With Sir Alex Ferguson's book he talks about the importance of setting goals and how it can be one of the hardest leadership skills when you have people who want quick results. He mentions how important it is to understand what is possible and therefore be able to set realistic expectations. The reason for attainable goals is since its easy to have that enthusiasm and then set unattainable goals which when uncompleted leave either the team or myself deflated and not satisfied. I have seen this whilst I have been at work and setting goals and objectives there.
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José van Dijck produced an interesting article on the difference between personal self-presentation and professional self-promotion. Personal self-presentation is seen with Facebook whilst professional self-promotion is seen on LinkedIns's social network.
José van Dijck believes that you only have one identify now since the days of having one image for your close family and friends and a different image for co-workers are coming to an end. Therefore being able to present yourself in a professional manner online is becoming more important. Whilst Facebook was created more for friends to connect with each other after being created for people who studied at Harvard University In the United States. Whereas LinkedIn has been created solely for a more professional use. There are various ways which LinkedIn and Facebook can be used to the users advantages and the user can decide how they want to come across on each platform. Either you can keep both LinkedIn and Facebook up to date whilst keeping a more social side on Facebook, (for example: a hobby of sports), and then keep their professional profile on LinkedIn. On the other hand some people tend to post little private/personal information on Facebook, yet keeps an up to date and active profile on LinkedIn. This states that the user is more inclined to keep there private life, private. My personal preference is the latter, I rarely post to Facebook and if I do its mainly more to the social side. I make sure that my Facebook account is set at private, this allows me to control who see's my social side and gives me the ability to add my friends, rather than co-workers. Whilst i keep an active LinkedIn and look for new connection and different organisations on LinkedIn, making sure only profession information and posts are on there. Reference Dijck, V, J. (2013) 'Media, Culture & Society' 'You have one identity': performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn, 35(2) pp. 199-215. Whilst working part-time at McDonalds I have been given the chance to be promoted to crew trainer. A crew trainer is there to assist shift managers and help new starters learn how to do the job. Recently as a crew trainer my main position has been in the kitchen whilst a shift manger is overseeing the front counter and customers, therefore my main job is kitchen leader.
Whilst in this position I have been able to develop various leadership skills, one of these being goal setting. At the start of every shift I have to fill out a notice to display in the kitchen, this give various details of the day with a section dedicated to goals and objectives. I have had the opportunity to set these goals and objectives where I have think about making them both attainable and also a challenge. I soon began to experience the issues of setting the goals unachievable and saw first hand the dissatisfaction with crew members when not completing the goal. However once I hot the balance correct the crew members took to the challenges and tried to also complete them which happened most of the time. In order to make them more interested in achieving the goals I added prizes if the goals were completed or exceeded. This seemed to make the crew even more motivated to achieve the goals which were set. I have recently been reading Sir Alex Ferguson's book on leading which offers an insight into his approached to various different leadership capabilities. It has given me different perspectives on how he handled certain situations and how he coped with problems. Some pieces in there which interested me were his views and opinions on presenting and public speaking. Since this is one of my leadership capabilities I want to improve on I was interested to see what he believed when it came to this capability.
With social media now being as big as it is Facebook seeing over one billion users and twitter with 236 million users it is important to present yourself on these sites in a more professional manor. This is due to more and more employers are looking at the profiles of applicants to job opportunities. Since discussions in our entrepreneurial leadership lectures and seminars about the importance of social media I have created a Linkedin account. This is my current Linkedin profile just having set it up after the discussions in the lecture. I have currently set up my education on there, which will allow people to see what I am currently studying and what I have studied in the past. I have made several connections within the first few days, with both university colleges and several recruitment consultants. As it can be seen with a connection i have here with Robbie Jones, who is a recruitment consultant at Bridgewater Resources UK. He looks at the graduate program there and recruits for that. Therefore he is a good connection to have in order to help access details for future graduate jobs available.
