Leadership Styles and Self Reflection

Subject : Leadership
Student No.
Sub Topic : Self Reflection ( Supervised Project )
Component A

Personal learning journals is records of observation, though through making notes of
previous experience or particular event of period of study, especially in context of placement
experience or work field. Learning journal contributes in understanding key strength and
weakness of individuals thereby finding alternative method that could be used to improve the
same for successful professional career. Managing a team is the most crucial and difficult
task for the leaders of the company. Being a leader of my group project assignment, I have
experiences lot of challenges and identify various reason which create conflicts between the
team members. This is about personal learning log that is made by using Kolb reflective
learning cycle to understand what things that I have learned through my previous experience
while I was studying in a college. The various modules I have learned and read on a daily
basis which help me in developing and improving my academic and technical skills. So, this
covers my personal experience of leadership and what leadership style I need to adopt in
order to solve and observe the situations.
KOLB REFLECTIVE CYCLE
This is a reflective cycle which helps me in analysing and identifying my experiences
and the outcome of that experience. Being a leader of the Group project assignment, I have
faces various issues and challenges to manage my team members daily work along with that I
also faces challenges in motivating and encouraging them. Though, I am reflective my
experience and what positive and negative about that experience in my life via Kolb’s
reflective cycle (McIntyre, Dix and Ward, 2018).
Concrete Experience: I have faces issues regarding the conflicts between the team members
because of their personal as well as professional matters. Not only that I have also experience
that because of such conflicts and misunderstanding among the team members and between
the leaders of different departments the performance level of the staffs is decreasing. The
impact of which is that the overall goals of the teams are not achievable. This is happening
may be because of lack of motivation and appraisal. I also experience that there was a two
member in my team they always used to create misunderstanding between the me and my
other team members. They always make sure that the team members do not communicate
about their issues to me. And then I realize that it may be arises because of the lack of
communication between me and my team members. I experience that I have to use the
management theories and approaches to minimize the communication gaps arises between us.
One more think experienced by me at the workplace is that the structure of transferring
authorities and responsibilities related to work or any other is very poor and wrong which
need special attention (Lamya and et.al., 2020).
Here, the structure is in such a way that every work is delegated from top to down and
no one can talk and express their issue directly to me. I have also experience that in normal
days the work of the team members is quite perfect and they complete it on time but
whenever I have found that the workload comes the members performance and their quality
of the work decreases. This help me to realize that their issues are time management and
work-life balance. I think it may be because of the low incentives and may no incentives.
Basically, what I experience is that being a leader is really a tough task but being an
employee is also not an easy one in the case when there is no support from top authorities.
Besides, managing my team member work I experience that I am unable to complete my own
work on time which need to be solve as soon as possible because my team member will learn
from me only. Because of my responsibility of overseeing and overlooking the productivity
of team members along with communicating with other department’s leaders and top

authority I am facing the issues related to time-management. Because of struggling the
balance of my own work along with my team member, I need to adopt leadership style and
approach (Layton, 2019).
Reflective observation: After experiencing my situation and issues what I faces in the Group
project assignment I have decided to adopt three most important leadership style and that
include coaching and transactional style. This area has helped in reflecting the things that has
gone well and need to be improved so that I can achieve higher success in future case. The
preparation of learning log helped to know my strength skills and weakest skills which I need
special attention of mine.
Coaching leadership style: This is a leadership style which helps me in realizing each team
member’s strength and weakness. After that I always used to assign the work on the basis of
my team member interest and also, I use motivation to encourage my team members towards
different and challenging task. For this, I always set SMART goals and objective for my
members with the help of which they can achieve it on time. Beside this the most important
step I adopt in order to improve my team performance and reducing conflicts is conducting
fun group activities. I also start taking and providing proper feedback regarding work to the
members by breaking the top to down chain and structure (Khan, 2017).
Transactional leadership style: Previously, I put less focus on the performance of the
members the impact of which that my overall team reputation is get down in the eye of top
management. So, after this experience I use this style in which I analyse the daily
performance of each member and make sure that the member will receive incentives and
benefits as per their performance. For this, I have tricked that I provide a same task to two
members and ask them to perform it in a specific time and if anyone complete the task first
will help another member is same task. The impact of which is that their time management is
also get improve and their conflicts and misunderstanding also get remove. I also used pre-
determined incentive strategy to motivate and manage the work of my team members at the
time of tight deadlines (Peng, Gao and Zhao, 2019). The project assignment needs to be
submitted on time and in case my group unable to do so we will face loss of marks or
cancellation of our work. That’s why I generally use this style to manage my group works
and their project completion deadlines. While adopting these two strategies I mainly faces the
challenge time consumption and adversity but in order to solve this I personally talk with
each and every member of my team. In case, if anyone performance was not as per the
standard at that time I rather than telling this in crowd I used to tell them about their
performance separately. The benefits of this leadership style are that I am able facilitate the