Leadership Plan for Dynamic Leadership | Desklib

Executive Summary
Leadership is the ability of an individual to lead a team or a group of people towards shared
goals. Leadership has always been an important aspect in my life owing to several leadership
opportunities that I have encountered. At present I am leading a team of four people in the
communications department of an Ecommerce retailer. This report is a reflection analysis of my
own leadership traits and abilities. In order to gain a deeper insight about my leadership skills, I
took online tests as well as received feedback from people in my life. Through the course, I have
been able to identify my strengths and weaknesses. The report also contains an action plan that
has been devised to improve upon my leadership skills. The entire journey of self-reflection has
been largely overwhelming as well as eye-opening. I have been able to identify several
intricacies of my leadership style and I am sure this analysis will help me improve upon the
future leadership roles that I embark upon.

Reflection
Leadership refers to the process of leading a team of people towards accomplishing a specific
goal. Throughout my life I have been fortunate enough to encounter several leadership
opportunities and I strongly believe that these leadership roles have played a significant role in
shaping my life. Through these roles I have been fortunate to work with different kinds of
people. A leader is bestowed upon with several responsibilities that need to be fulfilled
(Mitstifer, 2014). The role played by a leader in any organization or group is critical to the
accomplishment of team goals and objectives. A leader must be able to garner trust and instil
respect among team members in order to ensure effective leadership.
At present I work in the communications department of an Ecommerce retailer. I am leading a
team of four people and we all collectively report to the Senior Manager of Public Relations. A
large part of my job involves making sure that the firm’s positioning in the minds of its
stakeholders is positive. As a team, it is our responsibility to prepare all the communication
material that the business requires. This includes advertisements, taglines, newspaper reports,
blogs, social media posts and any other form of communication with internal as well as external
stakeholders of the firm. I have been leading this particular team since 17 months.
My leadership journey especially with this team is an extensive learning experience. When I was
appointed as a leader, I was coming with a significant number of years in corporate
communication but in an entirely different industry. Owing to this, we had several conflicts in
the beginning but over a period of time, situation changed considerably. Today, we work as a
closely bound team. All of my team members are self-motivated professionals and since the last
five months, we have been exceeding our targets. The first responsibility assigned to me was to
form a team of four people who I believe would be able to take responsibility of the
communications department. Before this, our organization did not have a communications
department and all the PR activities were handled by the marketing team. After an extensive
process, four employees were moved to the communications department and they continue
serving here to this date.

Since they were all coming from different departments, my first responsibility was to bring in a
sense of coordination among these team members. I realized that they all work in strict autonomy
and this is leading to missed deadlines and delays in submission. Moreover they had little sense
of ownership for this team and still related more with their previous departments. They even took
lunch with members of their previous departments. Every team undergoes five stages. These are
forming, storming, and norming, performing and adjourning (Forsyth, 2018). During the
storming stage, I realized that team members are very disconnected from each other. In order to
overcome this, I started conducting more team meetings and involved them in the decision
making process of the firm. This served two purposes, firstly, they were spending more time
together with their own team and secondly, they felt an increased sense of ownership.
During this journey I was also able to reflect upon my leadership abilities and styles. I have
always adopted a participative leadership style. A democratic leader involves subordinates in the
decision making process and creates a participative working atmosphere (Iqbal, Anwar &
Haider, 2015). Such a style has helped me connect better with all my team mates and ensure high
participation from all team members. I realized that as a team, we were able to perform better
because we could identify and acknowledge several new and out of box ideas. In fact all the team
meetings were a source of immense learning, even for myself.
Setting clear goals is an important responsibility of the leader. Goal setting theory also suggests
that having clear goals is a source of motivation for employees (Miner, 2015). As a leader, I set
weekly and monthly goals for the team. Initially, I also divided weekly goals into daily goals but
then I received a feedback that such a practice was creating unnecessary pressure on the team.
Therefore this was discarded. I make sure that the entire team is present while setting the goals
because a lot of their work needs high levels of coordination.
Feedback plays a significant role in the success of any team. As a team, we adopt a 360 degree
feedback system. This recommends that all employees will receive feedback from their seniors,
juniors as well as peers thereby completing a 360 degree feedback mechanism (Karkoulian,
Assaker, & Hallak, 2016). Instead of having meetings specifically for feedback, we devote ten
minutes at the end of every meeting to offer feedback. Any member of the team is free to offer