Leadership Essay #2
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Leadership Essay #2
Reflection of Personal Leadership Development
Vernon Chan
LDR3003
3/1/2014
Leadership Essay #2
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Thesis Statement:
This paper will help identify and analyze the leadership traits and theories that I have
demonstrated in the leadership experience of project management and coordination of the
accreditation project during my internship at St. Vincent’s Health Care Riverside. This paper will
also include what I have learned from the leadership experience as well as leadership strengths
and weaknesses that I have learned about myself throughout the whole experience.
Introduction:
For this second essay the task at hand is to first talk about a leadership experience that I
have had in my life. The leadership experience that I am going to talk about for this paper is the
time when I was suddenly assigned the role of a project manager and coordinator at St.
Vincent’s. In this essay, I am going to describe what all went on in the time frame of the event.
The time frame that the leadership event lasted was about six weeks. I am also going to talk
about what I have learned from that experience. I gained a lot of leadership knowledge from that
leadership experience. Then I am going to talk about what that experience taught me about selfawareness of leadership beliefs, values, attitudes and emotions that motivate you to take action in
a leadership role in this essay assignment. Towards the end I will comment about my leadership
strengths and weaknesses that this leadership experience taught me during my internship.
Synopsis:
I am now going to give a brief summary on the project and what went on during the
project. For the high importance of security and secrecy I will be renaming the project that I will
Leadership Essay #2
be talking about in this paper to project XYZ. Basically in that leadership experience I was
volunteered and thrown into the project by my manager. My manager thought that I would be a
good candidate to be the project manager of that project. My direct manager for this project is the
director of 26 primary care practices. I was thrown into the project with no prior knowledge or
idea of what the project was. I also did not have any knowledge what I was going to do for the
project. I was then given all of the things that I would need in that project manager role and was
told to do research on the topic of the project. I started out needing to print out seven sections.
Each section ranged from 5 pages to 30 pages. I believe that all 7 sections included easily over
150 pages of information. I then had to separate the sections and punch holes in the pages so I
could organize the work in a 3 ring binder. After all of the organization was done I started the
project management can coordination aspect of the project. My management aspect of the project
was basically to schedule meetings, record data in meetings, and document policies and
procedures. I had to schedule meetings with directors and other staff personnel. I had to then
record data from all of the meetings and compile them so I can send updates to the other
managers and directors. The last thing that I had to do from a management or leadership
standpoint is that I had to document policies and procedures. With the help of the other managers
I had to create policies and document them so that we could submit those policies into the
application process to apply for what we needed.
Leadership Traits
Now I am going to talk about my own leadership traits. There are many leadership traits
that I believe I possess that motivate me to take action in a leadership role. The first leadership
trait that I believe motivate me to take action is desire. My desire is fairly simple. I have the
desire to do well on this project. That desire to do well on this project is backed by the idea of
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this organization offering me a job when I graduate if I do well on this project. The next
leadership trait that helps motivate me to take action in a leadership role is passion. I have the
passion to do well as a project manager for this project. I have the passion for doing well on this
project because I have a passion for health care and the patients that we help on a day to day
basis. I believe that I have a strong passion for the field of health care and I love doing things
that will help the patients that I care for.
There are many values, emotions, and attitude that also help motivate me to take action in
a leadership role. Positive emotions and positive attitudes help motivate me to take action in a
leadership role. They help motivate me to take action in a leadership role because I like leading
people with positive emotions and positive attitudes. With that being said it helps motivate me
take action when people are positive because it makes me want to take control and lead those
that are positive. I could then maybe help them achieve what they are trying to accomplish.
Another leadership trait that I have learned about myself though out this management experience
is my beliefs as a manager. When I first started on this project my belief was that I was going to
be a terrible leader because I have not had leadership experience. Actually being a leader in this
leadership experience changed my belief. It changed my belief because it showed me that I am
capable of being a leader. To be a leader I needed to learn quickly, take good notes, and ask
questions when needed. I did all of that and it helped changed my belief of being a bad leader.
Examples
Now I am going to talk about my actual experience in the field. I am also going to give
real life examples and details. A real example of a leadership trait that I used while managing the
XYZ project was honesty. I used honesty in the project by giving the correct information to my
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peers or those who were under me. If I had bad news I would tell them directly what the bad
news was and I would not sugar coat the information. Another way I showed honesty was I
didn’t play favorites. I treated everyone the same with respect. I did not give anyone else more
work than the others and everybody had the same amount of work. The difference that honesty
had in the work group was huge. Everybody seemed happier because everybody had the same
amount of work. Also everybody reacted positively to it. My peers even worked harder, as a
team and more efficiently.
Pre Leadership Vernon
Before taking this leadership class I was a know it all and quite frankly I was very
ignorant about the topic of leadership. Before leadership, I thought I had all the answers of how
to be a great leader and I thought that I was very good at it. I thought that I could be a great
leader without anyone’s guidance and help. Fast forwarding a few years 5 to be exact my
thoughts about leadership have changed dramatically. I now actually take the time to admire
other people’s leadership style. I try to learn as much as I can from other people’s presentation
about their leadership traits and styles. I actually try to learn from their body language and body
styles. How that differs from how I was 5 years ago is that I would have not been paying
attention and thinking that the presenters did not know what they were talking about.
Strengths
According to self-assessment leadership questionnaires I possess much strength as a
leader. The strengths that I possess as a leader are that I am motivational and influential. I
believe that I motivational and influential and many ways. The first way that I believe I am
motivational is because I can get whoever I lead to follow me and do the things that I tell them
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to. One example of my motivational skills is that I got people to take action. By them taking
action I got them to take the book with the documents home to study during the weekend. How I
got them to do that is by simply saying that I wanted them to be knowledgeable on the
information by Monday so we can start implementing the policies.
Weaknesses
According to self-assessment leadership questionnaires I possess many weaknesses as a
leader. The weaknesses that I possess as a leader are self-esteem and self-confidence. Examples
of my self-confidence weaknesses are that I sometime doubt myself as leader. I often found
myself double checking my own work for the project. I also would seek reassurance that my
work on the project was correct from the people I lead. As a leader self-confidence is a really bad
leadership trait to have. What I have learned from this project management example is to be
more assertive in my work and tone. Another thing that I have learned from this experience is to
learn from my own mistakes. Learning from my mistakes will help me be more confident in
myself for whatever task that I am doing.
Conclusion
In conclusion with this leadership experience that I went through it taught me a lot about
myself. It taught me a lot about my own leadership traits. The experience taught me many things
that I did not know about myself and my leadership abilities. It taught me that I have some traits
that will help motivate me to take action in a leadership role. Those traits include passion and
desire. The leadership experiences also have taught me about my leadership strong points and
also the weak points that I have as a leader. The strong points in my leadership skills are being
motivational and influential. The weak points that I know I have to work on are self-confidence
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and self-esteem. The experience taught me a lot and I will bring all of the new knowledge to use
in my future as a Health care administrator.
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Works Cited:
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