Personal Philosophy LEAD 3300 PDF

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Personal Philosophy LEAD 3300...

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Personal Philosophy: Leadership Effectiveness

Student Name: Fadwa Assaf Course Name: LEAD3300 Instructor Name: Tabea Berg Due Date: July 15, 2018

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Table of Contents Experience and Reflection

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Evaluation 7 Action Plan (SMART) 8 Conclusion 9 References10

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Experience & Reflection My definition of effective leadership is having to practice skills to become a better leader. Therefore, effective leadership will be based on three core values such as inspiration, motivation, and practical thinking. My values are based on my positive and negative experiences of my personal life. My experience of leadership is based on three different leaders who have helped me understand leadership. Therefore, I would like to describe my experiences related to my mother, teacher and a stranger. I will be describing my positive and negative experiences with each one of them. My experiences are based on my three core values. The most inspirational leader is my mother. My father passed away due to cancer when I was only ten years old. We are a family of five children. My siblings and I were all born in Canada but decided to move to Lebanon because of our family. My father had a really great job in Canada and only visited us once a year in Lebanon. After he was diagnosed with cancer we decided to move back to Canada. My mom was not only a leader to me but a hero as well. She did not get in another relationship, however, her only goal was to make sure her kids were safe, honest and educated. My mother has been a leader by encouraging me to work hard in every step I took in my life. Although it was tough in the beginning for her to take care of her kids, she stayed strong and never gave up. I remember asking my mother, why my family is going through many problems. Her response was that go is testing us. My mom explained to me that life is like a test paper. She told me that questions can trick you, but you should work hard to answer them correctly. Sometimes you get a question

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wrong, but you learn from your mistakes. She further explained that we should always focus on finding solutions to our problems. When my mother explained me everything by giving an exam example, I could relate my test paper with my family problems. This taught me to be passionate about something that I love and do anything to accomplish my desired goals. Furthermore, when I was in grade 12, I overheard my mom discussing financial problems with her brother. I decided to look for a job to help my family and save towards my university tuition. I decided to take a year off from school and start saving up money. I began working at Dairy Queen at a mall in a full-time position and started making lots of money. I noticed that I can afford all my university tuition in one year. So, I decided not to go back to school and continued to work much more and make more money. One day while I was working, and a random person approached me. He started asking me why I was working and not in school. I explained to him that I am happy because I am making a lot of money and I do not want to go back to school. He responded by explaining that this will be my future job for the rest of my life if I did not go back to school. Somehow, he convinced me to apply into accounting after I explained my skills in math. The same night I went home and applied into accounting and a few months later I got accepted. I met this man again a year later and he remembered me. This stranger was a leader and very optimistic towards my future. This is very helpful to leaders, so they are willing to help find solutions for their followers.

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The third leader is my teacher in elementary school. I was in grade six and my math teacher noticed my math skills in his class. I was very smart and always answered questions quickly. The teacher told me about a math contest and wanted me to join. Back then as a child I was very shy and would not take risks. He talked to my mother and they both convinced me to join the competition. In the competition we were split in to 2 groups versing each other and our team was the winner. I was very happy and so as my teacher he was proud of that I had won. However, for me what was more important was taking a step and doing something that I feared. I always thank this teacher because of him I am more outgoing and always take risks. Giving confidence to others to participate is an important characteristic to be able take risks and gain more skills. I would like to describe one incident that happened last week and what I have learned from that incident. Last week, in one of my courses, I was given one challenging assignment, where I must work with my group to develop a website for our food business plan. Although it is not a real business website, my group was asked to come up with an innovative business plan, which would convince our classmates to invest in our business website. My group consists of four classmates, including myself. We gave each other different tasks and we have decided to focus on various aspects of our business plan. Since I am majoring in accounting, my group members decided to give me the financial aspect of our business plan which also includes creating a website for our business plan. In my business plan, I must look at cost methods which will exceed profits over cost. Therefore, I must use my critical thinking skills to decide what’s profitable for our 5

