Personal Leadership Development Plan

Personal Leadership Development Plan

Leaders guide individuals, teams, and organizations to achieve goals and provide services. To accomplish those goals and provide quality services, a leader must be intelligent, trustworthy, disciplined, and courageous. Those traits are developed by learning a core set of competencies. Those competencies enable a leader to motivate others to engage intellectually and emotionally. This is accomplished by creating a trusting and supportive atmosphere, while promoting risk and innovation.

To become a competent leader, I needed to gain self-knowledge. This was accomplished by using feedback from evaluation tools, self-evaluation, and reflection. These activities helped establish my strengths and weaknesses.

However, there are several categories in which my evaluators ranked me higher than I ranked myself. I feel that my self-assessment involves more emotion so it reflects the areas where I feel I could continue to improve, not necessarily my actual performance. Those categories include analyzing problems systematically, logically, and in a timely manner, taking accountability for performance measures, effectively hiring and marketing, being considerate, patient, helpful, empathetic, and supportive, conflict resolution, and encouraging cooperation and teamwork. It feels good that my evaluators appreciate these things about me already and it is not that I feel weak in them. I just know that I can improve. This is a good leadership trait. As we learned in the video clips in Module 3 of this course, leaders will never be perfect and will always have weaknesses. A good leader knows their strengths, uses them, and then selects a team with the strengths the leader does not possess. This results in a strong, dynamic team that will be able to perform

Servant leadership and transformational leadership are two of the most prominent philosophies. Servant leadership focuses on the growth of those around you by providing opportunities and resources for staff to achieve their goals and to be successful in their work. That success translates into the success of the organization and ultimately the success of the leader (Roussel, Thomas, & Harris, 2016). Servant leadership builds trust and appreciation between leaders and staff. Transformational leadership is a process that motivates followers by appealing to higher ideas and moral values. A transformational leader must have a deep set of internal values and ideas and must be persuasive at motivating followers to act in a way that sustains the greater good rather than their own interests (Doody & Doody, 2012). Transformational leaders create an atmosphere that promotes risk taking and allows the boundaries of thinking and doing to be extended. This generates an atmosphere full of energy, creativity, and innovation while assuring that supportive environments of shared responsibility are created (Doody & Doody, 2012). Transformational leadership has been viewed as the most effective model of leadership because, while it recognizes the importance of rewards, it goes further by satisfying the higher needs of the follower by engaging individuals emotionally and intellectually (Doody & Doody,