Term Paper on "Leadership Development Plan"

Term Paper 6 pages (2000 words) Sources: 6

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Personal Leadership Development Plan

During this course, I have gained immense insight into my own leadership capabilities. I have learned my preferred leadership styles and those I avoid using. I have learned about my strengths and about my weaknesses. It is important that I continue to grow and develop as a leader, especially in my need to reconcile caring for people with caring for my organization's uniformity of purpose, and my ability to persist towards a real solution in times of conflict.

In order to facilitate that growth, I propose the leadership development plan below, based on my goals, self-assessments, and feedback from people who know me well. This plan is not just a one-time task or assignment, but an expression of my values that I will revisit from month to month and year to year. There are several distinct parts to this plan: its theoretical foundations, its relationship to my career and personal goals, a thorough self-assessment, and a timelined plan of attack that addresses weak points in my self-assessment. At the end of this plan I have summarized the projected development outcomes that I expect as a result of executing the steps in the plan.

Theoretical Foundations

The most useful leadership framework that I have seen for my purposes is the Scholar-Practitioner-Leader (SPL) model. This is a model of organizational and individual behavior that I would like to follow for the rest of my life. It emphasizes the equal roles of knowledge, expertise, social contributions, alongside the ability to lead by influencing others (Avolio & Yammarino, 2002: 48). Using this framework to assess particular leaders' styles, we can see that some organizations privilege one dimension over another. Depending on the organization's needs at the time, this may be appropriate. Many educational and healthcare organizations have taken this model as an ideal on which to base their hiring and development practices (Wasserman & Kram, 2009: 511). It appeals to me because I recognize the importance of knowledge and social action in building and leading an organization, especially a healthcare organization. Personal influence, charisma, and transformational actions alone will not be enough to create and sustain an organization whose goal is the permanent personal transformation of clients' lives.

Goals

My guiding goal is to be the CEO of a nationally-recognized addiction treatment center with multiple facilities. This goal comes out of my own personal history, my deep interest in human well-being, and my recognition of my own abilities as a leader. A close member of my family has had a long struggle with addiction, and has successfully met his goal of sobriety for the past twelve years. Part of his extraordinary transformation took place in a rehabilitation center, so I am very well acquainted with the good that these centers can do. I fully believe in the mission that an addiction treatment center must have, and that it takes a strong, charismatic, knowledgeable leader to successfully oversee such a program.

One key element of this goal is further education. In the healthcare field, attainment of the terminal degree for one's specialty is essential. It confers respect, prestige, and confidence in a leader's foundational knowledge and ability to work hard at a self-imposed goal. A doctoral program in healthcare administration provides ideal preparation for running an addiction treatment center. Although education itself is not a certain indicator of drive, charisma, or influence, it is critical for a thorough understanding of the vision I desire to lead my organization towards. Building an organization that can successfully treat and ameliorate addictive behavior requires an understanding of the most recent research on addiction, as well as an understanding of best practices in healthcare and organizational management. My graduate career may terminate with a DHA, but my educational development will continue for the rest of my life.

Self-Assessment

My strengths as a leader are my emotional intelligence, my charisma, my concern for people, my transformational communicative strengths, and my ability to collaborate and compromise on a solution. Scores from my self-assessments of Emotional Intelligence, charisma, leadership style, conflict handling, and team-building can be seen in Table 1. These strengths have made me a very good "people person" and a respected manager. Coworkers and friends describe me as organized, prepared for change, able to make critical decisions, and someone who leads by example. It is important to me that I leverage these strengths in the development of my career and personal goals. For example, my charismatic and transformational leadership style will serve me extremely well in building a team of dedicated professionals, donors, and administrators. The ability of transformational leaders to motivate a diverse workforce is well recognized (Bono & Judge, 2003: 554). My skills may also allow me access to a healthcare administration career in human resource planning, in the context of which I would build my knowledge base about healthcare organizations in general and addiction treatment specifically. Putting knowledge into practice in the field is facilitated by learning in a practical setting (Wren, 1995, p. 403).

