Self-Assessment as One of the Best Ways in Which One Can Gauge His Strengths and Weaknesses - Essay Example

Self-reflection and assessment is a good way that an individual can use to find out his performance status, his strengths, and weaknesses in relation to certain aspects of performance at the place of work. For students, self-reflection can be a good way of helping these individuals to decide the areas of the job world or studies that they may specialize in. This essay summarizes the findings of a reflection exercise undertaken to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of the researcher who set out to gauge himself on a number of parameters. The first part provided pieces of evidence that show that there has been improvement in the ratings and the second part is an analysis and reflection of the process of self – assessment and an analysis of the evidence gathered.

Part 1

During the first part of the research, there were areas that the researcher rated himself low, scoring grades C and D, which represents “effective” and “needs improvement” respectively, as opposed to “excellent” and “highly effective” rating that is represented by A and B respectively, and which are the ratings that represent good performance. Some of the areas that originally returned low scores were Leadership (grade D or Needs improvement), effective presentation skills (grade C or effective) and cultural literacy (grade C or effective). These areas have returned slightly higher scores in subsequent assessments, and this section will present some of the pieces of evidence that can show that, indeed, there has been some improvement.

Leadership

Leadership is an important trait in an individual pursuing any career field, especially in business, where the divergent opinions and feelings of the people in a team must be synchronized and evaluated and decisions made in time to enable the organization move forward. The first step in becoming a good leader is knowing the qualities of good leadership, and the evidence that there has been effort to discover these qualities and make effort towards improvement on this trait is a document that was written by the researcher as soon as he found out that he was scoring poorly in leadership. While coming up with the document does not necessarily show that one is a better leader, it is a clear demonstration that one is aware of the traits that show good leadership, a good starting point before one starts making efforts to improve.

Qualities of a Good Leader

1. Honesty; while this trait is a requirement in every employee in an organization, there is more expectation for a leader. The team that one is heading looks up to him to provide leadership, and if the decisions he makes are honest and ethical, they will also carry out their duties in an honest and ethical way. These are key requirements for the success of an organization, and this is why honesty is a key factor in improvement of leadership. As a way of improving on leadership, a list of ethics that every team member is expected to adhere to has been written and circulated, known as the ethics code. The leader is expected to display these standards before he demands them of every other team member.

2. Delegation; this is an important element of leadership because other members of the team must be made to feel that they are entrusted with responsibility. Every day, the leader is expected to give some of the tasks that are assigned to him to other members of the team.

3. Effective communication; this has been greatly enhanced in the team, and is one of the best manifestations of the improved leadership.

4. Confidence; a leader must at all times demonstrate faith in the success of his team. Confidence is required at all times, especially at times when there are problems such as low sales, which may cause the rest of the team to feel discouraged. It is the duty of the leader to inspire hope.

5. Commitment; the leader must be the most committed member of the team, and should demonstrate this through punctuality and high sense of loyalty to both the brand and the team.

6. Good Attitude; the leader needs to lead the way in being positive about the operations of the company.

7. Creativity; the leader must demonstrate ability to think and come up with solutions whet situations threaten to be go out of hand.

8. Inspiration; a leader must inspire his team to continuously strive to improve on their performance and work towards becoming the best they can.

Effective Presentation

The evidence that this trait has improved is a PowerPoint presentation (attached). It was a presentation the leader gave to his team on the ways of increasing sales and reaching new markets. Originally, the leader would not have a structured and organized way of giving such presentation, but after the poor score in the self-assessment, it became necessary to come up with organized presentations, which has led to improvement and the attached presentation is one of them. An effective presentation needs to be planned, since failing to plan and note down the points of the presentation will lead to a disorganized, haphazard presentation. In addition, when presenting to a group of people especially on an issue that is intended to guide them in accomplishing something as is the case in this research, it is important to focus on their needs and not those of the leader. The major advantage of effective presentation is enhanced and effective communication, as the level of organization of a presentation greatly affects the level to which communication takes place.

Cultural literacy

Cultural literacy can be said to be the awareness one has towards different cultural perspectives and the role culture plays in the lives of people. In the initial assessment, the score on cultural literacy was low, which made the researcher discover that his awareness on matters to do with culture was poor. To improve, a number of initiatives were put in place, among them studying on the importance of cultural diversity sand its importance to business. In fact, this was one of the topics that the researcher gave in one of the presentations. It dealt with the importance of cultural diversity knowledge to a business especially at a time when there is need to expand to a new market with a different cultural background. The researcher admits to, earlier on, thinking that culture had nothing to do with business and therefore he had no interest in culture as a topic. However, the research has made it a topic of interest and he has discovered that cultural factors of the clientele that the business targets is a paramount issue when it comes to market study and analysis. The attached PowerPoint presentation (Entitled Cultural Awareness) is evidence that the cultural diversity of the researcher has improved from the time the first research was done.

