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Leadership and Management: Personal Perspective

SummerLove Holcomb

SOCW 6070

Instructor: Ivan Page

12/10/2020

Leadership and Management: Personal Perspective

2

Leadership and Management: Personal Perspective

SummerLove Holcomb

SOCW 6070

Instructor: Ivan Page

12/10/2020

Leadership and Management: Personal Perspective

As a leader and manager in social work, I am confronted with the responsibilities of leading employees in our practice and motivate them to succeed. Effective leadership is recognized as the enabler of efficient and effective functioning of organizations. To be an effective leader/ manager, there are various strengths one has to possess. I possess the strength of excellent communication skills. I can convey precise information to other people in a simple and ambiguous way. My excellent communication skills will help me communicate with health care providers, coworkers, and insurance companies easily in challenging times when I need to understand things in social work. I find it easy to cooperate with other people in solving various issues. As a leader in social work, I need to negotiate, compromise, and coordinate with other service providers to ensure that my client’s needs are addressed, and my cooperation strength will help me achieve this. I possess critical thinking strength. Social work deals with unique problems that require unique solutions. As a social work leader, critical thinking will help me identify the issues my clients are facing and their practical solutions.

My skills align better with my social work leadership role. I have excellent problem-solving skills, interpersonal, organizational, and empathy skills which allows me to be the best leader in my social work leadership role. These skills give me a great understanding of social work experiences, problems, solutions, operational environment, and how to juggles between issues and tasks.

I believe that I have a weakness in time management, and I need to develop my time management skills further. As a social work leader, I have many responsibilities, and this requires excellent time management skills. I am not that bad in time management, but I need to be excellent to lead my organization effectively. I need to develop my time management skills further because it will allow me to accomplish many tasks in a shorter period giving me more time to focus on other issues.

The two external factors that I believe might influence my work as a social work leader are technological and political factors. Technology is significant in social work practice because it facilitates various forms of service that support social work functions. Technology might influence my work as a social work leader by helping me to communicate any changes to all social workers of our organizations irrespective of their remote locations, saving time and resources. Technology can enable me to view and review tasks accomplished by various teams in real-time. Political factors are factors influenced by government decisions. In social work, political factors are significant because they touch on public policy creation and implementation, which is used to address the problems clients face. As a social work leader, political factors may influence me to participate in political action and policy advocacy to create social change.

The four assessment tools I used and one a peer administered and the results from: Northouse, P. G. (2018). Introduction to leadership: Concepts and practice (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Sage.

Please do not forget to define these things cite everything in APA format 7th addition and full references I did not cite everything in this but it is all from the reference above and it is not written how it should be in the essay it is just information needed in the paper

1. Leadership style questionnaire: this questionnaire is meant to help people find out what is their style of leadership. My score for authoritarian leadership was 14 which was in the low range. Democratic leadership score is 26 very high range. Laissez-Faire leadership score was 16 which is just on the start of moderate range.

2. Leadership strengths questionnaire: This tool can help leaders figure out what their strengths are and even help them see where they may be able to make some improvements. This tool scores 5 things and mine are: implementer score 28, innovator score 26, encourager score 27, analyzer score 25, mediator score 24. This means that with my lowest number being a 24 all but mediator which was score at moderate the rest of my scores for this tool are in the high to very high range.

3. Task and relationship questionnaire: this tool helps us to see our behaviors with task orientated skills and relationship oriented leadership skills and if we put more emphasis on one. I scored High on both, task score was 47 and relationship score 45. This shows I have a balance between the two. Task leadership behaviors facilitate goal accomplishments, while relationship leadership behaviors help followers (workers) feel comfortable with themselves (Northouse, 2018).

4. Leadership skills questionnaire: This will help us see strengths and weaknesses one may have in administrative skills, interpersonal skills and conceptual skills. I scored high on all three, for administrative score was 23 high, interpersonal 26 very high, conceptual 25 high. This is not a shock to me because I have worked for hospice for 14 years and you have to have interpersonal skills for this job not just with other employees but with patients and their families. My conceptual skills is also high and I believe I developed these skills with working with the union and working on what were the problems in our workplace, what did we need to fix those problems and what strategies we can use for negotiations on a fair contract.

5. Leadership vision questionnaire: this helps assess our ability to create a vision for an agency or a group. My score was very high at 50 and I believe this is because I have done union negotiations and at my last internship I did small groups at the homeless shelter.