Managing and Leading in Business

Competency
In this project, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following competency (as pertaining to managing and leading in business):

Identify yourself as a leader and follower to be effective as an individual and team contributor
Overview
Many well-known leaders wrote and continue to write in journals, reflecting on their actions and decisions in their leadership roles. These reflections allow leaders to revisit their choices and learn how to improve their actions and decisions to become more effective leaders in the future.

Directions
Write a reflective paper describing your leadership style and skills. Reflect on what you have learned throughout the course, and think about how you can use this knowledge to further your career. Use the results of your self-assessments, leadership map, and other course materials to guide your reflection. Begin your reflection with a single statement that concisely summarizes your leadership style and approach. The statement should be one that you could later share on LinkedIn or your resume. You could also use it to guide your professional development.

Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:

Leadership Approach:
Leadership Skills: Describe your primary leadership skills and describe how these skills will help you effectively lead a team. Additionally, describe skills or attributes you would like to develop and improve upon in order to become a better leader.
Leading and Following: Explain the importance of being able to both lead and follow when working as part of a team, along with how well you are able to lead and follow on a team while in a leadership role.
Leadership Style: Describe your personal leadership style and explain how you intend to use that style when working with a diverse, dynamic team.
What to Submit
To complete this project, you must submit the following:

Your submission should be a 1- to 2-page Word document with 12-point Times New Roman font, double spacing, and one-inch margins.

Text: Managing and Leading in Business first edition

SAMPLE ANSWER

Leadership Style and Skills

              Collaborate leadership style is a great leadership style that helps me in developing teams that are focused in achieving the organizational goals even with strict timelines. The collaborative leadership style being part of my leadership philosophy has facilitated me to involve co-workers in devising the best approach to tackle emanating challenges and problems in the work place. The collaborative leadership style has helped me in fostering strong work relations among team members due to the ensuing participatory approach and respect for individual competencies (Özbağ, 2016).

Thus, the leadership style facilitates strengthening of the individual strengths in the team as weaknesses are eliminated or reduced leading to better outcomes in work related assignments. Therefore, the leadership style values the contribution of each individual member where consultation dictates the idea that carries the day in the team engagement. This leadership style has shaped my perception of synergy generated in the organization due to the involvement of members of staff in making decisions that facilitate the attainment of the corporate goals. Further, the leadership style has made me to always value the healthy work related relationship for the learning opportunity the workers get.

            The collaborative leadership skills have created a need for the organization through my guidance to develop individual skills set that will support the ability of staffs to function at their optimal capacity. As such there are key skills that are essential to support the leadership style that I use in the organization. Due to my possession of better communication and presentation skills i find it easy to present findings or research on a given team task with ease due to ingrained speaking and negotiation skills. Further, having better listening skills make each member of a team including myself to listen carefully to contributions of others without interruptions (Fiaz, Su, & Saqib, 2017). Thus, the listening skills facilitate group cohesiveness due to the developed respect for individual competencies with less focus on failures and weaknesses.

Also due to the use of collaborative leadership skills, the individual including me will need to have soft skills that facilitate the use of the current advanced technology due to the need for quality research in the team assignment. Thus, the computer literacy skills has proved instrumental on my part due data analysis and presentation during team meetings. Further, by having better social skills has made me to have better interaction skills with team members (Shah, 2018). Thus, through individual rating scale the skills set were reinforced in me since I was rated as highly social and outgoing individual who is ever ready to engage other people in developing and implementing solutions to emerging organizational problems.

            In conclusion, leadership style can be used in combination of other leadership style depending on the issues affecting the organization at any given time. For example use of collaborative leadership style together with other leadership styles such as autocratic leadership style has assisted me in enforcing accomplishment of set targets in time. Moreover, my adopted leadership styles are enhanced by involving employees in meetings to set the standards for appraisal and communication that are clear. This makes target attainment or surpassing to be owned by individual staffs. There is need for any organization to train the leaders and subordinate staffs on the best approach to use in implementing their leadership strategies to assure better outcome.

References

Fiaz, M., Su, Q., & Saqib, A. (2017). Leadership styles and employees’ motivation: Perspective from an emerging economy. The Journal of Developing Areas, 51(4), 143-156.

Özbağ, G. K. (2016). The Role of Personality in Leadership: Five-Factor Personality Traits and Ethical Leadership. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 235, 235-242.

Shah, B. (2018). Effective Leadership in Organization. European Journal of Business and Management Research, 3(3), 1-5.