solution to different challenges that we came across. My ability to influence made it possible for workers to remain focused into attaining the required output without looking at the obstacles. Another strength is my ability to remain steady and to stick to one goal. I was able to remain focus and to make my team remain focus to the actual project mission, vision and goals even when I encountered challenges that would make any leader sway. This made it easy to gain the support of the members who believed in me and hence we were able to attain the required results together. With this, I was able to make courage to make unpopular decisions which only made clear sense to the followers after we made great attainment at the end of the project. My leadership skills was another strength which made it possible to handle workers even during conflict. I do intend to expand my knowledge in conflict management and expand my leadership skills further by advancing my leadership knowledge, being engaged in leadership forums, and workshops to strengthen my leadership skills even further.

Leadership Areas to Improve

One leadership area that I need to improve on is diversity management and inclusion in organization or team members that I lead. Although the team was diverse, I did not pay much attention into diversity management. In this regard, most of conflicts that were to be handled revolves around diversity related issues. Thus in need to improve my ability to manage workplace diversity and to embrace inclusion in a diverse team. I also need to perfect all other aspects of leadership that include conflict management, enhancing communication, and decision making. This will be attained through advancement in learning, exposure into more leadership position in different leadership environment, and knowledge advancement in leadership.

How have these experiences impacted you as a leader?

The experience have highly enhanced growth as a leader. It has given me the opportunity to apply theoretical knowledge I learn in class in the reality and thus, enhancing my understanding of good leadership skills and their impact to an organization as well as that of poor leadership skills and their impact. The experienced also help me to identify my strengths and weaknesses as a leader. This experience has provided me with an opportunity to work on my weaknesses as a leader using all possible means to be able to improve my efficiency in the future leadership positions. The opportunity has also enabled me to learn new leadership skills by interacting with other leaders and by trial and error method. Thus, the experience has enhanced great personal growth as a leader.

How do these Strengths and Areas of Development Relate to Aspects of My Emotional Intelligence and My Disc Profile?

My leadership skills, strength and development are highly related to my emotional intelligence since I have highly managed to study my emotion and that of my followers and to identify the right emotions to use to influence my followers positively. With high ability to learn and identify emotions, I have been able to resolve different conflicts in my previous position as a leader and to enhance reconciliation and good relation after a serious fall out. Recognition of workers emotion has also played a great part in employment of my influential skills in the organization to capture workers interest. My strengths and area of development also related with my DiSC profile in that I have managed to position my dot in a more balanced position that promotes my success in the employment of my influence and steadiness skills in leadership aspect.

Specific Steps and Actions I am Planning to Further Improve on My Strengths and Cultivate Areas for Development?

To improve my strength and cultivate my areas of development, I intend to take leadership position in different and more challenging environment. I also intent to take regularly take part in leadership forums where I will learn more on how to solve different leadership challenges in different techniques. I also intent to join leadership professional network where I can extensively interact with different  leaders at different level and learn more about good and bad leadership, how to enhance good leadership and how to avoid poor leadership. I also intend to continue doing personal research on leadership by reading the most leadership recommendable books. This will help me in improving my strength and cultivating my development areas.

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