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The following are my most important values I seek to model as a leader. These are listed in order of importance to me, the first one list is the most important.
Communication
Determination
Respect
Honesty
Teamwork
Innovation
Freedom
Impact of Leadership Values, A Good Leader
The person I chose to select as a good leader is my current boss. He has been with the company for seven years and has taken on multiple important projects with links to the future expansion of our network of warehouses.
The values they ‘Modeled the Way’ included:
Communication
Integrity
Determination
Honesty
Respect
Caring
Teamwork
Many of the values that I see from my boss are values that I view as very important and want to model as a leader. We have an overlap of my top five values, which are Communication, Determination, Respects, Honesty, and Teamwork.
Communication is the top value that I value and that is one value that he walks the walk every time there is something that need to be communicated to the team. This allows me and the other members of the team to always have the critical information needed to continue with our projects without having to redo our work because of missing information. Another thing that has led to personal growth is the fact he respects my decision-making ability when it come to certain aspects of the projects we have worked on together. This has helped me and other co-workers to gain more confidence in our decision making and making better use of the information we have at our disposal. Since both of these values were aligned with my values, it allowed me to perform better since I knew that all of the important information has been distributed and then this allowed me to focus on my portion of the project without having to second guess whether I have everything to succeed. Obviously, information can change but the changes were told to us in a quick manner.
My boss has personally helped me grow as a leader. He has an open-door policy that if I have any questions or ideas, he will listen and help me through all the questions I have. He has also helped me learn how to communicate better within a group and share my message instead of “parroting” other peoples’ thoughts that we truly not mine. He also has helped me create my own unique working style and have support while developing into a good leadership style. The honesty that he has given me has helped shape who I am as a leader now and will only help into the future as I hopefully grow within the company. Also, he has opened my eyes on some values that I believe I am weak in but this has allowed me to learn how to use these values in a more practical sense and apply them in my own unique style.
Impact of Leadership Values, A Leader Who ‘Needs Improvement’
One instance that I have had a leader that I regarded as someone who needed improvement was a former production supervisor that I worked with at a previous job. I often would have to work with this individual anytime we had a very large contract we had to produce products for. He was always the leader that was in charge of everything until the contract is completed.
The values they ‘Modeled the Way’ included:
Task Focus
Unimaginative
Productivity
Competitive
​Cautious
Security
Rigid
After review of these values, I do overlap with some of the values like competitive and productivity, which are not in my top values, but other than those there is very little overlap in any of the value that the supervisor and myself had in common.
Since we were not aligned in many of our values, there was issues in our working relationship daily. Many times, I would offer solutions that were out of the way the process was done before and it was met with pushback since it was “ not the way we’ve done it in the past”. This hindered my performance since I was forced to follow a procedure that was inefficient since it was how the process was done historically. This also made me constantly question my decision making since I was often meet with the feeling, I was wrong. Also, there was feeling that any of the team members contributions were not truly appreciated .To complete the project, I just conformed with what I was told to do and went against many of my values. Looking back on the situation, I wish I would have taken steps to back up my values such as innovation and communication to express why my thoughts may have helped with the production process. I also should have looked at it come an others person’s view and could have respected their decisions more.
The Role of Values and My Future Workplace Action
As I reflect on my values I have, I believe that they will help me advance in my professional career. One of the biggest ones I think is communication. With the world becoming smaller with the technical advancements happening, communication is going to be key in advancing not only products but also your ideas. Hopefully in time my communication becomes more polished, and I can communicate in a clearer view so any team I lead understands what is expected of them and what the goals are. Along with this, respect with allow all of opinions to be heard and allow new ideas to be heard. This would tie into innovation since I believe in challenging current process in order to grow. An issue I do foresee with one of my values is my determination. I can foresee my determination will lead me to try and solve a problem that may be unsolvable and cause me to focus more the issue rather than spend my time on a more productive venture.