Walden University Leadership and Followership

Leadership and Followership

The concept of emotional intelligence (EQ) has become very important in understanding the effectiveness of leaders in many situations. Understanding one’s strengths and weaknesses, from an emotional intelligence perspective, is a valuable outcome of reflection as you critically assess your leadership capabilities.

To complete Part I of the Assessment:

1. Read the Goleman article “Leadership That Gets Results.”
2. Carefully reflect upon your life experiences as a leader and as a follower. These can be professional or personal experiences.
3. Then, using the emotional intelligence framework by Goleman (2000) as the basis for your analysis, complete the following:
   1. Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, as a leader, using the lenses of the concept of emotional intelligence. Self-assess on each of the emotional intelligence concepts listed in the table on page 4 (Goleman, 2000). Your evaluation should be approximately 200 words.
   2. Repeat (a) above, but now evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, as a follower, using the lenses of the concept of emotional intelligence. Self-assess on each of the emotional intelligence concepts listed in the shaded table on pages 7 and 8 (Goleman, 2000). Your evaluation should be approximately 200 words.
   3. Provide three specific recommendations for how can you improve your effectiveness as a leader, based on your evaluation of EQ-based strengths and weaknesses. Be sure to explain how and why these recommendations are appropriate, and support your response with appropriate references to concepts about emotional intelligence and best practices in leadership (reaching beyond the Goleman article). Your response should be approximately 200 words.
   4. Provide three specific recommendations for how can you improve your effectiveness as a follower, based on your evaluation of EQ-based strengths and weaknesses. Be sure to explain how and why these recommendations are appropriate, and support your response with appropriate references to concepts about emotional intelligence and best practices in leadership (reaching beyond the Goleman article). Your response should be approximately 200 words.

An important part of mastering any topic in social science (and leadership is such a topic) is being able to explain how and why an observed practice, or set of witnessed behaviors and interactions among people, led to intended outcomes or not.

In this part of the Assessment, you will be asked to identify two experiences from your professional or personal life as a leader and/or follower, and to analyze and explain how and why the leader in each experience was effective or not effective. The key to your responses will be to use relevant documented best practices and theoretical frameworks about leadership to support your explanation. It is one thing to have an opinion about why someone is an effective leader; it is quite another to be able to explain how and why they are effective, using leadership knowledge to support your reasoning.

1. Effective Leadership:
   1. Describe one example from your professional or personal life in which a leader you followed was effective and you and other followers were committed and supported the leader enthusiastically. Include a brief description of the setting in which this example of effective leadership occurred. (Please disguise all names and organizational identifiers.) This paragraph should be 75–100 words.
   2. Create a list of the first 10 adjectives that come to mind when you think of the leader in your example.
   3. Using relevant, documented best practices and theoretical frameworks and concepts from leadership theory, explain how and why this leader was effective and why people followed him or her. Be sure to include specific references that help you to make a strong argument. This element should be 3–4 paragraphs (approximately 400 words).
   4. Discuss interesting connections between the more formal, academically-backed concepts that explain how and why the leader was effective (from #3 above), and your initial list of descriptive adjectives (from #2 above). This paragraph should be 75–100 words.
2. Ineffective Leadership:
   1. Describe one example from your professional or personal life where a leader you followed was not effective and you and other followers were not committed and did not support the leader. Include a brief description of the setting in which this example of ineffective leadership occurred. (Please disguise all names and organizational identifiers.) This paragraph should be 75–100 words.
   2. Create a list of the first 10 adjectives that come to mind when you think of the leader in your example.
   3. Using relevant, documented best practices and theoretical frameworks and concepts from leadership theory, explain how and why this leader was not effective and why people did not willingly follow them. Be sure to include specific references that help you make the strongest argument. This element should be 3–4 paragraphs (approximately 400 words).
   4. Discuss interesting connections between the more formal, academically-backed concepts that explain how and why the leader was not effective, and your initial list of descriptive adjectives. This paragraph should be 75–100 words.

Your Transformational Story

A transformational story consists of the retelling of a pivotal event in one’s life and its effects upon the individual who experienced it. The person who recounts the story is the protagonist and shares how he or she is now a different person as a result of having lived through a particular experience.

Although some experiences can be negative or adverse, not all pivotal events that are transformational in nature are negative by definition. Positive and intense experiences can be just as impactful. In the article, “Crucibles of Leadership,” Bennis and Thomas (2002) point out how pivotal experiences, which they call “crucibles,” can also shape individuals into leaders. Individuals who are able to learn from pivotal experiences, especially negative experiences, often have the necessary skills to become extraordinary leaders.

For the Part III of this Assessment, you will write a transformational story where you (or, if necessary, someone very close to you) experienced a time of great crisis, adversity, and stress, which led to profound insights about your/their motivations and desires to lead and to improve as a leader. Using critical reflection, you will use documented best practices and theoretical frameworks about leadership to explain how and why the experiences shaped or reshaped your/their subsequent leader behaviors and effectiveness.

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Reference: Bennis, W. G., & Thomas, R. J. (2002, September). Crucibles of leadership. Harvard Business Review, 80(9), 39–45.

To complete Part III of the Assessment:

1. Choose a transformational experience from your professional or personal life. (Note: This is the highly preferred approach. If you do not have such an experience, choose to discuss an example from someone very close to you. Remember, the crucible experience does not have to be a negative one.)
   1. Describe the circumstances that led up to the transformational experience, and describe the transformational experience itself, being sure to include what happened and how it affected you. Your response should be 400–700 words.
   2. Share the leadership lessons you learned as a result of your circumstances, and explain how you could—or actually do—apply these lessons in your personal and professional life to be a more effective leader. Be sure to make reference to appropriate leadership theoretical concepts and frameworks as part of your explanation. Your response should be approximately 400 words.

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