Leadership Reflection Essay: Developing Leadership Skills and Traits

This essay presents a leadership reflection, analyzing the student's leadership skills and traits through the lens of questionnaires. The introduction establishes the importance of leadership and the use of questionnaires to assess strengths and weaknesses. The body of the essay is divided into three parts, each focusing on a different questionnaire. The first part discusses the leadership trait questionnaire, highlighting the student's self-assurances, trustworthiness, conscientiousness, empathy, and dependability. The second part examines the results of the leadership skills inventory, which revealed strengths in technical skills, enthusiasm, listening, and decision-making. The third part analyzes the leadership behavior questionnaire, noting a lower task leadership score compared to the relationship score. The conclusion summarizes the key learnings, emphasizing the importance of continuous improvement and the application of leadership theories such as coach-style and transformational leadership to foster strong relationships with followers and achieve strategic goals. The essay aims to provide a roadmap for the student to become a more effective leader, drawing on the insights gained from the questionnaires and relevant leadership theories.

Running head: LEADERSHIP REFLECTION
Leadership Reflection
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

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Leadership Reflection
Introduction
Leadership is a process to guide, support, monitor and facilitate a person, group of
persons or huge organisations. The leadership process is carried out to achieve specific goals
and to implement the planning successfully (Western, 2019; Malakyan, 2014).. The score of
my leadership trait questionnaire showed a result of 57 and it has a tendency to show neutral
effects of leadership traits and there is room for improvement. The results from my skills
inventory questionnaire showed a total score of 82, resulting in a high skill level. The task
score in leadership behaviour is 37 and the relationship score is 44. These results will be used
to improve future leadership goals by developing leadership skills and traits according to
leadership principles and theories. The current essay aims to analyse the leadership needs
through questionnaires about the weak and strong areas of the leadership which will help me
in the future to develop a roadmap to be the best leader by keeping in mind the necessary
areas to improve.
Body 1:
Through the leadership trait questionnaire, it was found out that the average of the
five results and the attempt by myself declared that self-assurances, trustworthiness,
conscientiousness, empathy, and dependability are higher being a leader. A leader needs to be
less dependable and provide complete discretion by guiding the followers in such a manner
that they perform their best. The rest of the traits are seen as positive, and a leader becomes
ethical while he supports the followers if he has a great conscience and develops
trustworthiness among his followers. When he shows empathy, he is supposed to perform his
best part by being realistic and supporting the followers with the needed resources to carry
out the tasks. To be self-assured is the key to success when a leader has got persistence,
confidence, perceptiveness, determination and diligence. In my leadership style, I have to

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develop sensitivity and articulation to get better in communication and emotional
perspectives.
Body 2:
The results from leadership skills inventory show that I have technical skills, an
enthusiastic nature to explore things on several dimensions, listening, enjoying the tasks,
multi-disciplinary, accountability, support and decision-making skills. These skills are
important to be influential leaders who never get bored from work. I will continue the skill
development to make them refined for better leadership developmental goals. In the future, I
would plan to take the challenging tasks and delegating all the responsibilities by assigning
different milestones to the followers. This will enhance the capabilities of the followers, and I
will also improve my leadership persona. These characteristics are important to be displayed
by a leader if he wants to get acceptability among the followers. Skillset will also make the
relationships strong when a leader supports and guides the followers in the process of
development.
Body 3:
The leadership style of the leadership behaviour questionnaire shows that the task
leadership scores are lower than the relationship score. In this regard, I need to make
improvements to the task goals to make my understanding clear and obvious. This will
enhance the abilities to determine the excellence level that has to be achieved when the goals
are to be met. The relationship score helps in understanding that excellence in the task score
will further strengthen the relationship goals. This has identified the weak areas to be
improved and further plans will be made to initiate organised efforts to be an influential
leader. Such characteristics will develop transactional and democratic leaders who will be
good at systematically imparting the tasks by establishing the relationship goals in a parallel

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way. This will be focused to influence and inspire the followers so that they can initiate the
activities with the support of a charismatic and inspirational leader.
Conclusion
Hence, it has been established that the leadership styles and skills can also be learned
and when the pathway has been decided and declared clearly, it makes a huge contribution
towards the strategic goal accomplishment. As a leader, I have learned that an effective leader
has to make attempts to improve his styles to be familiar with the followers. In light of the
results drawn through the questionnaire, I will develop certain traits that will help me achieve
the desired goals. The scores from these questionnaires have also helped in identifying that
strategic leadership is aimed at constructing long-term relationships with the followers to
carry out the necessary leadership goals. Coach-style leadership and transformational
leadership will be practised to develop strategic relationships with followers. These theories
are not only helpful in defining a path for the success of leaders but also make sure that the
followers are getting benefited by the leader.

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References
Malakyan, P. G. (2014). Followership in leadership studies: A case of leader-follower trade
approach. Journal of Leadership Studies, 7(4), 6-22.
Western, S. (2019). Leadership: A critical text. SAGE Publications Limited.