Personal Leadership Portfolio Part 1: My understanding, experience and interest with leadership has evolved from an early age. My understanding of leadership includes various characteristics and abilities that vary from person to person. Effective leadership skills are critical to build success in not just business, but anything we do. Some key characteristics of effective leaders include confidence, can express creativity, and are generally strong communicators. My personal experience with leadership began with school and team sports. Playing baseball, hockey and football from a very young age showed me what it takes to be a leader of a team, and how important it is as it impacts the entire team. Through school, working in groups has shown me how to lead in certain areas and building a consensus so every member of that groups agrees and is supportive of your ideas or approach. My learning objectives for this course include understanding different leadership styles, skills and abilities. When having an understanding of these, applying them to real life or simulated situations will allow me to choose a style that is most suitable and will result in a positive outcome. Another learning objective will be to learn about the history evolution of leadership and what has driven success in certain areas, and failures in other areas. I believe that my intended learning objectives in this course will be significant to my personal growth and development for several reasons. To begin, being able to identify situations where I can display appropriate leadership skills based on the given situation. For example, there are situations where the appropriate style of communication is important. For instance, a sports coach where he encourages you but pushes you to reach the next level of your success at the same time. Next, I believe that building my skills and abilities around leadership will make me a better, well-rounded person in business and really in all aspects of my life. When applying this learning to current or future endeavours, it is critical to first analyze and understand the situation in order to determine the appropriate leadership style that would be most effective. I hope to continuously expand my leadership capabilities and also understand that they change in every situation and over time. There is not one specific answer to solve all problems, and this is where effective leaders are able to use their abilities to maximize their chances of success. Part 2: There are many people who have significantly impacted my life. Three that particularly stand out, include Matthew Nesbit, Mark Sammut and Muhammad Ali. These three have shown different characteristics, traits, qualities and leadership skills that have positively impacted myself. Using these three as leaders to look up to have taught me a lot about myself, and where to make changes in my daily life to become not only a better leader, but a better human being. To start, Matthew Nesbitt was my head coach for Guelph varsity football for two years. During those years, coach Nesbitt taught and showed me a lot about how to be a leader, showed me how to lead by example and many other skills that have benefited me greatly to this day. As he continues to coach at queens, he shows a great amount of work ethic and dedication to each team he leads. Mark Sammut, being my father, has shown me a lot of fundamental skills throughout my life. Being in the business world, he knows what it takes to be successful, and After reviewing the list of what I categorized each skills, trait and quality to each person I recognized as having an impact to me, I realized that they consisted mostly of heart. Both head and hands had an equal amount of points, but heart seemed to be the most common within this breakdown. From this I can tell that I take many traits to heart from these leaders when they have a strong relationship with me, respect me and are doing it to benefit me or a group that I’m involved with. These leaders show characteristics that come from the heart and when I realize that, it impacts me the most and not only does it benefit me during that time, but I see that as a learning opportunity that I can use elsewhere throughout my life. Part 3: RATER RATER RATER RATER RATER AVERAGESELF ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE RATING RATING 1.ARTICULATE 5 4 4 5 4 4.4 4 2.PECEPTIVE 4 4 4 4 5 4.2 4 3.SELF-CONFIDENT 5 5 5 5 4 4.8 3 4.SELF-ASSURED 3 5 3 3 4 3.6 3 5.PERSISTENT 4 4 3 4 4 3.8 3 6.DETERMINED 4 3 4 4 5 4 4 7.TRUSTWORTHY 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 8.DEPENDABLE 4 4 5 4 5 4.4 5 9.FRIENDLY 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 10.OUTGOING 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 11.CONSCIENTIOUS 5 4 5 5 4 4.6 5 12.DILIGENT 5 5 5 5 4 4.8 4 13.SENSITIVE 4 5 5 5 5 4.8 3 14.EMPATHIC 5 5 5 5 5 5 4 Averages per rater: 4.5, 4.5, 4.5, 4.6, 4.6 After reviewing the findings of the score sheets from the five raters, there is a lot of information I can take from it regarding what changes I have to make for personal growth, what others believe I am doing right and excel in, what areas I can work on to become a better leader, and so much more. All 14 of these characteristics I believe are very important to business, leadership and overall being a good human being. When I take a look at the trends within the rating for each skill, I see a lot of similarities between the majority of raters. In particular skills such as friendly, outgoing and empathic were the same across the board. When I take a look at average ratings for the individual raters, the numbers fluctuate a bit more than what I was hoping. Of course, my relationship with each rater is different and they all haven’t had the same opportunities to see me perform each of these skills in the same way. That being said, what I can learn from this is that I have to have to constantly act the same way in all situations and to all peers regarding these different skills. Working on this will lead to having more similar average ratings between the 5 peers, and give me a better understanding of what I’m still lacking. From this chart, I can see what areas need to be worked on that might develop my personal growth as well as make me a better leader. For instance, under the self-assured category I was rated somewhat low compared to the rest of them. Being self-assured was described as being secure with self, and free of doubts. I unfortunately consider myself lacking in this category as well, as I do tend to doubt a lot with many situations. Whether its group work at school, my place of employment, sports teams or anything else where there is potential for failure, I tend to always have some sort of doubt. I am a very cautious person and I tend to look at all the negatives of each situation before including myself in it, which takes me away from many good opportunities and not being able to put myself out there. I have been trying to work on this, but by taking It to solve problems, I sometimes find myself feeling challenged to make my perspective clear to others. I also find at times it is difficult to share my personal thoughts and feelings to group members, especially when I do not know them very well. For