Skills inventory by Northouse PDF

Preview

Summary

Download Skills inventory by Northouse PDF

Description

Skills inventory 1. – 4 2. – 3 3. – 2 4. – 5 5. – 4 6. – 3 7. – 4 8. – 3 9. – 3 10. – 4 11. – 4 12. – 5 13. – 4 14. – 2 15. – 3 16. – 5 17. – 4 18. – 4 Scoring on skills Technical skill - 26 Human skill - 20 Conceptual skill – 20

A reflection of my strengths and challenges as a leader The position of acting as a leader has always been demanding as it requires people who have the ability and skills to tackles problems head while using their strengths to their advantage and finding ways to improve their weaknesses. Northouse describes the skills approach in leadership and how it can be used by leaders to reduce the focus on personality characteristics but rather use their skills and abilities to grow as leaders. I will be analyzing my strengths and weaknesses using my results from Northouse’s skills inventory to assess my leadership qualities and find areas where I may need improvement. From the results of the skill inventory questionnaire, I discovered that I am a leader who has a high range of technical skills and a medium range of both human skills and conceptual skills. I totally agree with the results of this assessment because I consider myself as someone who uses strategical thinking to handle my tasks and plan for the future or solve problems even though I do not consider it as my strength. Strategical planning is something I consider myself good at but not excellent at. I am a person who prefers to envision every next step and lay down every possible outcome of my actions. This type of strategic planning helps me determine where I want to be as a leader and where I expect my team to be. Having such expectations makes it easy to address any obstacles that I may face. Northouse describes technical skills as adequate knowledge on any specific type of work combined with proficiency of the same (Northouse, 2013). From his description, it is clear that my strength as a leader lies in the technical skills that I possess like the ability to analyze and employ the best tools and techniques required to make sure my work remains successful. Another strength I possess as part of my technical skills is my work ethic and excellent problem-solving ability. I am very good at solving problems that arise in our organization

whether new issues that need time and careful thought processing or the common problems that may arise in the organization. My technical skills give me the ability to identify potential problems and gather adequate information regarding these issues and figure out the best way to solve them. One thing I understand as a leader is that I cannot solve every problem, therefore, I always tackle the ones I am sure I can manage and ask for help on more complex issues that may require more effort to solve. With my strategical thinking, combined with an excellent work ethic and problem-solving skills, I know I make a capable leader who can guide my team and improve our performance output significantly. This will be achievable if I can be able to work on the weaknesses I am about to mention. I understand that leaders cannot possess all the three leadership skills mentioned by Northouse and considering my strengths lie on my technical skills, I am a good fit at middle management levels (Northouse, 2013). This is mainly because I have a moderate skill level at both human and conceptual skills and this is where I face a lot of challenges as a leader. I understand that I may lack some crucial human and conceptual skills like the ability to fully visualize ideas and the concepts of my entire organization. Sometimes I fail to see the bigger picture maybe because I am more of a technical person. I also lack in good communication skills and building solid relationships with fellow colleagues and my subordinates. These are very important skills for a leader and I understand how important they are in helping an organization run very smoothly and in increasing the reproductive capacity for any organization. Northouse mentions conceptual skills as the ability to work with ideas and concepts and I believe this is the area I would love to improve in terms of my skills. In order to fit well into top management levels, my conceptual skills need to be at the top (Northouse, 2013).

Conceptual skills are the most essential when it comes to running an organization because this is the skill that enables a manager to think in terms of the whole organization. Having the skills to strategically plan for an organization is very important because only a conceptual leader can generate ideas and plans that may help an organization overcome its problems. I believe improving my conceptual skills will also combine well with my technical skills because problem-solving goes hand in hand with strategical planning and the two rely on each other when it comes to tough situations. In conclusion, I consider myself a capable leader who lacks quite a bit in my conceptual skills and I can easily improve on them with time and become a more capable leader in the future. I would also need to try and work on my human skills....