Leadership- reflection as a team leader - Essay Example

5 December My leadership experience Kouzes and Posner have suggested five practice areas for optimal performance of an individual as a leader, namely modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act, and encouraging the heart (“Approach”). In this paper, I have reflected upon my leadership experience with respect to these five practice areas. When I reflect upon my experience of leadership, I find that I modeled the way nicely. I established certain principles for my team that guided them on dealing with the people of different age groups as well as the people in different positions in the hierarchy of the organization structure.

I knew that the whole team looked up to me like a charismatic leader, and that the way I behaved would establish the standards for the whole team to follow. I established milestones in the way of the achievement of the overall objective, and guided the team to organize their efforts in such a way that they achieve the goals through the milestones. I measured high on the scale of inspiring a shared vision. As a leader, I knew that the planning of a leader is the fundamental prerequisite of teamwork.

In order to minimize the cost of operation, I remained very prudent in the selection of resources. Conventionally, leaders arrange external sources of education and training of the followers, but I made use of the age diversity to educate and train my followers. I organized the whole team in the form of little groups. Every group constituted some senior and experienced members and some junior and inexperienced members. This not only reduced the cost of training, but also enabled the workers to remove their differences and promote an environment of mutual harmony and peace.

These experiments also enabled me to score high on the scale of challenging of the process. There is usually a lot of conflict between the workers that are diverse with respect to their culture, age, gender and religion. I saw the group-work as a means of elimination of such misunderstandings among the team members. Although by doing so, I assumed great risk of facing interpersonal conflicts as a result of increased interaction among the diverse members, yet I thought about giving the group-work a chance, and fortunately, it yielded favorable results.

In the group-work, each member represented his/her unique cultural and personality traits and yet interacted with others, thus promoting an environment in which both the individual and collective efforts would be maximized. This made me a potential leader with respect to enabling others to act. To encourage others heart, I made sure that everybody is appreciated for his/her individualistic contribution in the achievement of the goal. I had established a reward system according to which, I made the well performing individual chief for a certain period of time.

Being a chief, I made him a representative of the members’ opinions. This not only made the chief feel honored, but also provided me with a potential bridge to the members’ perceptions. Concluding, I was a very good leader as I performed well in each of the five practice areas proposed by Kouzes and Posner. In an attempt to promote their understanding and minimize the dysfunctional conflicts, I made sure that the members of each group are not only diverse with respect to age, but also with respect to several other factors including gender and culture.

Works Cited: “Approach.” 2011. Web. 5 Dec. 2011. .