My Leadership Strengths and Areas for Growth: A Reflective Essay

Introduction

Reflective leadership is a way of approaching leadership work by leading one's life with personal mastery and presence. The objective of reflective leadership helps one to learn to be present attentive and aware of our experiences with people. This essay describes my leadership strength and areas for growth or future study. It also includes how these qualities are used in my daily work routine and self-assessment results. Finally, it describes the individual style in leadership.

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Strategic and Adaptability

A leader should have the ability to think strategically to be able to make the right decisions for the organization. This skill also enables the leader to solve problems that may arise in the company. He or she needs to be able to adapt to different changes that he is likely to experience in the organization alongside his juniors.

Affiliative

Carasco-saul, Kim, and Kim (2015) defined affiliative as the formation of emotional and social bonds with other people. A successful leader must be great in making relationships; he or she must be able to interact freely with people. This leadership style works best where there is a need to fix workload stress or bitterness among members. It is useful in restoring broken trust, team harmony, and increase communication and interaction among members (Brayant-lukosius, Discenso, Browne & Pinelli, 2014)

Democratic Leadership Style

In this style, members of the group take a more participative role in the process of decision making (Mahd-alloubaini, Almatari & Almukhtar, 2014). Although the juniors are involved in decision making the leader makes the final decision after analyzing members' feedback. It is a valid style since it makes all employees feel valued hence giving their best.

Transformational style

This style is based on motivation and encouragement of the employees to give their best and always being positive when handling numerous tasks assigned to them. With a positive mind, members can give their best in workplaces. Transformational as a leadership style increases individual's productivity since, as a leader, it has successfully enabled me to interacted and establish relationships with my juniors, thus understanding their potentials are making duty allocation easy. Moreover, since I have enlightened all members on how to know their strengths and weaknesses, they can maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses, therefore, the growth of the firm (Tsai, Chachainasakul, Zhao, Flores & Lopez, 2014).).

According to Bryant-lukosius et al., (2014), in transformational leadership style the leader motivates, encourages and inspire the employees to be creative and innovative to discover changes that will help in the growth and future success of the organization. Mahd-alloubani et al., (2014), reported that there are four elements of transformational leadership style; these are intellectual simulations, idealized influence, individual consideration, and inspirational motivation. Idealized influence: This is expressed through a leader's willingness to follow ethics and organization's values alongside taking risks of the company. This builds employee's trust who in turn emulates their leader. Inspirational motivation: Through their visions and personality's strength, leaders can motivate employees to change their perception, motivations, and expectations and work towards common goals. This style has been successfully used in prisons by organizational psychology. It proposes the morals, values, and ethics in terms of attaining the company's goals without violating the values. Transformational leadership's style redesigns employees understanding on organization culture, moral values, and organizational structure changing their expectations to the organization, therefore, increasing employees' commitment to the company. Transactional leadership or individualized consideration, on the other hand, motivate employees towards working hard using monetary benefits they will get after working (Carasco-saul et al., 2017).

Intellectual stimulation and creativity: here, leaders make employees feel respected, safeguarded, trusted and provided with the excellent working environment through leader's influential abilities in return; they work extra hard, putting more efforts and extend their capabilities far beyond their limits. Moreover, employees become creative in their production. This improves the company's' productivity (Bryant-lukosius et al., 2014).

There are several things in common between transformational leadership style and nursing leadership, which became known as a magnetic force. This leadership style has been evident to be effective, particularly in turbulent environments like those found in today's healthcare. Nurses can learn this outstanding leadership style to support a professional practice environment resulting in exceptional patient care (Tsai et al., 2014). Historically nurses' leaders have been focusing on encouraging and motivating their members to exploit their strengths and potentials besides changing their thinking and being creative in bringing useful change to the company. Leaders in the nursing field too have been embracing charisma influence and achieved its positive impact on members trust to their leaders, thus improving their services (Tsai et al., 2014).

My leadership style has been improving over time; this is as a result of many different experiences I have been getting as I advance in practicing nursing. I have been through leaders with great transformational leadership style, which I have been able to emulate to serve and train my juniors better. In comparison to other leadership styles, mine is easy and swift to deliver since they naturally come from my personality. In addition to this, my leadership style is derived from my strengths, and therefore, I can offer this leadership at my best without any struggles.

References

BryantLukosius, D., DiCenso, A., Browne, G., & Pinelli, J. (2004). Advanced practice nursing roles: development, implementation and evaluation. Journal of advanced nursing, 48(5), 519-529.). doi:10.1111/j.1365-2648.2004.03234.x

Carasco-Saul, M., Kim, W., & Kim, T. (2015). Leadership and employee engagement: Proposing research agendas through a review of the literature. Human Resource Development. doi.org/10.1177/1534484314560406

Mah'd Alloubani, A., Almatari, M., & Almukhtar, M. M. (2014). Effects of leadership styles on quality of services in healthcare. European Scientific Journal, 10(18 http://dx.doi.org/10.19044/esj.2014.v10n18p%25p

Tsai, C. L., Chaichanasakul, A., Zhao, R., Flores, L. Y., & Lopez, S. J. (2014). Development and validation of the strengths self-efficacy scale (SSES). Journal of Career Assessment, 22(2), 221-232. doi.org/10.1177/1069072713493761