Overview and Rationale

Writing a journal provides you with an opportunity to critically assess your leadership capability through introspection and self-analysis - it makes you aware of who you are as both an individual and a leader.

This assignment serves as a reflective exercise and a self-assessment to help you learn more about yourself, as an organizational. It will also serve as your mid-term project.

Assignment Objectives

Students will be able to connect personal experiences with the information learned to date, citing course readings, lectures, and discussions.

Students will be able to analyze their personal progress as organizational leaders by reflecting on the content and activities learned during the first half of the course.

Students will have an opportunity to recognize obstacles and strengths to their own development as organizational leaders, and to identify solutions or plans on how to overcome those obstacles or develop those strengths.

This assignment focuses on your personal level of organizational leadership. You will work on understanding, analyzing and implementing choices related to situations related or organizational change.

In doing this, you are expected to demonstrate an understanding of the theoretical foundations of transformational thoughts when you reflect on your personal challenges, apply course frameworks in analyzing your choices and dilemmas, and move to the level of defining a direction for personal growth as a leader.

Using lecture materials, readings, and the various discussions you have had with classmates and the instructor, you will incorporate leadership theories to create a leadership model and definition.

Essential Components

Assume that you were to lead a transformation within your present or future organization. Which of your leadership skills do you think would support your efforts and which ones do you feel need improvement?

Using the information in Chapters 1 - 2 of our text, the journal readings, and your general understanding of the four frames discussed by our textbook's authors, identify which frames would present you with the biggest challenges as an organizational leader.

For instance, do you feel that your strength lies in identifying the structure that would best support your organization's transformational efforts, or do you feel most comfortable working within the human resource, political, or symbolic/cultural frames?

Consider the following when writing your journal:

What are your leadership strengths?

How have our readings or discussions, during the first half of this course, changed or reinforced the opinions you previously held about yourself as a leader?

What leadership models (situational, adaptive, transformational, etc.) do you value and identify with and how do they support an effort to transform an organization?

What strengths do you have that will help facilitate your development as a transformational leader?

Length: 5 - 7 pages (double spaced - 12 font - APA style)