Leadership and Leadership Skills - Essay Example

This involved interactions with employees at personal levels to learn their strengths and weaknesses, capitalizing on their strengths and solving their weaknesses. Interpersonal communication and direct involvement with employees at work also proved successful (DuBrin, 2012).  

My position also involved employee orientation, training, and management for effectiveness and employee retention. With a preferred democratic leadership style, in which my subjects were significantly involved in ‘decision-making’ processes, my leadership role involved facilitation deliberation forums. My role of influencing, motivating, and empowering employees also identified my leadership position with capacity development at both personal levels, among employees, and at team levels. The position also involved the identification and nurturing of special talents and matching these talents in different teams. This is because diversity generates different potentials that need to be developed and properly matched with other talents for effective teamwork. My position, therefore, involved leadership initiatives, aimed at developing employees at both individual and team levels towards maximized operational output levels (DuBrin, 2012).

How the position exposed my skills

The position exposed my leadership skills by creating challenges that required specific skills for solutions. The process and results in resolving these challenges facilitated the identification and evaluation of my leadership skills. The need to spearhead successful projects for example demonstrated my skills in identifying individuals who could lead teams to success. While most of my supervised teams significantly excelled in their initiatives, there were exceptional cases of failure. This could not however be solely attributed to poor choice of team leaders as projects’ success depends on many factors, both internal and external. Challenging situations in projects also demonstrated my potential to motivate and inspire employees. When discouraged by challenges, my teams always called on me and we collectively identified solutions. These interactions encouraged them that challenges are always solvable. Challenging projects also identified and for the med basis for evaluation of my skills to be authoritative when necessary, to be a servant leader, and generate and influence ideas. While attributes such as motivating and empowering employees, assertion, setting examples, and participation in generating solutions were considerable strengths, due to demonstrated success, identifying the most suitable team leaders was still a challenge and need improvements (Ashman and Hull, 2011).  

Conclusion

My most significant leadership position has been that of an administrative supervisor at STG Company. The scope of duty demonstrated efficient leadership attributes with necessary improvement in the identification of intrapersonal attributes among employees.