I hereby present responses that reflect how I assess my personal and strategic development in the light of studies by Hughes, Beatty & Dinwoodie (2014) and Ungerer, Ungerer & Herholdt (2016). To provide added clarity, I have provided each response with an accompanying theme or sub-theme where applicable. The themes are labelled in numbers while sub-themes in letters such as a and b.
How I respond to life’s circumstances
Like most people I know, I tend to enjoy desirable circumstances to the fullest. For the less desirable ones, there are two key factors that influence how I respond; my faith in God whom I trust to ultimately make everything work in my favour and, my capacity to think deeply until I find the most practical solution. When unable to find a solution alone, I rely on as much support I could gather from family, friends and trusted associates.
How I handle the stressors I face.
Indeed, I handle stressors both personally and professionally. At a personal level, my faith in God serves as leverage for coping with the stressors. As I trust God, I tend to withdraw more to myself in order to pray and undergo deep reflection and introspection while in search of answers. At a professional level, I also collaborate with my team and together, we weather each storm as it unfolds. Recently, in one of our business units, we experienced very low sales and this was quite discouraging and stressful. Handling this situation personally and professionally, gave me the strength to dream again and as I write, we can already see light at the end of the tunnel.
Why I am working towards strengthening my responses to how I handle stressors as well as life ’s circumstances.
I have come to realize that my personal growth ultimately drives my professional performance as a leader. Specifically, I realize that when I am at my best at a personal level, I tend to provide better leadership to my team. As such, I take matters that affect my personal growth and development very seriously. My need to become a more effective leader and ultimately grow my profit and non-profit organizations motivate me to continually strengthen my responses to stressors and indeed, all of life’s circumstances.
My strengths and weaknesses with regard to the changes I desire in life.
I consider my strength to be my tremendous inner strength and will-power for pursuing constructive actions towards my personal and professional development. As per weaknesses, I sometimes find it difficult to make spontaneous decisions or arrive at any decision at all. I believe this is the costly price I sometimes pay for my excessive analysis of situations.
My Personal Mission, Vision and the Values I Practice
My personal mission is to initiate and implement strategies that address cultural, socio-economic and political issues that adversely affect the development of the youth, women and children in my home state and beyond. My vision is to eventually live in a world where suffering becomes non-existent and abundance becomes more natural than scarcity. As much as this sounds very ambitious or near impossible, I still continue to envision it because I have come to understand that all it takes is to inspire more people to make the right choices and also empower them to live better as they choose right. The core values I practice include generosity, love, empathy, integrity, justice and diligence.
The challenges I experienced as well as the circumstances of my growing years have made me naturally sympathetic toward the plight of less privileged people in society. Specifically, I grew up with a wooden spoon and was raised by a single mother. This explains why I feel a strong connection with my mission, vision and values.
The Key Strategic Drivers that Would Help Me Create Significant Impact for Achieving My Potential
I have chosen the following strategic drivers as being critical for helping me actualize my potentials and vision for my non-profit organization;
(a) improved access to funding and material support,
(b) passionate and resourceful personnel who would commit towards my vision,
(c) a more robust needs assessment strategy that would better enable my team and I create a stronger impact in our quest to address the plight of less privileged people in society, and
(d) leveraging the use of information technology and social media for better coordinating our projects (Hughes et. al., 2014).
I would be seeking to excel in areas (a), (b) and (c) above. Considering that at the moment, our target beneficiaries are currently the poorest among the poor who have very limited access to the Internet, I would be seeking to abandon aspect (d) above for now.
The Personal/Professional Culture which I Want to Develop from the Mission, Vision, Values and Drivers Envisioned and How They Align with my Present/Future Success
My mission and vision entails addressing the issues that affect the vulnerable in society especially women and children. To complement this vision, first, I hope to strengthen my culture of personal learning and research (Hughes, et. al., 2014). This would enable me better access and appreciate the peculiar needs of individuals within our target groups and also discover how best to empower them. In addition, by constantly seeking to learn, I would remain open towards newer ideas which could help in shaping and re-shaping my vision in order to constantly create maximum impact in society using the available resources.
I realize that just as a tree would never become large enough to fill the space of a forest, I would never be able to actualize my vision without the support of others. As such, it is imperative that I develop a professional culture and system for constantly identifying and retaining the best available people who share and could contribute towards actualizing my personal and professional vision (Hughes, et. al., 2014).
Conclusion
My old economy thinking and practices, their outcomes and how I Intend to change them.
The old economy thinking and values which I have practiced include;
(a) hero leader and hierarchic power,
(b) privilege and technocratic opaqueness of power, and
(c) the tendency to dictate and control (Ungerer, et. al., 2016).
I believe that this old way of thinking may have also contributed to the considerably high rate of staff turnover at the initial stages of our organization. Specifically, virtually all decisions had to be run by me as the organization’s founder and this clearly had its effects on the rest of the organization.
Over the years, I know that have evolved as a leader by learning to trust others more. With the insights gleaned from Ungerer, et. al., (2016, pp.15-17) I intend to adopt a personal and professional strategy which better distributes power and leverages on the collective effort and support of others towards achieving a shared future that we can all envision and work towards actualizing as a cohesive team.
My personal assessment of the personal development which I need to become a better strategic leader.
Following my review of Hughes, et. al’s (2014) book about becoming a better strategic leader, the key area which I have identified for my personal development as a strategic leader is my ability to communicate and transform my vision into one that becomes a shared future which the members of my core team and by extension the organization, could fully commit towards. Essentially, this entails the human element of strategy as described by Hughes, et. al. (2014, p. 32). A different area which I also identified for my personal development is to strengthen my capacity to continually imbibe the learning mentality especially as I seek to further strengthen our mechanisms for determining and measuring the performance of my team as we implement our corporate strategy (Hughes, et. al., 2014, p. 33).
Current strategic strengths I have discovered and how I can align them to become a better strategic leader.
Two of the strategic strengths I have discovered are (a) my capacity to adequately access the internal and external environment in which my organization operates and (b) my capacity to create a business strategy (Hughes, et. al., 2014). I intend to align these strengths by applying them to better understand how my organization might satisfy the critical needs of our customers, expand our understanding of the factors in play in our industry and better access our strengths and weaknesses in the light of our capacity to meet the needs of our customers (Hughes, et. al., 2014, pp. 23-24). In addition, my capacity to create business strategy would prove instrumental towards making informed choices about which drivers I constantly need to prioritize to continually position my organization for superior performance over time (Hughes, et. al., 2014, p. 31).
References
Hughes, R.L., Beatty, K.C., & Dinwoodie, D.L. (2014). Becoming a strategic leader: Your role in your organization’s enduring success (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Ungerer, M., Ungerer, G., & Herholdt, J. (2016). Navigating strategic possibilities: Strategy formulation and execution practices to flourish. KR Publishing.
