Reflected Best Self Portrait - Essay Example

Running Head: Reflected Best Self Portrait Reflected Best Self Portrait [Client’s Name] [Affiliation] I have always known myself as a confident, competitive, and often irrational person. For the last two decades that I stood on the top of my own company, my achievements as well as my brilliant ideas were applauded by my colleagues and those who work for me. I have always thought of myself as a too-objective person with little or no regard for how other people feels, particularly if the situation calls for my firmness and my toughness. Although I have always been aware of my soft side – the aspect of my leadership and management that puts strong emphasis on the contribution of the human resource to the business, I did not pay much attention to it. I run the business on objective strategies and if ever I reach out to my people, the opportunity comes very rare. I see myself as a strict, no nonsense person, until I read about other people’s feedbacks on my leadership and management style. The feedbacks and observations of other people on me can be summarized into three things: I am very competent; they want to follow where I lead because I seem to know where I want to go; and I care a lot for them. Their observations on my competence do not surprise me at all. I am aware of my leadership skills and my crafts as a manager. In order for organizations to grow and prosper, leaders with strong values and high level of competence must run them (Argyris & Schon, 1974). Organizations whose leaders are technical and well-versed in management are more likely to succeed because the people that take the lead knows what they are doing compared to organizations whose people are undertrained, underexposed, and incompetent (Child, 1975). It is for this very reason that I made it a point that I get the right education, be exposed to various aspects of the business to help me make good choices, and increase my competence in many different ways. Because I am competent and I am confident of my knowledge and skills, I know exactly what I want to achieve in the organization. I have made a lot of success stories in the last two decades, establishing a very strong market presence for the company and earning the respect of my colleagues and competitors alike. But because I was too focused on making things happen, I was not so much aware about my relationship with my people. Since I am not the type of person that shouts at people or embarrass them, I usually keep quiet when I am upset over something. When people don’t meet my expectations, I usually got enraged inside and then vent it out through careful remarks. I do not want to point other people’s mistakes. Rather, I made it a point that they find their mistakes on their own so that the lessons will remain. I did not realize that my subtleties translate to kindness. It is only through the feedback process that I realize that people working for me stayed with me not only because I am competent but mainly because I am treating them fairly and humanely. This revelation is somehow surprising but I am happy to hear this feedback nonetheless. This just shows that my personal values and principles were very much integrated to my competence, leading to the positive perspectives of my people towards me. I have identified two important areas in my leadership and interaction with my employees and colleagues. First, I realized that I work best when the people working for me have strong faith in me. The feedback showed that I do well when people trust me and put their faith in what I can do for them. The faith that I discovered is very different from expectations that puts a lot of pressure. The faith that I am talking about is the kind of faith where people accepts success and losses regardless of which comes first because they know that I can make things happen and no amount of failure can stop me from achieving what I think I can reach. Good leaders must be able to identify failures from mistakes. Mistakes allow second chances while failures can break a person down. Leaders whose perspectives about life is pessimistic might see events that do not go as planned as failures whereas leaders who hold on to their dreams According to Mowday & Sutton (1993), the perspectives of individuals comprising the organization will eventually find its way to the mainstream perspective. In other words, my being positive towards the challenges I face have been ingrained to the values and perspectives of the organization as well resulting in a more coherent organization whose individuals are attuned to each other. I also realized that I do not dwell very well in dishonesty and uncalculated risks. There have been many cases in the past (which my employees and colleagues have remembered very well) where I have to make difficult choices for the organization. Instead of treading on the familiar waters filled with dishonesty, I have chosen to be upright and honest in my ways. Because of the decisions I have made, the business has suffered a massive blow and the outcome became too difficult for us. Yet we manage to survive and we emerge strong and righteous. However, the emotional scars those incidents have left behind have been too deep that people find me reclusive and unproductive in the process. I personally noticed that I hate it when people lie to me or have been dishonest; that it made me furious being lied at. So I can say that the feedback acquired from employers and colleagues are fairly accurate. I have a big dream for the organization and for myself. I want the organization to succeed and expand in my lifetime. Apart from the fact that such growth and expansion could help more people; such progress can be reflected to my leadership and management styles. This means that I can inspire more people to follow my views and perspectives because of the success that I brought to my organization. I believe that the mixtures of principles, leadership values, management knowledge, and personal outlooks have greatly enhanced my leadership abilities. Because of this awareness of my strengths and limitations, I was able to make all my goals and ambitions a reality. I want to emphasize more on people management. I want to make my employees comfortable around me without getting too close so as to destroy their respect on me. I want to stay honest and deal even more firmly with dishonesties in my organization and in my personal life. Yet, I want to teach dishonest people of the disturbing results of lives lived in dishonesty. I want to be more aware of the things around me, to be able to synthesize all information to the advantage of the company so that the company can become stronger than it already is. I want to live a little longer so that I can be able to help the company grow more and seize strategic opportunities so that the company can help more people in the long run. More importantly, I want to learn how to let go of the company that I have established, to let go of the people I have come to know in person in the last 20 years, to let the younger generation step up and handle complicated issues that I used to handle. I am a very soft person and I don’t believe that letting go would be an easy task for me. Lastly, I want to live a peaceful life after I retire from work. I want to catch up to the simple pleasures I missed in the last 20 or so years. I want to get even closer to my family and friends, to spend precious moments with them while I still can. I believe I have missed so much about life that I need to get back to my simple self. I want to live more and work less. I want to be me. I want to be happy. Although I have a fairly accurate view of myself even before the reflected best self portrait exercise, I was still surprised that there are areas that I miss or I neglect entirely. I have learned a lot about how I handle professional relationship in the workplace. Although I did not expect the feedbacks to be very positive, I am glad that the people I work with perceive my subtlety as a sign of good breeding and good temperament. I am glad that I chose not to hurt people and to show them the way to their mistakes instead of blatantly pointing out to them which areas they were wrong at. With this new learning about myself, my management styles, and my leadership approach, I am resolved to view myself from a relational point of view. I have to be more aware of the relationships I made around me because as the reflection suggests, the relationships I made in the last twenty years of my life have been material in the success of my company. However, I do not wish to create relationships just because it implies that such relationships translate to the success of my business. Rather, I want to make long and lasting friends from all the people around me which I will nurture and cherish for the rest of my life. The reflection process has been very helpful in making me realize the gray areas that I am generally unaware of. A well informed leader brings out the best in people and in situations (Sergiovanni, 1989) and a leader who is always ready to impart his knowledge, ideas, experience, and his life to the people will almost always find his people sharing a positive and healthy relationship with him (Salas et al, 2004). References Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A.  (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness.  San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Bolman, L., & Deal, T.  (2003). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership(3rd edition).  San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Callahan, K, Stetz, G., & Brooks, L. (2007). Project Management Accounting: Budgetting, Tracking, and Reporting Costs and Profitability. Wiley. Child, J.1975 "Managerial and organizational factors associated with company performance--part II: A contingency analysis." Journal of Management Studies, 12: 12-27 Mowday, R.T., And Sutton, R.I. 1993. Organizational behavior: Linking individuals and groups to organizational contexts. Annual Review of Psychology, 44, 195-229 Salas, E., Stagl, K.C., and Burke, C.S. 2004. 25 years of team effectiveness in organizations: research themes and emerging needs. In C.L. Cooper and Ivan T. Robertson (Eds.),International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 19, 47-91 Schön, D. A.  (1991). Educating the reflective practitioner.  San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Sergiovanni, T. J.  (1989). Informing professional practice in educational administration. Journal of Educational Administration, 27(2),   p. 186. Read More