The Positive Leader: Analyzing Employee Outcomes and Reflection Essay

This essay analyzes the concept of the positive leader and its impact on employee outcomes, focusing on the use of reflection as an informal training method. It begins by highlighting the challenges organizations face in improving employee performance and introduces the importance of training and workplace learning, including both formal and informal approaches. The essay emphasizes the benefits of reflection as a proven informal training technique, as defined by Jordi (2010), and how it allows employees to extract knowledge from their experiences and critically evaluate assumptions. It then discusses the role of decisive and positive leaders in incorporating informal training, emphasizing characteristics such as communication, integrity, empathy, optimism, and objectivity. The essay concludes by recommending reflection to enhance employee performance, highlighting the need for leaders to engage employees effectively. References to relevant research are included to support the analysis. The essay fulfills the requirements of Assessment item 4, focusing on analyzing and reflecting upon interventions aimed at increasing employee outcomes using reflection.

Running Head: THE POSITIVE LEADER 1
The Positive Leader
Students Name
Institution Affiliation

THE POSITIVE LEADER 2
Improving employee outcome has been the biggest challenge for many organizations
until recently. Corporate and organizations have spent millions of money and devoted their
ample time to try and identify techniques of improving employee performance. Indeed, training
and workplace learning is a critical aspect of human resource development. The most common
type of workplace training is the formal or official training, which has proven to work in most
organizations. However, Anseel, Lievens & Schollaert (2009), advise that combining both
formal and informal employee training yield a better result. Reflection is one of the proven
informal workplace training that has shown to yield better results (Sparr, Knipfer & Willems,
2015). Reflection according to Jordi (2010) is the “activity in which people recapture their
experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate it.” Jordi adds that reflection allows
employees to extort an understanding from their experience and thus, they can critique ethnic,
class, and gender hypothesis and injustice. In addition, the employees can be able to think about
their potency and flaws and come up with a plan of how to improve their work performance.
Besides, reflection as informal workplace training is more engaging and participative.
To incorporate informal training to formal training requires decisive leadership. Decisive
leadership is a form of command that is deviant. Leaders are flexible and open-minded to new
ideas. Confident leaders can achieve more in regards to enhancing employee performance.
Positive leaders can identify with employee challenges and know precisely what type of training
and the technique of training to use. They practice empathy and therefore can identify with
employee challenges and flaws. They seek feedback from employees rather than answers. Hence,
these leaders can work well with reflective learning as part of employee training precisely
because they possess the following characteristics of communicative, integrity, empathy,
optimism and objectivity. Being able to extract information from employees’ personal reflection

THE POSITIVE LEADER 3
is not smooth. You have to master the art to engage and indulge the employees. Formal training
cannot allow this kind of interaction because of its nature. In conclusion, reflection as informal
training is recommended to enhance employee performance.

THE POSITIVE LEADER 4
References
Anseel. F., Lievens, F., & Schollaert, E. (2009). Reflection as a strategy to enhance task
performance feedback . Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 110
Jordi. R. (2010). Reframing the Concept of Reflection: Consciousness, Experiential Learning,
and Reflective Learning Practices. Adult Education Quarterly, 61(2), 2.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0741713610380439
Sparr. J. L., Knipfer. K., Willems. F. (2015). How Leaders Can Get the Most Out of Formal
Training: The Significance of Feedback‐Seeking and Reflection as Informal Learning
Behaviors. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 28 (1), 33.
https://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21263