My weaknesses as a leader include an imbalance between my task-orientation and my people-orientation, a tendency to seek stability over innovation, and my difficulty leading people who expect a "male-typical" leadership model. I tend to be more people-focused than task-focused, which can result in a very happy team who has not actually accomplished much, or accomplished it well. I am inclined to give people more time to learn than they might need, and I avoid putting pressure on my team when a little strategic pressure might be appropriate. I am also concerned with my leadership style as it affects innovation. As a leader, I know that I need to foster innovation in the structure and function of my organization, but I am less inclined to make my team compete than I am to ask them to find a collaborative solution. Lastly, my biggest challenge as a leader to date has been confronting sexism. In the world of healthcare, there is still a gendered division of labor and expertise, with men holding the plurality of high-prestige expert positions and women holding mostly low-prestige administrative and support positions (Riska & Wegar, 1993, p. 218). Although this is changing, I still find that my leadership style must accommodate team members who respond best to the competitive, take-no-prisoners, ego-driven, highly directed style typical of male leaders.

Leadership Development Plan: Overview

The explicit goals of my leadership plan are to develop into the kind of leader who:

1) Fosters an innovative environment for my team

2) Is able to lead in a "feminine" mode as well as a "masculine" mode

3) Possesses a Doctorate in Healthcare Administration (DHA)

4) Is prepared to meet the challenges of building a multi-facility substance abuse treatment organization.

These goals can be met by taking courses and workshops, interviewing and shadowing people who are doing the things I am passionate about, pursuing a DHA degree, investigating ways in which leaders can foster innovation, and working on my drive, confidence, and ability to demand the best from my team.

Leadership Development Plan: Timeline

I anticipate that developing a "masculine" leadership face that I can turn to when needed will be the easiest gap to close in my leadership portfolio. Fortunately, there is a training seminar coming up in August on Leadership Skills for Women, run by SkillPath management seminars in Atlanta. This workshop will give me a broad overview of techniques women in leadership positions use to overcome gender bias and achieve the same levels of influence as men in their fields. This part of the plan will be complete by September 1 of this year.

The next step in my leadership development plan is to investigate the ways in which leaders foster innovation, particularly in healthcare institutional settings. One helpful project might be to plan an independent study of ways in which healthcare organizations have encouraged or suppressed innovation, and think about what role leadership played. As a starting point for this independent study, I will read recent work in peer-reviewed journals that specifically addresses leadership for innovation and/or healthcare management. One example is Somech (2006: 132-157), "The Effects of Leadership Style and Team Process on Performance and Innovation in Functionally Heterogeneous Teams," in the Journal of Management. This article presents a thorough review of the effects of leadership style on innovation before delving into the author's research. In the specific field of health care administration, a good starting point would be Viens et al. (2005: 150-158), "New Approaches of Organizing Care and Work: Giving way to participation, mobilization, and innovation." Although this article is written from an organizational perspective, it still contains insights about how individual managers should lead teams in order to help innovation bloom. This self-guided study will take several months, and I anticipate that I will have met my goal in this respect by July of this year.

Another part of my plan is to conduct in-person interviews with healthcare administrators in order to discover how they manage leadership challenges. I will be especially… READ MORE

How to Reference "Leadership Development Plan" Term Paper in a Bibliography

Related Term Papers:

Leadership Plan Personal Leadership Development Term Paper

Leadership Plan

Personal Leadership Development Plan

Personal Development and Theoretical Underpinnings

Throughout the self-reflection and investigation that has taken place during this course, I have developed an increasing awareness of… read more

Term Paper 5 pages (1327 words) Sources: 4 Topic: Leadership / Mentoring

---

Creating Leadership Development Plan Term Paper

Creating Leadership Development Plan

Leadership Development Plan

In assessing the results of the leadership plan received, my intention is to define a series of personal, professional and leadership strategies for… read more

Term Paper 6 pages (1620 words) Sources: 0 Topic: Leadership / Mentoring

---

Personal Leadership Development Plan Essay

Personal Leadership Development Plan

As a managerial leader, I have many strong suits. I am a detached and rational decision-maker, which manifests itself in a number of key strengths. I… read more

Essay 4 pages (1488 words) Sources: 4 Topic: Leadership / Mentoring

---

Leadership My Assumptions About Leadership Have Changed Research Paper

Leadership

My assumptions about leadership have changed over time. I used to believe that leadership was simply a matter of having strong motivational skills. That remains a part of the… read more

Research Paper 18 pages (6193 words) Sources: 7 Style: APA Topic: Leadership / Mentoring

---

Leadership Development and Effectiveness Article Review

Leadership Development and Leadership Effectiveness

Issues dealt With

Leadership development needs to be agile enough to meet the changing needs of an organization, yet stable enough to be consistent with… read more

Article Review 3 pages (945 words) Sources: 1 Topic: Leadership / Mentoring

---

View 100+ more related papers  >>