now, these results provide me with a good overall perspective on my capabilities that drive leadership behavior. During the summer, I am employed full time as a customer service representative, supporting dozens of customers each and every day. I certainly recognize the importance of these leadership behaviours and how critical it is in building my leadership skills. In both task and relationship, I scored in the high range which again I feel is an accurate representation of me at this time. Moving forward, this exercise helps me to identify areas of personal growth, areas of learning and improvement overtime. It is important to be a capable leader through an emphasis on both task and relationship styles. This exercise gave me an interesting perspective on my overall style capabilities, where I can focus on areas of growth and where I hope to continue to perform well. Part 5: After reviewing specialized knowledge and certain skills that are unique, there are a few I’d like to list. To begin, I am very knowledgeable when it comes to technology. In today’s world, technology is extremely important in every aspect. Particularly in the field I am getting into which is business, technology is very important with programming, marketing, communication and much more which means having this extra knowledge regarding technology will be very useful. For instance, if I am presenting in front of important clients or my employers and technology is giving me problems, I will be able to quickly recover and find a solution without embarrassing myself and causing a delay with my presentation. Next, I have always been mechanically inclined. Although fixing cars may not serve me in a leadership context, understanding it and being able to teach others might. As an example, I recently have been restoring a car from the 1950s. when friends who have similar interests to me come over to help and lend a hand, I take this leadership opportunity to discuss with them what needs to be done, set certain task to each of them and try and get as much done as possible, although much rarely gets done when friends are over! During this, I tend to get stressed out because I like to use my time efficiently, and when my friends are being more of a distraction than anything, my emotions tend to get in the way. From this, I have learned to be patient and practiced communication and directive leadership skills over this time. I have noticed an improvement in the amount of work that gets done, the way my friends and I work together as well as how my communication skills have improved. Another special skill that might not come in handy as much, but also gives me opportunities to be a leader is being trained in boxing. I have been boxing for five years now and have been competitive, fighting all over Ontario for the past couple years. Recently at my boxing gym, I have been running evening classes once a week for the fundamental class. At first, I was nervous and had a hard time being a leader in front of a group of 20-30, especially when most are older than me. I have become much more comfortable with leading the class, giving advice to members of the class regardless of their age or gender, and have a good routine where I can make sure everyone is pleased with their workout, and are leaving with more knowledge about boxing than they came in with. One particular skill that can set me up for leadership opportunities is speaking fluent Dutch. Although it hasn’t done much for me in the past besides speaking with relatives and being able group chat so we can stay in touch and communicate our thoughts about the assignments. Once this has been done, I try and divide the work up in the fairest way possible, and make sure everyone is accepting of the tasks assigned to them. At times in the past, I’ve focused more on task at the expense of lacking with the relationship aspect. Over time I have been trying to improve on this to be able to balance both and give each enough attention to minimize the amount of issues our group could run into. When I focused mainly on the task, I found that there were poor communication skills between the group members and we were all rarely on the same page. Back then, I assigned tasks without making sure everyone agreed that that was fair which resulted in upset members, lack of work ethic due to them believing it was unfair and the list continues. Since then I have realized that happy and satisfied group members make for a better work ethic and an overall better experience. With that being said, there are certain situations when I still focus more on the task side of things rather than relationship. I have dealt with group members that even after being friendly to and making sure they believe the work is fair and reasonable for the time period they have, still lack to get work done. When the other group members’ grades are on the line, the task is the most important thing that needs to be completed regardless of the relationship with the other group member who is lacking. Although I have a good balance between the two, this situation will always occur and my balance will need to change to make sure the assignments and tasks get completed. Overall, I have learned a lot about leadership since starting university and what works best with pleasing your group members to avoid issues and being the most effective as could be. Part 7: The mission statement I have created is as follows, “I am dedicated to the highest quality of communication, trust, commitment and compassion delivered with trust, empathy and understanding.” I believe this mission statement describes my commitment and leadership skills in a very professional manner. I think the top leadership skills that describe me are my communication, trust, commitment and compassion towards everyone I have worked with previously, as well as present. In past group projects or even at my previous/current part and full-time jobs, I have demonstrated a lot of these skills. For instance, my current employer has had no problems with me. I am consistently on time, have never called in sick or missed a shift in the many years I’ve been working there, and am always committed to getting all tasks assigned to me completed, while striving to succeed with customer service. I have always had the mentality of pleasing people who have an impact on my future. By doing this, I have set up a great reference that will allow me to take my customer service and leadership skills to the next level. I have always been a compassionate person with everyone in my life. I have always showed sympathy and concern with friends, family and even group members that if met for a short amount of time. I believe that if you treat people like this, it will be reciprocated majority of the time, and you also feel good about yourself. It is important to me because these are skills that I have learned from past leaders and mentors of my life. Some of these include both my parents, my current boss, and my football coach, Matthew Nesbitt. Since I have grown up with some much of these skills being shown to me, it almost seems like second nature to have these certain skills and Ье аЫе to provide them to group members, peers and coworkers of the past, present and future.