Leadership reflection essay Management Essay Paper

Leadership Reflection
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Leadership Reflection
The demand for effectiveness and efficiency in leaders continues to grow unabated in a business world that struggles to cope with changing business environments, markets and competition amid technological advancements and globalization. The subject of self-awareness and leadership is critical in achieving effective management and mitigating various challenges that are linked to ineffective leadership. In a fast paced world where information sharing has become far too common, effectiveness of various leaders in big corporations can be scrutinized and commended openly and with equal measure. Therefore, a large collection of written literature as well as popular leaders can in illuminating and strengthening focus on this critical subject. By exploring various works relating to self-awareness and leadership skills, this reflective essay examines challenges faced while taking leadership roles as a young leader and an aspiring future effective leader.
Advances in leadership and leadership development are critical components in the process of becoming an effective leader. Day, Fleenor, Atwater, Sturm & McKee (2014) note that one critical component in the leadership development process is self-other agreement (SOA). Self-other agreement relates to how leaders rate their leadership effectiveness and performance and how their rating compares with the ratings of others. Accordingly, leaders who rate themselves similarly to how other people rate them are likely to become effective leaders. Ineffective leadership is associated with overestimating one’s strengths while underestimating his/her weaknesses (Day, Fleenor, Atwater, Sturm & McKee, 2014). As a young leader, I often find myself praising my strengths without peer comparison or taking into consideration opinion of others. The challenge may affect my ability to improve on my strengths and avert my weaknesses translating to ineffective leadership in the future. Self-other agreement is an important aspect of increasing self-awareness and self-perception accuracy which is critical in developing effective leadership skills.
A 360-degree feedback strategy has been adopted nearly ubiquitous with organization using the strategy as an aspect of promoting leadership and self-awareness development. In operation, 360-degree feedback strategy collects and reports on the behavior and effectiveness of leaders gathering unbiased feedback from multiple sources such as peers, bosses, subordinates, clients and other external partners. The feedback is collected with guarantee of anonymity and compared to self ratings. This evidence-based process has become crucial in establishing leadership skills and competencies that aid in identifying effectiveness of a leader (Day, Fleenor, Atwater, Sturm & McKee, 2014: Rothstein & Burke, 2010). Adopting this strategy as a young leader is faced with such challenges as getting biased feedback, for instance, friends are likely to lie while giving feedback which reduces the success of leadership development and self-awareness. While learning various determinants of effective leadership is my ultimate goal, listening and adapting to the feedback of other peo...