Back in January I created two timetables in order to help my with completing deadlines in terms of assignments and also a timetable to help me keep track of what to study on which day. As an overall experience I feel that the exercise was useful and helped me out in several different ways. However there was a few cons which I believe could be improved upon.
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Goal setting is seen as a very important leadership capability in order to become a successful leader. Various Academics such as, Cunningham & Lischeron (1991) and Renko, Tarabishy, Carsrud & Brännback (2015) have all disscussed what entrepreneurial leadership actually involves and traits and skills which are seen within entrepreneurial leaders, all these academics include the ability to set clear goals. So within this blog posts I will discuss various pro-active learning I have indulged in, in order to boost my leadership capabilities. Goal setting on a personal level can be a start to look at and there is various exercises and tool's which will help us look at different ways to set goals. These can be: personal development plan (PDP), personal development reviews (PDR), self audits and SWOTs. I decided to complete a personal development plan (PDP) in order to help me understand what I want to achieve and how i will be able to achieve my set goals. This includes the activities I need to undertake to achieve my objectives, support/resources I need to achieve the objectives and the target date for completion of the objective. Below is my complete personal development plan (PDP). My personal development plan (PDP) looks at my objectives over my academic years. I have seven objectives with various completion target dates, whilst also giving a priority rating to each objective. The priority rating has two states, 'critical' or 'beneficial'. Some of the date's of achieving the objectives are N/A due to not yet being complete.
Since i have now created a PDP I am able to keep a check on what exactly i want to achieve over these next few years, which will help me concentrate on these specific objectives. I plan to review my PDP every six months to see if i have completed any of the objectives. References Renko, M. Tarabishy, E A. Carsrud, L A. Brännback, M. (2015)'Understanding and Measuring Entrepreneurial Leadership Style.' Journal of Small Business Management, 53(1) pp. 54-74. A big leadership capability I want to improve is becoming a better presenter, this includes better confidence and engaging with the audience more. There is many ways which I can improve my presenting skills, one way is to actual present. Whilst having the chance to present at university I have also had chance to present at meetings in work and in the work environment. I have had chance to show existing employees new products and information which is coming out. Whilst also showing new employees around the premises showing them how everything works. I feel like this kind of practice has so far helped me develop confidence and become more confident when presenting.Being able to manage deadlines whilst being a leader and managing your own deadlines is fundamental. As this is an area which I identified as a weakness, I am looking to try and improve on and learn techniques which will help me in the future when it comes to managing deadlines. The first activity I looked at was the creation of a timetable which will be affective for the month of January, I created two timetables, both shown below. I have created this first time table in order to help me with my first assignment in the Entrepreneurial Leadership unit. As you can see I have made two days bold which allow them to stand out to me, these include the deadline for the assignment and the presentation for the assignment. By doing this it highlights it to me every time I look at the timetable helping me not forgot and keep an eye of how long i have until the deadline. The rest of the information in the calendar is there to give me a structure which i can follow in order to complete my assignment on time and at a good standard. If i have a clear idea of what to do on each day then i wont waste time when it gets to that day thinking of what to write. This also allows me not to leave the assignment to the very last minute to finish which might affect my final mark. This second timetable is there to help me study and read around the subject to a good standard. Within the first few months of the course I found myself not reading about the subject as much as a should have. Therefore I am hoping that this kind of structure will give me something to follow and remind me that i need to do 'x' tonight and so forth. I have given more hours on days which I am not in university and less on days I work or am in university for a larger period of the day.
If this months timetable's works successfully i will carry it over to February and the following months to help work with my academic deadlines. Throughout this blog I will be looking at how I am demonstrating self-development in terms of leadership capabilities and create a reflective record of the various self-directed learning activities I take part in. There will be three main leadership capabilities which I will set out to improve on and discuss over the following few months within this blog. The three leadership capabilities I have chosen are:
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Jack MooreLevel 5 Student Archives
April 2016
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