Common Assignment - Individual Leadership Growth Reflection Essay

Common Assignment - Individual Leadership Growth Reflection - Essay Example This type of awareness is important to leader’s self management ability. Self management must include flexibility to adapt to new situations and emotional self control, ambiguity and complexity. Authentic leaders also embrace honesty, transparency and integrity and earn colleagues’ trust with consistent behavior. This paper will discuss individual leadership growth reflection and also look at and discuss in detail the transformational leadership theory and how this theory impacts my individual development and growth as an effective leader. Finally it shall address various individual leadership development strategies that can cushion me as a leader in my workplace. Transformational leadership As a transformational leader, I must be socially competent in the ways that I carry out myself before others. The display of understanding, empathy and emotions of others, and being concerned with their welfare is core to managing individual’s relationships. As far as organiz ations are concerned, transformational leaders must be perceptive in reading the culture and climate of an institution, alert on how and why decisions are made and keeping pulse of institutional politics. In maintaining good relationships, transformational leaders inspire others with vision, persuasively influence them and advocates for necessary positive change. They come up with skillful approach on conflict management and resolution; develop colleagues as leaders, forms partnership and alliances as well as the capacity to build effective teams and work closely with others in an institution. Various techniques are of aid in self-reflection of myself as a leader, observation off myself and others, meditation and inspirational reading and writing. A good number of organizations have embraced transformational leadership process which serves as an effective, organized and continuing framework for development, self reflection and improvement. In my occupancy as an elementary and middle school principal, many experiences have played a major role in shaping and developing my leadership skills. My reflections on these challenges may also be helpful in program design. In one of my experiences as the leader of the middle school, I was given the task of shutting down an existing elementary school, supervising renovations to the infrastructure and organizing a new middle school which was also being put up as a technology project site for the region. An advisory committee was prepared to lead in development of the project with members from various communities and organizations within the province. My experiences during the five years of active participation with this project prompted me to re-asses discernments of the role of the principal, the effectiveness required of educational leaders and the nature of competent staff development. The aspects of this transformational leadership experience which positively affected my professional growth included: our recurrently sch eduled advisory committee meeting with different stakeholders which boosted the transformational process that we tried to transfer to the school’s daily operation; being part of action research concerning our project which was led by professor from Regina University; being an active participant in mentoring relationship with both the