Leadership Action Plan Essay

This paper seeks to prepare a personal development plan in my objective to become a leader in an organization. I will analyze the requirements of the targeted job in relation to my inventory of skills including my strengths and weaknesses in relation to the requirement of a goal in mind for which I am willing to know my deficiencies in terms of skills. I will therefore have to make an action plan on how to correct my deficiencies and to improve on my weaknesses to take advantage of my strengths in attaining a target job that I want to have and quality of a person that I want to happen as a result.

2. The Goal, Requirements, Deficiencies and the Strategies

2.1 My goal and its requirements

The goal of this plan is to be able to attain the position of Pricing analyst which requires the following: having strong analytical skills and ingenuity to provide logical solutions to nonstandard issues, having a strong mathematical aptitude as well as well developed communication skills (written and verbal), being computer literate (including working knowledge of Excel and Word) and possessing the values of resourcefulness, organizational skills and ability to coordinate activities across company function. It further requires having demonstrated ability to work well under pressure to meet critical deadlines, having the ability to adapt to changing priorities and handle multiple tasks and having an exceptional attention to detail and problem solving skills.

2.2 Determined deficiencies and the causes of their perceived causes of having them

Using as basis the job requirements and compare the same with my present inventory of skills, I found out that the targeted job requires the need for demonstrated ability to work well under pressure to meet critical deadlines as well as at the ability to adapt to changing priorities and handle multiple tasks. I believe this requires utmost patience on the part of person to be hired for the job. A patient person will not be easily being cowed into giving up for pressure as the person would normally consider pressure as part of the job. A patient person will also find the need to adapt to changing priorities and handling multiple tasks to be part of the challenge. I definitely need to be more patient partly because of my attitude of perfectionism which is rather out of proportions sometimes.

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Further comparison of my inventory of skills with the requirement of the job revealed that my verbal communication skills are weak as may be proved from past experiences when I have delegated tasks to people that resulted to some misunderstandings. I have diagnosed the in many instances times about the reasons for these misunderstandings and I found them in failure to make my instructions in a way that may be fully and intelligently understood. In wrongly believing that my own understanding results to my teammates understanding, I really have made a short cut of effective communication which is creating inefficiency to my job.

I find deficiency also in my organizational skills as evidenced by my having overlooked a lot of times important details in my job because of deficient communication skills, failure to delegate and ineffectiveness if making motivations to my people.

2.3 Strategies to address deficiencies with corresponding time table

The way I am going to tackle these leadership deficiencies is to set up a plan where I can draw on personal and others feedback. I have talked to my manager, supervisor, and other coworkers and they have agreed to provide feedback to me on these three subjects. I am going to keep a journal, as well, so that I can track my own thoughts and feelings about how I am handling and improving in these tasks. Also, I plan to do some research on all there subjects so that I may obtain further information on these subjects. The following are the things that I plan to do within my time table.

Improving Patience

On the basis of the above, I found out that I really lacked patience; I have decided to increase my patience in more systematic manner. My high anxiety level, which causes me to get short with people, could really be bad if I will not improve my patience. I am planning to monitor my progress and evaluate myself weekly on my patience levels. In a year I want to get to a point where I can handle any situation, no matter what that entails. I want to get to the point where I don’t let my anxiety interfere with my job duties and interactions with other.

Having stated earlier that lack of patience may be caused by my attitude of perfectionism, I feel addressing the latter is crucial to my development as a person for the desired job. Perfectionism makes me feel that I should always be imposing to people the highest requirement for many work activities without may be considering their capacities. My strategies for improvement of correction of said perceived caused of lack of patience are to analyze the importance of having something perfect in relation to realistic goals of every activity. Since every activity may have its deadline, I would devised an improve schedule so that I will not push myself unnecessarily on things.

But since I may never know if I am progressing on this activity, I would measure my progress and my criteria for measuring the same would be to have less frustration with progress while ensuring that work is still successfully accomplish. The time table for this is one month intervals

Improving communication

One of the requirements of the targeted job is having a strong mathematical aptitude as well as well developed communication skills (written and verbal). Finding my skills to be lacking in this respect, I have decided to effectively improve my verbal communications skills continually by relying on feedback from manager and supervisors in my present job as well as peers and family and friends.

In my own analysis what is causing my poor communication is the spontaneous and impulsive comments to teammates as I perceived bad comments in return making such irresponsive comments which offend their feelings, hence I would really need to reflect on how my comments would affect others. This is in addition to developing of course and an effective communication plan verbally and in writing.

To know whether I would be progressing I would be recording my observance of the absence of negative peer reactions as well as my observation of positive oral feedback from family and friends. I am also giving month intervals ask for feedback from peers and family/friends

Improving organization skills

Organization will be one of my other big hang-ups and I think this should be evaluated daily by keeping a journal of my tasks as well as a calendar to avoid mistakenly overlooking anything. I believe this will take time to improve, and with the help of my observations, research, and others feedback, I could o be proficient in the skills within the next three years. For the meantime I have short goals as explained below.