Part 2

A reflection on the process of self-assessment offers good insights into the process of one finding out their own strengths and weaknesses. For as long time, people have been rated by others, but there is an increasing trend in which people do a self assessment be froe others are asked to rate them. If this is well done and organized properly, it is the best way of bringing the individual to a realization of his strengths and weaknesses, and pinpointing to him those areas that he needs to improve on. The above process was an accurate way of helping the students take a critical look at their strengths and weaknesses so that they can find out which areas they need to concentrate on in attempts to improve. Based on the completed, the pre-activity ratings were correct, as the areas that scored poorly were indeed found to be areas of weakness when a careful analysis is done, especially after some efforts had been made to improve. There are some areas in which overrating might have been done, especially cultural literacy in which the available knowledge was very low. After making efforts to improve, the realization of the areas that overrating might have been exhibited was evident.

There is a need to improve on the self-assessment so that the process is more accurate in future. One way through which the test can be improved is adjusting the tests and scores to make it more realistic and specific to the elements being tested. This can be done by, for example, including multiple-choice alternatives to the scores so that the respondent simply ticks on the alternative that is as close as possible to the option he thinks reflects his case. For respondents who are found to consistently overrate themselves, the scores can be left out of the test temporarily, and only choices that reflect their traits given, then the scores are assigned to the responses later. The test also needs to be consultative so that as many people as possible participate in its formulation in order to limit the bias that is likely to come in if it is done by an individual (Nejati, 2013). The evidence gathered to support the improvement is also strong because one of the best ways to demonstrate increased knowledge in any field is to present documents that one has authored on the topic. PowerPoint presentations are the nearest one can demonstrate the exact content of a talk that they participated in. However, these can be improved on in a number of ways. For example, to demonstrate good presentation skills, one needs to be seen in the process of actually giving the talk to a group, since a PowerPoint presentation alone is not enough to prove that the presentation was done effectively. Therefore, videos capturing the presentation need to be availed to potential employers to remove any doubts (Lynch, 2013). One can present videos of himself in the process of delivering the talks, or can refer potential employers to certain websites or blogs where they can access the videos.

The assessment also provided some unexpected outcomes, for example, there had been no interest whatsoever in the topic of culture as a factor to be considered by a business student. When the sores in this aspect were very poor, interest was stimulated and a lot of reading and research has now been done in this area, especially when it was discovered that culture has a big role to play in promotion of business. The outcome is that the knowledge level in this topic is now high, which that was never in the objectives of the assessment, but which is highly appreciated as a positive outcome of the assessment. In evidence presentation, it was discovered that there are some aspects fro which finding evidence is easier than others. For example, it is easy to demonstrate improved leadership skills and cultural literacy, but finding evidence on aspects such as personality and patience as virtues in a business student was not an easy task. It is therefore a bigger challenge to try to prove the existence of these traits especially to a prospective employer. The evidence that was mainly gathered was the documentation that has been previously used in the work place such as policy documents and PowerPoint presentations. These were mainly influenced by their availability and cost implications, as they are the most cost – effective forms of evidence one can come across. They are, however, limited in their ability to prove what they are meant to prove, since there are better methods through which the traits can be proved. There is, therefore, need to continuously improve the self-assessment tool so that in future, the test can return more accurate results.

The personal experience in carrying out this assessment test and in the entire course has been an extremely enlightening one. There has been no other time in which time has been dedicated to finding out personal weaknesses and strengths, as many courses tend to concentrate on theories and other personalities. One of the greatest discoveries made is that many people do not know themselves, which creates a good opportunity to carry out a simple test that showed the student what kind of person he actually is and the areas that need improvement. The other important aspect of the course is learning ways to collect and present evidence about personal strengths and weaknesses. However, the evidence collected in this assessment was not the best and needs to be improved on. The most important aspect of the whole process is that there were areas that were found to have some weakness and needed major improvement by the end of the assessment.

Conclusion

Self-assessment is one of the best ways in which an individual can gauge their strengths and weaknesses and devise a way to improve on the latter while managing the former. An important aspect that this particular assessment focused on was the evidence needed to prove certain strengths and weaknesses, which contrasts many studies that simply ask the respondents to rate themselves on given criteria, but very few ask them to provide the evidence for the claims made. In this case, the assessment done was an effective way of understanding oneself.

Reference List

Lynch, L., 2013. Exploring Journalism and the Media. Sydney, Australia: Cengage Learning.

Nejati, M., 2013. Frontiers of Business Management and Economics. Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers.