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Assignment: Reflective Journal

There are many learning's from the Managerial Roles Gap Analysis starting with the, ever increasing and significant roles managers play in the organization. The Gap Analysis breaks down the Managerial Roles which allows us to evaluate ourselves and others, from that we can identify areas for further reflection and growth. Managers do not just manage they wear many hats. They must perform at a high level to be responsive to peers and to achieve at all levels of the Gap Analysis to be successful and in the end deliver the numbers to the CEO/upper management. According to (Yukl, 2001), the descriptive research found that managerial work is inherently hectic, varied, fragmented, reactive, disorderly, and political.

In my role now and the past, the role of the decision maker is one of the most important and challenging we face today. Decisions made by entry-level managers as well as high-level managers every day from the mundane to the long-term strategy decisions shape an organization. These decisions are not based just on a managers team but also rely on inter-departmental relationships/office politics that if not nurtured during one's tenure may prove to be a difficult task. According to (Yukl, 2001), this activity pattern occurs, in part, because managers face several dilemas. To carry out their responsibilities, managers need to obtain recent, relevant information that exists only in the heads of people who are widely scattered within and outside the organization; they need to make decisions based on information that is both overwhelming and incomplete, and they need to get cooperation from people over whom they have no formal authority.

The role of a leader is the area I need to improve more. I am VP of Real Estate and Construction for a retail company. We are building 40 new centers a year across the United States, and I manage an internal team of 5 and an external team of over 25 people. I am new to this company, and I have inherited a team of which our CEO whom I report to does not believe, can help reach our goals. I have been employed eight times in increasing roles throughout my career. It will be my job to motivate, evaluate and deliver the 40 centers a year with or without my internal team. Our company is growing and as we grow we take on more responsibilities some are not as complex and impactful as others but they all add to the long list that needs to be resolved daily. The activities of managers tend to be fragmented as well as varied. Interruptions occur frequently, conversations are disjointed, and important activities are interspersed with trivial ones, requiring rapid shifts of mood. A manager may go from a budget meeting involving decisions about spending millions of dollars to a discussion about how to fix a broken water fountain (Sayles, 1979).

I believe managers are much like that of a CEO in training in the respect that managers will be better managers as they get older with more experiences under there belt. Life-stories can provide leaders with a meaning system from which they can act authentically, that is interpret reality and act in a way that gives their interpretations and actions a personal meaning (Kegan, 1983, p. 220). We are influenced by our past both positively and negatively but if we can learn from each incident or interaction and take the time to reflect on our interactions we can learn and grow as an organization. It follows from our discussion of authentic leader development that one of the major ways to assist people to develop their potential to become authentic leaders is through a guided reflection process. Reflective thinking is "the process of creating and clarifying the meaning of experience (past or present) in terms of self" (Boyd & Fales, 1983).

I want to continue to grow as an effective leader through my life story as well as grow through self-development. This suggestion implies a shift of focus from the current emphasis on the development of skills and behavioral styles to an emphasis on leaders' self-development, and especially to the development of their self-concepts through to the construction of life-stories (Shamir and Eilam, 2005).

References

Boyd, E. M., & Fales, A. W. (1983). Reflective learning: Key to learning from experience. Journal of Humanistic Psychology,23, 99-117.

Kegan, R. (1983). The evolving self. Cambridge, MA7 Harvard University Press.

Sayles, L (1979), "Leadership". What Effective Managers Really Do ... and How They Do It. McGraw-Hill Series in Management. California: Mc-Graw-Hill Publishing Company.

Shamir, B. and Eilam, G. (2005). "What's your story?" A life-stories approach to authentic leadership development. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), pp.395-417.

Yukl, G. (1981), Leadership in Organizations. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice.