My Leadership Potential

 According to this assessment, I have many potential leadership qualities. This assessment looked at potential leadership skills versus management qualities I find it comforting knowing that I have the potential to evaluate my leadership style and continuing to grow and refine my leadership skills. I also realize that since my score between mostly true's and mostly false's was close, I need to pay attention to whether or not I am using leadership skills or management skills.

I think my score in the potential leadership qualities area is reflective of practices that I have been using in the past. I have looked to inspire a vision for a group to help provide a manageable end-state that is reachable. I have tried to develop new ideas and challenged myself as well as others to look at the world through different perspectives. I feel that I have some of these skills, and with constant work and practice I can begin to use these skills to continue to become a better leader.

This being said, management skills come into play. I have noticed that I have responded to problems and dealt with them to help the group continue to perform. I have sought to maximize efficiency and effectiveness as well as stability in everything that I have done. Realizing that these are management’s qualities and not leadership qualities, and realizing that this isn't what leaders need to be constantly concerned with is going to be a challenge. At times it seems these activities are ingrained in my behavior and is not going to be something that will be easy to change.

Since I have worked as a manager and as a leader of a variety of teams and groups, I have found that there is an extremely blurry line between these two types of individuals. In my experience, in agreement with the information provided in the assessment, new leaders to understand the managerial qualities before reaching their potential within the leadership qualities. I have noticed this myself. When first starting as a manager, I focused more on solving the problems and worrying about the day-to-day operations. After some time, when I was comfortable with these operations, I began to look at the bigger picture. It was with the managerial understanding that I was able to understand how to use different perspectives in my outlook. This experience taught me that, being a leader means you have to understand and appreciate the managerial activities, you don't need to always actively participate in doing them, but understand how they play into the vision you are setting for the group.