Comprehensive Leadership Paper (400 points) 20-25
In this paper, you will interview a leader, assess your personal leadership, and apply leadership principles to your own leadership and to your organization. The content should generally be based on your behavior in your current position in the workplace. It is acceptable, however, to include content based on other reference points, such as church, nonprofit organizations, or family.
Your comprehensive leadership paper should include the following content:
Leadership Interview
Interview a leader in your business, organization, or community, such as an executive, elected official, minister, coach, or principal, about valuable developmental experiences. Make sure that you inform the leader concerning the nature of this class and the purpose of the assignment before asking the questions listed below.
Do you think leadership develops with experience?
Are there one or two experiences you look back on as having been especially valuable in helping develop your own leadership? Please briefly describe them.
What made these experiences so valuable?
Have your own views of leadership changed over time?
Do you think leadership in your arena is much different from, or involves different pressures, than leadership in other arenas?
Do you ever reflect after the fact about how effective your behavior was in a particular situation? Is this ever a source of new or different insights?
Is there any advice you would give people early in their careers about leadership?
Assessment of Personal Leadership
Assess your orientation toward power, including your tendencies relative to the five sources of power (refer to your Bases of Power Inventory).
Assess your leader motives.
Assess your typical (or default) influence tactics.
Given your orientation toward power, your leader motives, and your typical influence tactics, discuss three specific ways Jesus would approach your leadership responsibilities differently than you approach them.
Assess your creativity and how creativity affects your leadership.
Assess your personality, including where you fall on the “Big Five” personality dimensions.
Assess your personality type as defined by the Myers-Briggs instrument, and examine the leadership implications of what you have learned. If you have not previously taken a Myers- Briggs inventory, one is available online (the Jung Typology Test) at no cost at http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes1.htm. (Note: this link tends to change from time to time, sometimes in disturbing ways. If the link does not work, you can navigate to humanmetrics.com and find your way to it. There are some versions that must be paid for; the one you are looking for is free.)
Assess your key values and their implications.
Assess your top strengths as determined by the Strengths Finder assessment.
Leadership Application
Discuss a time when you lost trust in a leader, and describe the impact that experience had on your relationship.
What is most likely to occur when leaders try to drive change at the organizational level without first addressing the issue of their own credibility at the personal, one-on-one, and team leadership levels?
According to the Lead like Jesus book, the core of leading like Jesus is love. In which of your relationships do you find it is a challenge to lead and love like Jesus?
Describe a time when emotions overpowered reason and you acted according to your fears rather than your good intentions. What was the result? What should you have done differently?
For each of the five being habits presented in the Lead like Jesus book, discuss the steps you need to take to make positive progress.
Think about how well you serve those around you. What do you do to help those you lead live according to the organizations vision?
Describe a time when you were learning something new and needed someone to push you beyond a failure or an easy early success so that you could get to a higher level of performance. Describe a time when you quit because nobody was around to help you step up to the next level. What are you doing as a leader to determine who among those you lead needs to be helped or pushed? What signs of being ready to quit do you watch for?
When your current season of influence ends, what do you want your legacy to be (e.g., improved service to your customers, enhanced development of the talents and gifts of the people under your influence, made a significant impact on the world around you)? Why? What two specific action steps can you take in the next 30 days to move you closer to your goal?
Discuss a change you were called to be involved in as a leader or a follower that was difficult for you. Reflect on the seven reasons why leading even positive change is hard (see Blanchard et al., pp. 252-257). What could you have done differently as a leader or follower to make that change easier and/or more successful?
Rath and Conchie (2008) set forth four basic needs of followers: trust, compassion, stability, and hope. Discuss how your top five strengths can be used to help meet these needs for the followers in your organizational unit.
Identify, describe, and discuss the changes that would have to be made for “covenantal management” to be implemented in your company.
Reflections
Using your leadership journal and experiences while taking this class as inputs, reflect upon the things that you have learned about leadership while you have been taking this class.
Provide an assessment of which activities, exercises, or projects have contributed to your understanding of leadership, and how that contribution came about.
Guidelines for Writing the Comprehensive Leadership Paper
This paper is due by 11:59 pm on Saturday of Week 8 of the course.
The paper should be completed using APA style and documentation except in terms of using the first person to refer to yourself, which is not only allowed, but encouraged. A guide to APA and links to APA resources are available on the course home page.
Content, style, and grammar are all important to the grade. Your paper will be
assessed using the Comprehensive Leadership Paper rubric posted under the Rubrics tab in Sakai. Well-written papers with excellent content and grammar will receive A grades. Deficiencies in either content or style/grammar will reduce the grade.
No length is specified. The correct length is whatever length it takes to do an excellent job with the content of the paper (these papers often are 20-25 pages in length).
You must submit your paper on time to receive full credit. Late papers will not be accepted without prior approval by your professor. Even if approval is given, a penalty will be assessed for late papers. The late penalty is 20 percent per day or portion of day.
All content is confidential, and your instructor will not copy or share any information from your paper without your consent.