Blog IV: What are my leadership traits?
The results of the ‘Leadership Theory and Practice’ and ‘Style’ questionnaires I partook in didn’t reveal too much and confirmed what I mostly knew about myself already. In terms of style, I’ve always preferred to lead based on relationship because I like to give people the freedom in the way they do tasks instead of prescribing a method because often there’s more than one way of doing tasks and someone else’s way might be more efficient than mine. Also in the long term, I believe it’s better to facilitate good relationships with team members and allow them room to discover things on their own as it benefits the group overall if individual members are improving.
As for the ‘Leadership Theory and Practice Questionnaire,’ I’ve always known that human skills have always been a strength of mine so scoring highest on that wasn’t much of a surprise. I was surprised though that I scored higher on technical skills than conceptual skills.
Lastly for the ‘Leadership Trait Questionnaire,’ I found that my self-perceptions of my leadership traits were mostly consistent with the perceptions of my peers with the biggest difference between perceptions about my dependability. For this trait, I had rated myself as a ‘5’ but found my average rating from my peers was ‘3.5’ which I found surprising. My weaknesses as a leader aside from dependability was conscientiousness (3.8), sensitivity (3.5), and empathy (3.8) which were all weaknesses I thought about myself as well and scored myself as ‘3’ for those three traits. My strengths were also consistent with my self-analysis with them being self-assurance (5), out-goingness (4.7), persistance (4.7), and diligence (4.8).
