PERSONAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PLAN

FOR

SSGT NIKO GOLUA

INTER EUROPIAN NONCOMMISSIONED OFFICER ACADEMY

MAY 13, 2016

INSTRUCTOR: TSGT MORENO

PART I: PERSONAL VALUES

1. Loyalty to my country and to my people is quality without which I can not imagine anyone
who wants to be airmen, especially leader. The loyalty to people for me means that I'm
interested in their benefits and ready to assist in their duties, development and personal
problems as much I can. The loyalty of my country asking me to put the mission in the first
place in front of my personal goals.
2. Self-confidence. It is impossible to be a good leader without faith in yourself and your
abilities regardless of how much you are professional, experienced and trained. For me,
confidence is not blind faith in oneself. I know myself and my limits and it helps me to act in
reasonable way to avoid damage to me, my subordinates and mission. So I could say that
confidence goes hand in hand with self-knowledge.
3. Sincerity is the base for building trust within the team and a good leader should be sincere
and should give personal example to encourage his subordinates to be honest with each other.
It's important because without trust within the team it is impossible to complete any mission
in effective way. Honesty includes feedback, positive or negative and removes all
misunderstandings.When you are honest, people know your standards. Honesty includes
moral courage to say one's position without fear of consequences, but asks the man to choose
a suitable place and time to not to make trouble to people. From my experience I know that to
be always honest is not an easy task. That's why I try to be honest even in situations when I'm
afraid that it could cause me trouble.
4. Courage is a rational response to the fear. There is a no man who is not afraid of
something, but brave leader is capable to make rational decisions even when he is in fear for
his life and life of the people he is responsible. Sometimes, in situation of fear or stress, I react
in a way that is below the standard I set to myself as a man and as a leader. I noticed that
thouse are moments when I unconsciously chose the "easy way" without looking at the bigger
picture. That brings me to the conclusion that for rational decisions in a stressful situation I
have to be aware of myself and my surroundings to make right decision.
5. Expertise should perhaps be on the first or second personal value of one airman, but
without the above mentioned human qualities all of our expertise has little significance.
However, a good leader must know in detail his work and work of his subordinates to be able
to effectively use all resources he has. This understanding gives me a task to constantly
improve my knowledge and skills I need to carry out all my duties.

PART II:LEADERSHIP VISION STATMENT

As leaders I want to apply and combine all leadership styles from transactional to
transformational, depending on the situation, needs and level of knowledge and skills of my
subordinates. It would be ideal if I could use most of the transformational styles because
thouse are styles that are most effective and provide good motivation of subordinates, but
some situations require more direct approach.
In the situation I have in my current job where I'm occasionally working as a cheif of Track
Production crew in Control and Reporting Centar, with well-trained and motivated team, my
job as a leader is reduced to oversight of the crew and, if necessary, to small corrections.
However, if any unexpected situation will hepen that would require my greater involvement
and leadership style will move to transacional. Also, to experienced personnel I will leave
more freedom to perform their tasks, while with new people I will have a more direct way. It
will be necesery until a novice adopt routine enough to work with less supervisoring.
In case we will drill new actions and procedures, I will applied a combination of transactional
and transformational style, from active menagment by exception and individual consideration
in the very begining to the intellectual stimulation and inspirational motivation.
No matter what job I will do in next several year, I want to establish clear standards, to asure
that my subordinates know what is expected from them. I will always give them feedback
about quality of their work and require the same from them, to try solve together all
challenges that await us.

PART III: STRENGTS AND IMPROVMENT AREAS

Throughout this course, I identified a number of strengths and possible improvment area.
The first thing I'd like to point out as my strength is the ability to function in a
multicultural environment and cooperating with people who come from different parts of
Europe and the World. I believe that this my characteristic is result of growing up in a
multinational environment where I was from my childhood learned to live with people
different from myrself and accept them as normal poeple. I am glad that this is so, because
today we are witnessing the great migration and the growing interference of nations and races,
and I think that will help me in the future life and work.
Another thing I discovered in this course as my strength is the realization that, even though I
passed 45 years, I'm still happy to sit in a classroom to learn new things. Before coming here
I was not sure if I have the will for it, but after the first couple of days I realized that I was
interested in all the new things that we discuss in this course. I think this is strength because to
any Airmen and leader important thing is to study and improve his knowledge and skills
during his whole career.
And finally I think my biggest strength is my patience. For exemple, I'm working for 6 hours
on this plan, I'm struggling with my bad English, fatigue and lack of ideas and have not lost
patience. This my characteristic really helps me in my job that requires a lot of patience in
dealing with people and techniques that often do not work properly.
One large area that requires improvement is my knowledge of English. It was a frustrating
moment for which I am not able to participate in class as I'd like. Beside that I need to
improve my English to have better communication with our NATO partners.
Another important thing to improve that I've discovered about myrself through lesson four
lenses is very low score in a golden field. I already knew I was not exactly neat and
systematic and it would be good to work on that, but now when the test showed me the blind
spot on gold area, I see more clearly the need for it and I can see why I'm not good at things
that require careful planning and development.
And a third area that definitely requires improvment my physical fitness. Much of life I was
dealing with different sports and have always been in great shape. However, the last 5-6 years
I was a bit lazy and get out of shape. To be healty, in good physical fitness with ability to
move, run and endure big physical effort are important things for every airmen and I'd love to
that on this course is much more physical activity to help me to start regularly practice. Let
this be a proposal for the next generation.

PART IV: DEVELOPMENT ACTION PLAN

I still have the intention to develop my capacity to co-existence with people from different
cultural environments. I'll have the opportunity to do so at the next professional course in
Hungary at the end of this year, the cooperation with colleagues from other NATO countries
as well as on vacation, which I will use to travel to some European countries that have not yet
visited. There is no time limit for this plan, it is the task and satisfaction for the long term, as
no exact way to measure success. Every new meeting is success.
Learn, progress, discover new things, that is for me the meaning of life and something that I
will always love to do. I will use every opportunity to sign up for courses, professional or
managerial as well as to independently improve my knowledge in the field which are not
closely related to my job but which I am personally interested. Timeline for some professional
courses is defined by plans which are 1-2 years and measure for success will be efficacy in
finishing them.
How to develop patience? Simply by observing and by raising awareness of myself and my
reactions in relationships with other people. Timeline? Whole life. Resources? More patience
and good will. How to measure? Just impatience can be measured, patience don't have
benchmarks.
Important area that needs to be improved is my English. Already this course helped me a lot
in training of speech and writing. In the next six months I will dedicate to independent study
of English in order to put together what I have learned here and best check will be a
professional course in Hungary at the end of this year.
During the four lenses lesson I've learned that I have a pretty balanced analytical,
compassionate and passionate side of mycharacter, but a lot of the lack of consistency and
neatness. It is necessary to work on that to achieve a perfect balance as much as possible. I
know that this is not an easy task, but practicing neatness and precision in small everydays
things, I believe that through six months to one year I could improve that weak point.
My current poor physical fitness is something that I definitely have to fix. During this course I
already started with light jogging few times on wick and I intend to continue running, work
out and mountian biking when I get back home. Raising the intensity of training I believe that
in the next 3-4 months will get in shape I'll be satisfied with.