Leadership Skills to Achieve Goals and Success in Life

In Module Seven, review your group members' posts and add comments to their selections of leadership skills and behaviors. Similarly, other learners will review your list of skills and behaviors and provide their feedback for the same. On completion of this review, you are to read the feedback given by your fellow classmates and make your final selection of leadership skills and behaviors.  

Consider the following during the ongoing discussion: 

• Are you actively listening to the feedback from your peers, remaining open to modifying the leadership skills and behaviors you have identified based on their comments and input?
• Compare and contrast skills and behaviors selected by your peers with those you have selected. As you review their rationale that justifies their selections, provide feedback to your peers on additional points they should consider.
• Provide your rationale for keeping the skills and behaviors you have selected that your fellow peer(s) have not, explaining why you believe the competencies you have selected provide better opportunity for organizational improvement. If, however, you believe another learner's skills and behavior selection is more viable then your own, then provide the rationale for changing your initial selection to one recommended by another learner. 

Respond to person 1:

The leadership skills that I identified within the employee satisfaction survey were emotional intelligence, communication and a willingness to make personal changes. The emotional intelligence does directly relate a couple of questions within the survey. The first would be "My supervisor shows appreciation for the work that I do." The second specific question would be "Promotes an environment in which employees feel free to make suggestions and complaints." These are important emotional intelligence instances where the managers are not relating to their employees and thinking about what they need from them. They are likely going about their jobs, not thinking about what they can do to improve the lives of their employees. The biggest question that marks the need for better communication from the managers is "My Supervisor talks with me to help me determine my training and development goals." This is close to the worst score in the entire survey this time around. Management is just expecting employees to know what to do without guidance or insight from the leadership team. "Maintaining effective communication ensures that management and the team below them are on the same page." (Cheng, 2020). The third skill, a willingness to make personal changes, is not specifically in one of the questions in the survey but it is implied throughout many of them. I think there is a management team represented here that is stuck in its ways, having seen the declining numbers in many questions two years ago, but not being willing to make the changes necessary.

I think all three of these leadership skills is needed to improve these scores on the next survey but the most important is the willingness to change. If the management team is not willing to work on their shortcomings then emotional intelligence and communication are not going to improve and the scores are only going to get worse. But if the team works on their willingness to change, by admitting they can do better, then emotional intelligence and communication will be key to getting these scores improved. Realizing how their teams are feeling, by using emotional intelligence, will make the employees see that their supervisors do care about them. Telling them they are doing a good job or asking for their input on the current project will go a long way to improving these scores. Communicating the mission or the vision of a project, and talking about these things in a group will improve how employees see their managers as well. Praise is, again, important here. Just that simple piece of communication will go a long way to improve the scores. While the initial goal may be to simply improve the scores of these surveys, it will become second nature and everyone will have a better work quality of life than they had in the past because these skills are being put to use every day.

Respond to person 2:

The leadership skills and behaviors I identified for improvement were adaptability, willingness to change, and facing reality.  A specific question that aligns with willingness to change in the engagement survey is I feel encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things.  A question that aligns with facing reality would be Provides an environment in which employees feel free to make suggestions and complaints.  These two questions directly align with skills and behaviors that I have identified as needing improvement.  Adaptability does not align to a specific question, but it does correlate to some of the questions such as My Supervisor gives me useful information on how I can improve my job performance.  All of these questions have low scores on the engagement survey.

Improvement in the leadership skills and behaviors I have identified will have a direct correlation to an improvement in the next employee engagement survey.  The three skills I listed can be applied to many of the questions on the survey.  Improving these skills will help to change the culture of the organization to one that puts employees first.  By doing this the employees will be much happier and in turn result in higher scores on the next survey.