Being that this is the 8th of 9 core classes I
must take as part of the leadership curriculum before the capstone, this is not
my first go round with self-awareness surveys.
As such, I can honestly say that most of the questions and results were
somewhat expected and of no surprise.
After my experiences in the Navy and through this curriculum, I would
say that I have a decent understanding of what it means to be a leader, what it
takes, and where I can improve. As a
result, I scored very well on the self-awareness portion, the emotional intelligence
portion, the tolerance of ambiguity portion, and the core self-evaluation
portion. With the self-awareness, I understand
my strengths and weakness as a leader and a communicator. I often need to be careful with my tone of
delivery when talking with someone since for whatever reason my tone of voice
portrays emotion in things that I really have no emotional investment in. Something else I have learned is that I often
do not do a good job of coaxing right answers out of people while counseling them
for a wrong action. I could name quite a
few more but needless to say, I have a grasp on myself as a leader. With the emotional intelligence, I think I am
very in tune with appropriate use of emotions – I try to keep emotion out of things that it
shouldn’t be in while also allowing emotions to flow when it is desired. One surprising thing to come out of that
section is that I apparently do hot have good emotional balance based on the
scoring. In fact, I only received 10 out
of a possible 30 points in that section.
Part of the reason for this is that I have always been taught to praise
in public while counseling in private and one of the questions discussed
essentially calling someone out in public who is trying to take the credit for something
I did. The book suggested the correct
response was that you should praise his contributions to the solution but
shoulder the majority of the success – I almost completely disagree with the
answer. First off, calling someone out
in public like that is humiliating to that person and will only breed discontent
– if he wants to be “that guy”, let him do so then discuss it with him later in
private. Secondly, as a leader you
should be ok with subordinates getting most of the praise. After all, they are the ones that executed
the plan. Thirdly, humility is a
powerful trait to have, especially in leadership – calling that guy out would
appear that you want the praise for your ego.
Moving on with the test, I smoked the tolerance of ambiguity
section. Ambiguity is a factor in my job
almost all of the time. After all, driving
a submarine is literally like being blind: all you have is sound but that can
only get you so far – there will always be a certain level of ambiguity in the
problem since sound strength is not necessarily only based on distance. Before I go off on a tangent, I’ll just say
that I am comfortable making decisions where some of the information is missing
because I did that exact thing for 3 years on the sub. For the core self-evaluation, I again scored
very well. I think this is again due
mainly to the confidence I have in myself and my abilities yet I also
understand that I have imperfections and shortcomings.
The biggest surprise for me with the test was the Locus of
Control scale – this was the only test that I was in the bottom half of the distributions
scale. With that being said, after
reading about what the score meant, it doesn’t really surprise me. While I do believe in fate to some extent,
especially in situations like indirect fire (mortars/rockets where any place is
as fortunate or unfortunate as the rest), I strongly believe that I build my
own destiny and my score reflected that I am strongly internally focused. While I may not have control over where I go
next within the military, I do have the control to do my best regardless if I
like it or not, make the best of the situation, and grow from the
experience. All of these things are
things that I control even though it was the result of something out of my
control.
As far as what can be taken away from this exercise, anytime
you have the opportunity to learn more about yourself should not be taken
lightly. In this case, I learned that I
am strongly internally focused which is good in some situations and bad in
others – I need to bring my focus to a more centralized situation where I can
also harness the power of being externally focused. As with most other things in life, it is not
good to be strongly biased in one direction or the other – taking a moderate
stance will equip you with more tools to deal with the possibilities that might
present themselves to you. Also, I learned
that I need to work on my emotional balance more. I look forward to seeing how my leadership
skills continue to develop through this class and the leadership curriculum in
general.
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