Leadership Reflection Paper

Leadership Reflective Paper 1

Question 1: Key Opportunities for Development

The three areas for development opportunities identified for myself relate to me looking at myself (Personal Mastery), looking at how I relate to others (Emotional Intelligence and Empathy for Others) and looking at how I look at teams as a whole (Leading Teams). These are discussed below.

Personal Mastery

This skill was not evident to me when I first started this program. But as I self-reflect I remember two occasions where I had a feeling of “do I belong here” or “am I up to scratch” versus the people I was interacting with on this course.

The first occasion was at the Graduation and Induction Ceremony in Sandton. Listening to the key note speakers, Raymond Ackerman

The exercise we did in class was called a Life Satisfaction Exercise that asked us to chart personal and professional experiences over my life thus far. We were put into our Action Learning Project (ALP) groups and were encouraged to, as far as we could, share our charts and life experiences between the ups and downs.

Each member of the Group had a unique story of how they got to where they were both professionally and personally. I was totally blown away. My initial impressions of everyone who shared were totally transformed.

As a leader, there is value in learning to see everyone as a blank canvass untouched by my own prejudices gained from a lifetime of personal experiences. A foundation of mutual respect is built when a leader treats all people on merit not prejudice. It also encourages the team being led to always give of their best knowing the leader will acknowledge and assess their outputs and performance on

The skills I need to develop to achieve this is to listen without interruption, giving equal opportunity to each team member and encouraging diverse thinking.

Being the leader of our ALP group has challenged all these skills I was trying to develop. The dynamics of the group is such that we have an equal mix of introverts and extroverts. Developing the team charter set the ground rules of how we would engage each other in the team environment. Unfortunately,

I decided to observe and make a personal assessment about each team member, what made them tick. For the introverts, it involved making a point of asking their opinions in meetings. The extroverts were not much of a problem to get information out of, it was about managing and acknowledging their contribution by paraphrasing back to them and asking the introverts what they thought of the