Reflective Essay: Developing My Leadership Skills

📌Category: Development, Experience, Leadership, Life, Myself
📌Words: 993
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 02 February 2022

Before starting my MBA journey, my leadership skills were empirically developed. I read some books, asked for advice (only very few times), looked up at the leaders in my organization and outside, and made a lot of mistakes. Looking backwards now, only after three weeks of starting the MBA, I realize that even though all this learning resources helped me a lot to grow as a leader, there was one key element that I was not practicing enough: SELF REFLECTION.

Since the beginning of the program, I realized the importance of structured self-reflection activities/sessions to know and understand oneself better. This deeper self-understanding is helping me not only in understanding my weak spots for their improvements, but also is helping me to project myself into the future on what kind of leader I want to become. By better knowing myself, it will be easier (possible) to continuously shape my own path and goals, as well as to influence the path and goals of my teams.

From the various self-reflection activities, we have done, I learned that an important complementary leadership activity for growth is feedback, not only giving, but also, and more importantly, receiving it. I learned that in the various leadership roles from my past, I didn’t exploit enough the resource of feedback to develop myself and my team. Regarding receiving feedback, I was prone to defend or dismiss my position, which generate a mental wall for me, that hinders my growth. This occurred mainly when the feedback I received came unexpectedly. I realized that this defensiveness disappeared when the initiative of the feedback came from me. Regarding giving feedback, I was prone to not giving enough direct feedback to my peers or the people I managed. Now I realize that I delayed the process of giving feedback, which slowed down the possibility of faster improvement and learning.

I am an introverted person. I don’t speak much, and thus it always has been difficult for me to start conversations and keep them flowing. Because of that, I never enjoyed going to networking events, as I felt that I was not being able to create real relationship with the people in those events. I learned that introverts have a big advantage for networking: LISTENING.  This has encouraged me to change my networking strategy and become a more active listener in networking events. This is skill I plan to nurture and practice from now on. Knowing new people can open unimaginable opportunities for personal and professional development.

I also realized that I was underestimating the power and importance of an advisory board. My “advisory board” was to narrow (only focused on some intimate contacts) and underused. This advisory board, even though had helped me in certain situations in my life, still have huge opportunities to grow in a manner that will help me grow as well.

Regarding my teaming skills, I have learned the importance of building meaningful relationships with my teammates to create a safe environment for sharing ideas, points of view, project suggestions, etc. The build of this safe environment is only possible with tolerance, empathy, and an open mindset. Furthermore, I have been impatient all my life, trying push projects or initiatives forward as quick as possible. Having work in a leadership position for the past 5 years, where I was responsible of giving a pace to my teams’ tasks, I quickly understood that it was important for me to “lower a gear” to help create a more collaborative team environment.

After all these reflections, and understanding some of the opportunities points for leadership growth, I commit myself to practice the following:

  • Everyday, have 5 min self-reflection sessions at the beginning of my day, in which I will write on a notebook possible challenge of the day, how I overcame the ones from the they before, and how I am feeling about it.
  • Ask for feedback twice a week. Not only regarding work/college, but also regarding my personal life.
  • Participate in at least 1 networking event per month.

About my learning group

I consider myself very lucky with the team I was assigned to. Since the beginning we have had a good understanding of each other. Most importantly we understood our own diversity, and thus the importance of being tolerant to each other thoughts. After the first guiding sessions, we were able to establish our rules for actions on our charter, and after that, we moved forward to create a good team spirit. I can confidently say that we have created a healthy working environment that provides psychological safety to all of us. For example, when we are discussing subjects, or trying to define certain thing, we all make sure that the others are on the same page, and we don’t move forward with the topic until everybody has committed to the answer.

We not only engaged at a professional level (peers at college) but also pushed ourselves to engage at a personal level. After only 3 weeks working with my team, I feel very comfortable around them, conversating with them and working with them. This was also a team effort. We have tried to engage with each other as much as possible in and outside college.

An emerging challenge I envision for our team is the division of workload if the semester’s work become heavier, which I think will be. Probably at some point we will have to “divide and conquer” to advance our work more efficiently. I feel this will require a change of our way of work, because up to now, we have decided to work all together on the required tasks that we were assigned (not only regarding BETA-X, but also other team projects).

Even though until now the work with my team has been smooth, and I feel confident that we are building good intimate relationships, I personally commit to the following actions to ensure a more successful and satisfying BETA-X project:

  • When I don’t understand the others points of views, I will ask thorough questions. Also, after pointing my ideas, I will make sure that everyone understood them by directly asking for the comments or opinions.
  • I will encourage a weekly feedback moment for the team, in which we will share comments, complaints, compliments, etc., of our work together. This will keep nurturing the work culture we have created. 
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