Core Values
My personal leadership philosophy is deeply influenced and informed by my core values. One of them is the commitment to achieving goals, personal or organizational. Commitment requires that all stakeholders align their goals to the collective mission. As a leader, however, commitment takes on additional dimensions. Long-term sustainability requires not only a committed leader but also one who continues to motivate their followers. The second core value that is integral to my leadership philosophy is connectedness. The essence of leadership is such that there is a sense of connection between the leader and the follower. Therefore, synchrony is essential in a team and as a transformational leader, fostering such a level of cooperation and integration is essential to achieving goals and objectives.
Clifton Strengths Assessment Profile Summary
These core values are derived from my Clifton Strengths Assessment. My profile was rated on different dimensions. First, in the strengths category, I recognized that I needed to improve my strength as an innovative and creative leader. These improvements are particularly focused on finding ways to incorporate ideas and solutions from different groups and individuals and apply them in problem-solving. In the core values dimension, I recognized that I needed to improve my skill in creating a culture of commitment to the common cause amongst my followers, even in my personal life. I learned that I needed to improve my competence as an arranger in the characteristics dimension, either by increasing my knowledge base or partnering with diverse people. The latter is preferable, scalable, and more efficient. I also recognized the need to overcome some of my innate fears as a leader, especially when I am responsible for motivating my followers but afraid of letting them down or revealing my real thoughts. These, among others, are the insights I got from my profile, and they helped refine my personal leadership philosophy.
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Effective leadership behaviors can have a tremendous influence on organizational performance, especially in transforming workplaces into healthy environments. Three leadership behaviors contributed to the formation of my personal leadership philosophy. First, transformational leadership behaviors of ethics and integrity helped shape my sense of right and wrong as an ethical leader. Unlike other leadership theories, transformational leadership embeds a sense of ethics as a prerequisite to being a successful leader and then applying it everywhere else (Yasir & Mohamad, 2016). Ethical behavior, especially in a leader, helps create an attitude and consciousness of ethics among the followers, which promotes healthy work environments.
Secondly, I believe that the foundation of every leader-follower relationship is trust. To a leader, trust does not come automatically but must be earned. For instance, transparency and consistency are leadership traits that naturally engender trust in a leader (Xu et al., 2016). Lastly, I believe that inspiring others is a more important leadership behavior than making decisions (Doci et al., 2015). Both are essential to making a successful leader. However, inspirational leaders have to only create a vision and motivate the followers to implement it. Furthermore, it is not just about having a vision but explaining it to the followers with passion, energy, strong beliefs, and values. These three leadership behaviors are essential to creating healthy work environments.
Personal Mission/Vision Statement
My personal mission/vision statement, which is also my leadership philosophy, is to be a leader that focuses on solutions by inspiring my followers to be leaders themselves with the three essential leadership behaviors: ethics and integrity, trust, and inspiring others.
Achieving this mission/vision requires that I strengthen two key behaviors. First, I need to strengthen my skill as a satisficer. As a leader who focuses on creating solutions, there are situations where I would have to make a decision or think of a solution to a problem that needs solving immediately. If I am a competent satisficer, I would be able to take all the available information and create an optimum solution that can evolve as new information is acquired. Furthermore, as a competent satisficer, I would have to always understand the downsides of the skill. For instance, making decisions under high uncertainty (unavailable information) is not about probabilistic thinking (chances of failure), but creating solutions that are optimized to available information but extendable when more pertinent facts come to light.
The second behavior is that of a maximizer. While it is often encouraged to choose either behavior and gain competence, there are situations where being a maximizer has benefits. For instance, maximizers have both all the pertinent information and time to analyze it to develop a solution. Therefore, the solution is almost always guaranteed to be optimum and new information is less likely to change it. Note that I plan to strengthen my competence as both a satisficer and maximizer to be a well-rounded leader. The result is that I would be able to achieve my personal mission/vision statement of focusing on solutions as a leader.
Achieving the mission, however, requires a plan. In the first step, I have to determine if a satisficer or maximizer is required for the solution., depending on the urgency and available time. The second step is finding mentors skilled in either behavior to provide tutelage. The third step is gaining practical experience. A metric to gauge my competence would be to re-evaluate all my satisficer decisions after a long time, and information is available from the perspective of a maximizer. If the solutions are optimum, then I can say I have developed enough competence.
References
Dóci, E., Stouten, J., & Hofmans, J. (2015). The cognitive-behavioral system of leadership: cognitive antecedents of active and passive leadership behaviors. Frontiers in psychology , 6 , 1344.
Xu, A. J., Loi, R., & Ngo, H. Y. (2016). Ethical leadership behavior and employee justice perceptions: The mediating role of trust in organization. Journal of Business Ethics , 134 (3), 493-504.
Yasir, M., & Mohamad, N. A. (2016). Ethics and morality: Comparing ethical leadership with servant, authentic and transformational leadership styles. International Review of Management and Marketing , 6 (4S).
