AGED 260 Leadership Theory Analysis 1

Section: ADF Ninghui (Angel) Zhang

Personal Introduction & Core Values Being a student in College of Business, I have a good amount of opportunities to get involved. A lot of the events that I have been involved with were volunteering and community services. I love helping people, and am satisfied with their satisfaction. Among those experience, I found myself emerged as a leader a certain times, as I define leadership as being able to offer help that influence others. Being influential is actually a crucial part according to Mr. Northouses definition of leadership, which states that leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. My leadership definition is deeply rooted in my personal values. My core value is to be helpful, and its supporting values include being liked, being friendly, and to serve others. I aim to bring positive energy to people around me, and that is why I love smiling. I am confident that smile has the power to reduce dispute! Because I value those qualities and that I admire people with those qualities, I would like to include them in my leadership definition, and let it serve as a guideline for my leadership development. Through my leadership experience in student organizations and community service, I have practiced my communication skills and leadership skills. Yet, there is still a huge space for me to improve. After this course, I would like to see myself grow further in leadership ability, specifically in interpersonal skills and management strategies. Those can also be very helpful for my future career.

Trait Approach The trait approach suggests that all the leaders happened to have a very similar set of personality traits, and that only those who possess designated traits will become leaders. That is to say, leaders are born to be leaders, and they are born with leadership traits. This is why the trait approach is unique from other leadership theories. In order to discover my leadership traits, I conducted the Leadership Trait Questionnaires. I asked three friends who know me very well to rate on my leadership traits. Meanwhile, I also scored myself for the same trait set. The purpose of the survey was to compare how people perceive me and how I perceive myself. The result turned out that there is not a big difference between others perception and mine. The differences in scores range from -0.3 to +0.3, with four zeros, being selfconfident, persistent, dependable, and friendly. I am glad to see that my friends rated me high for friendliness. This is one of my main values, after all. Among the traits where I underestimated myself, the one that surprises me is articulate. Although this phenomenon is not congruent with my high score in self-confidence, this calls for a re-evaluation of myself. As opposed to articulate, I overestimated myself for being trustworthy. I thought I have always been faithful and reliable. However, there were clearly some certain moments when I turned my friends down, but I did not notice. Overall, I am pleased that I have a fairly accurate perception of my leadership traits. The key takeaway from this assessment is that I should pay more attention to my behavior, since any subtle detail can change others view towards me. According to the trait approach, all five traits are equally important, so I will have to achieve all of them in order to become a leader.

Skills Approach The skills approach focuses on the importance of leaders abilities in leadership. The most unique part of this theory is that it stands at leaders perspective and emphasizes the impact of leaders competencies in a management relationship. The skills approach also implies that leaders are not born to be leaders. In fact, anyone can become leaders as long as they acquire enough skills. This appears to be more realistic and convincing. The theory includes many learned skills, such as crystallized cognitive ability that is accumulation of experience. This is another aspect why the skills approach is very different from other theories. From the Skills Inventory I conducted, which aimed to analyze my leadership skills, I realize that I still need to improve my conceptual skill. I got 28/30 for both technical skill and human skill, while 22/30 for conceptual skill. According to the Figure Management Skills Necessary at Various Levels of an Organization from Northouses book, I am more suitable to conduct supervisory management, where not too much conceptual sill is needed. I would think that I am more comfortable doing jobs that require subtleness and where I can interact with others. I guess this also go along with my core value of helping others. In order to improve my conceptual skill, I plan to practice thinking from the big picture, without losing attention to details. I will try to balance among the three leadership skills.

Leadership Theory Summary There have been a lot of studies and theories discussing about what leadership is and how do people develop leadership abilities. The three main concepts we talked about in class are trait approach, skills approach, and Emotional Intelligence. Although Emotional Intelligence is not necessarily a fully developed theory, it is a hot topic in leadership studies. All the theories can have various focuses when evaluating leadership. However, they do share some similarities. For example, ability to maintain good relationship is mentioned in all three concepts. (Sociability in trait approach, human skill in skills approach, and relationship management in Emotional Intelligence) By learning and combining ideas from all three concepts, I was able to gain a broader view about leadership. To be more successful, I identified my strengths and weaknesses through the Leadership Trait Questionnaire and the Skills Inventory, which gave me an image of where I am on the road of leadership development. Then I was able to match my strengths with the leadership approaches covered to picture my perfect job. (Details can be found in the previous section) For future development, I will have to advance in planning and execution. More specifically, to improve my ability to oversee my task from a big picture view, and then get down to details regarding how to implement the task. This can be accomplished by drawing an overall idea when planning, and design an issue tree to address the topic. Then, achieve the task piece by piece, which will eventually lead to success.