food business. Even though it’s a fake website, my professor has asked us to make it look real. Therefore, I must create a website which will be accessible to my classmates. However, I have never created a website before, this activity is challenging for me. I will complete my business website by this week so that my professor can look at it by next week and can give me feedback to improve it. I think the business plan assignment will help me to improve my accounting knowledge as I have to think critically to reduce business expenses for my food business. Even though it’s a challenging assignment, I will be working with a group with different skills. For instance, my team member had problems with her writing and I helped edit her work. Working as a team is essential as the different skills from different members help accomplish the goal of the whole team. For increasing my inspirational skills, I have decided to work more on intellectual empathy. In one of my leadership classes, intellectual empathy means to understand people’s thoughts and opinions. I think if I want to inspire people, I must give up on my selfish thinking and I must think about how my actions will help others around me. I believe that all inspirational leaders have inspired people by connecting with their thoughts and by doing things which benefit everybody. Therefore, I want to work on my intellectual empathy skills because I think those skills will help me to inspire people. My negative thoughts and fear of failure are two of my biggest obstacles to becoming an inspirational leader. I have been reading a lot of motivational quotes online and I usually start my day with one motivational quote each day. I think motivational quotes have made a lot of difference to my thinking and I’m able to overcome negative

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thoughts and fear of failure to some extent. It is when we are outside of our comfort zone that we encounter opportunities to grow. I will measure my performance by asking my myself some questions like what I have learned. To sum up, I think I must work more on understanding myself because I think self-awareness is the key to success. Evaluation My current leadership skills are: communication, motivation, trust, creativity and responsibility. I have been always told that I have great communication skills, through confidence and most importantly commitment. I am always motivated to do anything to complete the goal. I am personally very competitive and always motivated to be the best. I believe that the leaders I choose to follow represent my goals. I know that these leaders have the skills and techniques to accomplish the goal. Leaders are great to lead me and motivate me to accomplish my main objective. These traits have so much value for me and express who I am. No one was born with skills it takes practice and sometimes mistakes to learn and to inspire them and achieve the skill. I lack certain leadership skills such as: taking feedback, patience and sometimes teamwork. I personally have had many problems with taking peoples feedback into consideration. Every time someone says something to me, I assume I am always correct. This is not a good factor for any leader, as they need to be aware of other opinions and perspectives. I never really noticed that I had this issue until I wrote a discussion in this class and noticed that I do not take feedback from people. Patience is another actor that I lack, and it makes me nervous when I must wait for something. As a leader patience is key to success as it gives the leader control over situations. I work

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well in teams, however, sometimes I dominate the team and take over other members work if they are not very efficient. Action Plan (SMART)     

Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time bounds

Using the SMART goal setting plan, this will help me describe how I will get to where I want to be. Specific is the first component of the SMART goal setting plan. I would want to gain the experience and skills needed to become an accounting clerk. Recently I have been applying for many accounting jobs and most of these jobs require and experience. I need this experience to have a start with my career, so that when I graduate I have some skills. Secondly, measurable is the tracking of my progress and it will help be me stay motivated. Measuring my goal of obtaining the accounting skills to have a higher position in my field is important. It is measurable by determining how much training and experience I have completed in the current period. This will help me stay focused and meet my targets and be motivated to accomplish my goals. Achievable is the third component and one of the most important factors. This is by putting more capabilities than what I can accomplish. Setting a goal and finding the opportunities to be able to get close to my desired goal. For example, do I have enough time to get my training completed? Asking questions like this will illustrate how I will achieve my goals.

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Relevant is as important as the other three components I listed. This step ensures that my goals are relevant to myself. It is important to choose the right goals that will benefit and support me to attain my goals. I need to have reasonable goals and skills to who I am to be relevant for my future. Time bound is the last step of the SMART setting plan. Setting a target date is relevant so I know that I need to accomplish it before he due date. I must be consistent with my deadlines to be able to achieve my long-term goals. In my case, it is how long it will take me to acquire the desired skill. The skills are short term goals, so the deadline would be between 6 months to a year. Whereas, getting the perfect job is long term and a due date would be over one year. It is imperative to give a correct amount of time into achieving the goal. Conclusion In conclusion, self-awareness is the major component that I have realized from this class. It allowed me to identify the skills I do not have as a leader. This helped me find the areas in which I needed more experience and understanding. Some things I decided to do was to stay open to other possibilities. This made me realize my strengths and weaknesses. I noticed that I am very honest and reliable and was able to work with team members to accomplish the goals. However, my weaknesses were brought up which is overconfidence and I knew I needed to work harder to improve my confidence. Knowing who I am I would be able to give my voice to my values “and feel comfortable sharing them” (Kouzes & Posner, 2017, p. 14).

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References Kouzes, M. J., & Posner, Z. B. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations. Hoboken, New Jersey, USA.

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