Heaps of reading for this week and preparation for Assignment 2 as well. Reading for the subject included looking at leaders, followers and the situation through a number of theories. I am not sure how comfortable I feel with the term “followers”. Personally, I think I prefer team members or contributors. Follower just seems to have connotations of sheep.
These theories included the Contingency and Interaction models. We then explored a number of situational leadership scenarios before moving on to Path-Goal leadership and Adaptive Leadership. Seriously, I never knew there were so many different theories around leadership. The reality though, in my opinion, when all is said and done, is that any leader is a mixture of all these styles more often than not. It is also true that the style a leader applies will be contingent on the situation at hand if they are any sort of a leader.
A part of this process was to complete an Adaptive Leadership Questionnaire. This also included getting others to complete it and comparing your scores with the average of others. I was happy with my score on the questionnaire and it was only a point or two away from the averages on some areas and equal on others.
Assignment 2
Assignment 2 involves reading two articles and writing a 1,000 word commentary on each. I am breaking the assignment into two parts and working on one at a time. The first article is around the importance of trust with particular emphasis on authenticity, empathy and logic as core drivers. Sunday saw me writing the first draft for the first article. It’s a long way from being finished, but the research gave me a much better insight into the principles the article discussed. On Monday I attended a webinar where I was able to ask some questions on referencing. I still find it quite foreign to have to source everything from a peer-reviewed source. The webinar was really great though because the facilitator was able to translate the assignment questions from academic-speak to plain English. This was really handy, but of course, meant I had to go back and rewrite the content. It didn’t matter though as it was only a first draft. By the end of Monday, I had completed the second draft for the first article and edited it back to the required 1,000 words.
I found the second article a lot more difficult to approach. It wasn’t until Wednesday that I was able to wrap my head around what I think are the key aspects. Then we had a webinar relating to the assignment on Thursday which clarified things even further. I finished the draft on Friday and both articles have been submitted to Turnitin, the software that checks for originality. I wanted to check my paraphrasing of the articles’ contents before submitting it to the online writing review service for comment. The results from Turnitin were fine so I am now ready to move on second edit and reference completion.
Assignment 1
During the week I also received my grade for Assignment 1. The grade was a credit at 72. Given that this was the first piece of academic writing I’ve done since I can’t remember when, I am satisfied with that. It was only 3 away from a Distinction at 75. Upon review, it seems I received a Distinction for 4 of the 5 components and a Credit for the other. I have been back through the rubric and now understand how the marking works.
Conclusion
I am really enjoying the challenge presented by this subject. I have always been fascinated with Leadership and have devoured many books on the topic over several years. The assignments are taking me down some rabbit holes without a doubt, but it is interesting to get the views of so many authors on different leadership styles.