One way to improve this is to through having the skill to improve delegation. My rather poor delegation is basically rooted in the fear of poor teammate contributions resulting in team failure. I believe this could be corrected by building on trust with my team mates by being first becoming a trust worthy person. Delegation entails trusting people to do it with confidence to their abilities under given circumstances. In the case of team mates, I would have to realize the extent also of my influence so that I would not be ending up delegating everything. In addition I should be developing a system of evaluations of teammates since it is only in giving them the proper feedback that they would have the chance to improve themselves. The time table for this of course, requires that at checkpoints of project, I will have to assess feelings of comfort of myself and my teammates and address any problems immediately as may be necessary.

Another way of correcting this perceived weakness is to utilize an “equal work” policy. Under this arrangement, some my teammates would not necessarily be burdened with having more than expected and this will have a chance of reducing really the fear of poor teammate contributions resulting in team failure. Still another way of accomplishing this strategy is for me to build in checkpoints for making sure that projects are on time. This simply means that making a reliable schedule to monitor and follow through that projects are on in fact accomplished on time.

As a way of measuring my progress in this strategy, I would have to be chance to measure my progress, with myself personally performing less work that would result to utilizing more time to proper and maximum functioning of my teammates. This development should also be seen in my new developed ability to trust teammates that would lead more to better relationships with them by having a confidence in the result of their work.

Another way to improve organizational skills is to improve my forcefulness in motivating people. As a consequence of poor communication skills, my capacity to motivate or move people is just as limited to a great extent. My strategies for this target is includes attend additional classes on leadership (Erez, M. et. al, 2001), reading pertinent books on motivation (Maddock and Fulton, 1998) and utilizing an effective communication. Motivation on organization is a big deal since organization basically involves people who need to have the internal drive to what they need to do. Given the fact that organization may not provide every thing what workers may need, I can top a great potential from them by knowing each of my team mates and really find out what drives to excel of perform better in their job.

I would only be able to verify the attainment of these targets if there are positive responses of others to my improved motivational skills. If small goals get accomplished I would be pretty sure that I making a great motivation job on my teammates more often

Another way of measuring the accomplishment of this strategy is the reality of having an accomplished goals and positive team responses. The time table to evaluate others’ responses and behaviors would be to undertake each monthly.

3. Conclusion

Based on the above plans I believe I would be able to attain the target of becoming a price analyst. The requirements of the targeted position are very clear and I was honest enough to use the requirements to gauge whether I could actually satisfy the same. Driven therefore by the realization that I needed some skills, I should have the courage to correct my deficiency by tracing what are the behaviors that are causing me not to have the much desired requirements of the targeted position in terms of skills.

I have categorized the some major requirements of the job as requiring the value of patience from the need for demonstrated ability to work well under pressure to meet critical deadlines as well as at the ability to adapt to changing priorities and handle multiple tasks. So important is the value of patience in the job and which I have carefully analyzed could be acquired by training me to consider work pressures as normal consider s part of the job that would also help me to adapt to changing priorities and handle multiple tasks to be part of the challenge.

Improving communication between me and the people in the organization was could be by addressing the behavioral cause, that is the spontaneous and impulsive comments to teammates that I commit sometimes based from perceived bad comments. I would just have to stop offending their feelings by my having an honest reflection on how my comments would affect others. This is in addition to developing of course and an effective communication plan (Thorson and Moore, 1996) verbally and in writing which may involved the applicable of basic principles of effective communication that would be read in theory and experience if the actual workplace. Getting the right feedback from peers and friends would accomplish much for this. Improving my communication skill is also closely related with improving organization skills which I will have to develop over time through my observations, research, and others feedback. Having targeted to be proficient in the skills within the next three years, I believe would be realistic enough considering my targeted developed skills for communication. To improve organization skill requires me to improve delegation which I found to having been restricted by my fear of poor teammate contributions resulting in team failure. Being correctible by building on trust with my teammates by being first becoming a trust worthy person, I believe that my decision to delegation put me in the very right path to fully attain an integrated organizational skill (Heller et. al., 1998). I am however cautioned by knowing some limits in my planned delegation by doing still what I need to do best under the circumstances in avoiding to delegating everything. By my honest development of a system of evaluations of teammates, that would give them the proper feedback, I am hoping for the best about the accomplishment of this plan.

Appendix:

Chart of Personal Development Plan

Skill to Improve Causes of Behaviors Strategies Measurement Time table for Assessing Progress

Patience Perfectionism – Analyzing the bad effects of too much perfectionism

– Making a working schedule

– Effective delegation to team mates -reduced frustration

-successful accomplishment of work without much stress Will be monitored monthly

Delegation Fear of poor teammate performance Make a system of evaluation of teammates

– Make an ‘equal work policy.

– Making sure that deadlines are followed Less work to be performed more time for the main requirement of the job Assess feeling of teammates if delegation is received with respect

Effective Communication Irresponsible and impulsive comments Reflect on the effect of comments and reduce the same if necessary

– Design and effective communication plan Absence of negative peer reactions

Positive feedback from friends, managers and supervisors Must be confirmed monthly

Motivation Poor oral and written communication skills Read good books on communication skills.

Attend seminars related to Office communications Willingness of others to have more responsibilities

Attained output targets Evaluation should be done monthly or as often as possible