Blue Print for Personal Growth - Research Paper Example

?Blue Print for Personal growth Introduction Growth is one of the fundamentals to success and may be internally driven or molded by external factors.It however identifies establishment or improvement of a person’s qualities in a set up and is important to leadership and management. I, in this paper, complete a section of Blue Print for Personal Growth in which I explore aspects of teaming and interpersonal relationships, leading people, personal leadership goals, and outreach. Teaming and interpersonal relationships My personal evaluation identified cooperation as the best approach to ensuring unity in a team and developing cohesion during decision-making processes. Working in groups or teams, however, has challenges due to diversity issues and requires outstanding leadership abilities as a step to building and sustaining teams and their involved interpersonal relationships. My personal assessment also identified my qualities that are important to teaming and interpersonal relationships. These characteristics are “vision,” “charisma,” “negotiation” and “role modeling” (Christensen, Marx and Stevenson, 2006, p. 76). Even though I have made significant progress in leading teams into rational decisions, and cohesion, I have plans for improving on my potentials. I plan to improve on my vision development towards cooperation and cohesive decision making by using my entire team to develop team vision instead of developing one and communicating it to the team. This will have the advantage of instilling a sense of belonging and recognition in team members’ work and association with one another. I further plan to improve on my charisma through mentorship, and training on leadership qualities. Further, I will attend training on negotiation as a strategy to conflict resolution, and cross cultural diversity management as a strategy towards negotiation because exemplary negotiation skills will help me in bridging emerging gaps in decision making processes, and differences due to diversity. My development objectives also include improving on my integrity as a leader, which aims at developing credibility towards trust and influence on people. Implementing these changes will ensure outstanding decision-making processes, team building, and interpersonal relationships because of the elements’ significance influence and cohesion (Gates, 2009). Leading people Transformational leadership is the best practice towards creating, maintaining, and improving a system. This is because of the leadership’s tools that facilitate achievement of systems’ goals through motivation and empowerment. A transformational leader is for example charismatic and therefore derives substantial allegiance from people around him. The people ascribe to his outstanding and captivating traits and this facilitates development of a system to the leader’s desired achievements. The leadership style is also a best practice in creating, maintaining and improving a human resource system because of the involved “inspiration and vision” that focuses teams and groups to outlined developmental objectives and therefore reduces conflicts in implementation of objectives (Marshal, 2011, p. 5). The ability to motivate people’s intellect and personal consideration that is identified in transformational leadership also establishes its position as the best practice for creating, maintaining and improving the human resource system (Marshal, 2011). A human resource system is a set of asset that can be used to facilitate achievement of an organization’s objective and its psychological aspects that identifies influence, motivation and empowerment offers a leader diversified opportunities for influencing the system towards desired outcomes. A leader can therefore empower and motivate a human resource system towards strategic and tactical goals of an organization through identifying and influencing appropriate human resource practices that can empower and motivate employees towards the objectives. Developing and influencing a recruitment process that recognizes the recruits’ worth to an organization is one of the practices that a leader can use to influence a human resource system. This is because the communicated value will develop psychological utility in the recruits and stimulates their loyalty to the organization and its objectives. A leader can similarly transform employee’s attitudes towards practices such as training activities and motivational approaches in order to derive positive responses towards a motivated system that can implement objectives towards organizational goals and strategies (Pride, Hunges and Kapoor, 2011; DuBrin, 2013). Personal leadership goals My leadership traits are manifested in my attributes that influences people to my desired outcomes, and they largely align with features of a transformational leader. One of the traits is the development of a succinct objective and inspiring people into the objective. I have achieved this through my charismatic approach to interacting with people who, then positively responds to my initiatives and proposals. I also identify people’s needs and potentials and understand their motivational factors that I use to facilitate achievement of objectives. I also rely on “intellectual stimulation” as a strategy to leading people, besides understanding every member of my group and considering their isolated environment (Jasper and Jumaa, 2008, p. 8). My major strengths into the leadership style are my charisma and good interpersonal relationship potentials. I am for example able to influence people because of a favorable environment that I always create for interpersonal relationship. People e also recognizes me as a role model because of my level of integrity that has induced trust. As a result, I easily gain their allegiance and influence them into initiatives. My leadership challenge, however, is scarcity of time that develops a barrier between people and me because I have other commitments to look into. I therefore sometimes find it hard to manage time and find opportunities for one on one interaction with people. This further threatens one of my leadership traits that consider people’s personal conditions while leading them. In order to effectively promote vision or change an organization, I am going to build my leadership skills though learning from, independent research, on leadership skills and strategies to developing them, through training, and through mentorship interactions. These initiatives, based on the established theory that transformational leadership can be learned, will help me to improve on my strengths and manage my weaknesses towards successful leadership into visions and objectives (Borkowski, 2009). Outreach My most effective outreach methods were offering gifts to people and spending time to help people in their needs. Helping the people in their needs was particularly effective in creating time for interacting with the people and developing an attachment with them. It also developed trust and bridged interpersonal gaps that existed between the individuals and I. Most of the people whom I help were able to open up and we enjoyed close relationships that led to later interactions by the end of the interaction. Offering gifts to people and friends was another outreach method that worked out for me. I realized that the gifts induced emotional attachments that bonded me with the people and led to relationships that are more intimate. The achieved relationships also identified reciprocation (Grunig, Grunig and Toth, 2007). The major challenge in trying to reach out was scarcity of time for both my contacts and I. The contacts could for example be too busy when I wanted to reach out to them or I could be engaged when the contacts were available. This hindered interactions that could be perceived to burden either party. Differences due to diversity issues were another challenge to reaching out as one of the contacts demonstrated elements of racism and inferiority complex as I tried to reach out. I however plan to develop a systematic approach to reaching out. The approach will include research to understanding the contact’s schedule followed by planning my schedule to fit into the target’s free time. I also plan to develop cultural sensitivity and cultural understanding competencies that will help me in understanding and managing culture based differences in interactions. My generosity and achieved intimacy were, however, satisfactory because I was able to offer my time and material gifts to overcome fears and vulnerabilities towards mutual relationships. I could have however achieved better results by adequately planning for the outreach initiatives and being more sensitive to cultural diversity (DuBrin, 2013). Conclusion Self-awareness regarding my leadership potential and knowledge about my possible improvements and improvement strategies offers a sufficient base for my personal and professional growth in leadership. The Blue Print for Personal and Professional Growth will therefore help me in improving my leadership potentials. References Borkowski, N. (2009). Organizational behavior in health care. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. Christensen, C., Marx, M., & Stevenson, H. (2006). Tools of cooperation and change. Harvard Business Review, 84(10), 73-80. Dubrin, A. (2013). Leadership: Research findings, practice, & skills. Mason, OH: Southwestern. Gates, S. (2009). The relationship between supervisor leadership qualities and home-based clinician burnout. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest. Grunig, J., Grunith, L. and Toth, E. (2007). The future of excellence in public relations and communication management: Challenges for the next generation. New Jersey, NJ: Routledge. Jasper, M. and Jumaa, M. (2008). Effective leadership. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. Marshal, E. (2011). Transformational leadership in nursing: From expert clinician to influential leader. Sudbury, MA: Springer Publishing Company. Pride, W., Hunges, R. and Kapoor, J. (2011). Business. Sudbury, MA: Cengage Learning. Read More