Leadership and motivational skills self-assessment for public health education

Personal background.

Overview of strengths and weaknesses.

Future goals.

Strengths

Leadership strengths

Honesty

Literature/research on honesty in leadership.

How honesty will help me in the future.

Good communication

Literature/research on the importance of good communication in leadership and the different communication styles.

How my communication style will help me in the future.

Motivational strengths

Organizational skills.

How organizational skills help with motivation.

How being organized will help me in the future.

Task orientation.

Research on how task oriented approaches help to motivate others and myself.

How task orientation will help me in the future.

Weaknesses

Leadership weaknesses

Need to improve public speaking skills

a. Based on the literature, what are the best ways to improve public speaking skills?

b. Based on the literature, why is it important to improve my public speaking skills?

B. Motivational weaknesses

1. Perfectionism

a. Based on research, why can perfectionism be a problem for motivation?

b. Why is it important to temper perfectionism?

2. Need to improve self-confidence

a. Why is self-confidence important for motivation?

b. How and why will self-confidence help me in the future?

IV. Conclusions related to leadership and motivational skills.

V. Career goals and skills to develop

A. Masters of Education program

B. Public Health concentration

C. Teaching aspirations

Self-Assessment

With the ultimate goal of teaching public health at the university level, I am currently on track to enter a Masters program in the near future. Coursework in leadership and motivation has prepared me to hone my self-awareness and develop the necessary skills I will need for success. This self-assessment paper allows me to use what I have learned from course readings and outside research, and apply that knowledge to my personal and professional development. Honest self-assessment requires critical thinking, as I consider the ways I can improve my leadership and motivation skills. While I have superior organizational skills, and tend towards task-orientation in my work, I could use a boost to my self-confidence.

A primary purpose of a self-assessment is to honestly reflect on areas of relative weakness, and come up with pragmatic strategies for improvement. Self-improvement and professional development are ongoing endeavors. Some of what I am working on now to improve my leadership and motivational skills include being less of a perfectionist while being more self-confident in my abilities to help others. While reducing my tendency towards perfectionism, I would still like to maintain my orientation toward detail and efficiency. I would also like to discover new and effective ways of improving my motivational skills. While I am an honest with other people and tend to be a straightforward communicator, I can use some help overcoming my fear of public speaking. Focusing on these core areas in leadership and motivation, I offer insight into how I can apply these skills to my future career. Improving my strengths and bolstering my areas of weakness will allow me to become a future educator and future leader.

Strengths in Leadership Skills: Communication

For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed working with other people, collaborating on projects, and communicating. I have been complemented on my ability to solve conflicts gracefully, and interact with a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds. Therefore, one of my main leadership strengths has always been my ability to communicate. Communication skills are critical to leadership; "it is simply impossible to become a great leader without being a great communicator," (Myatt, 2012, p. 1). Leaders will grapple with many communication challenges throughout the course of their career, which is why it is always important to keep communication skills upgraded, fresh, and sensitive to diversity.

Communication is a "complex process," (Prozesky, 2000, p. 1). There are a number of potential roadblocks, barriers, or problems in communication that I need to become aware of as I grow in my profession. As Prozesky (2000) notes, educators need to remain cognizant of the needs of their students, create an environment students can respond to, and remember the importance of listening and taking non-verbal communication into account.

Because I have a public health education focus, communication becomes even more important to my future career. Educators especially depend on their communication skills in the classroom. When delivering lectures or speaking one-on-one with students, and also when working with colleagues or speaking at conferences, educators are continually engaging with others. The interpersonal nature of education is one of the core factors that drives me to teach, as opposed to apply my college education to any other career sector. I believe I have a knack for teaching, and that my knack is rooted in my strong communication skills.

Strengths in Leadership Skills: Honesty

Another one of my core strengths is an innate sense of the importance of honesty. While I am far from perfect, I have always tended toward telling the truth with tact. Even when I was a young child, I would often confess my misdeeds out of a sense of obligation to the truth. I know that the truth usually comes out in the end. I agree with Josephson (2011), who claims, "honesty requires a good faith intent to convey the truth as best we know it and to avoid communicating in a way that is likely to mislead or deceive." A "good faith intent" means always expecting the best from other people, which is why there is a lack of fear of being judged or upsetting the other person. Sometimes the truth needs to be sugar-coated, which is the essence of tact. Telling the truth "as best we know it" means to wait until the right moment before saying something that might upset someone, and conveying the truth in ways that are constructive and conducive toward reaching commonly-held goals.

As a future leader in the field of public health education, I feel uniquely entrusted with a responsibility for telling the truth. Lying about anything related to public health might lead to devastating consequences. Therefore, honesty will certainly help me to become a better leader in my field. Honesty will help me interact better with my students, as I help them improve their skills. Likewise, honesty will help me create lasting and genuine personal and professional relationships that are based on mutual respect. Good leaders are honest leaders. "There are, basically, three kinds of people, the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful, and those who become and remain successful. The difference is character," (Tracy, citing Huntsman, n.d.).

Strengths in Motivation: Organizational Skills

My ability to motivate others and motivate myself stems from a commitment to doing every job well. This requires a sense of timing and coordination of resources. With good organizational skills, I have been able to remain focused and on schedule for most projects I complete. Furthermore, organizational skills help motivate others on my team. I have worked with people with poor organizational skills who have thanked me for helping keep the project on track. When organized, our motivation comes from its intrinsic value, in that there is great personal satisfaction to be had from completing a challenging project.

In order to complete every job to the best of my ability, I have relied heavily on my organizational skills. According to Suttle (n.d.), "organizational skills is one of the most important transferable job skills a worker can possess." It is a good thing organizational skills are important, because I have always been a naturally organized person who appreciates the importance of tools like databases and other information technologies.

Organizational skills will help motivate my students in the future by inspiring trust and confidence. Students do appreciate the "mad professor" type with the disheveled hair and disorganized library. However, students also need professors who keep their lectures on topic, who remember important dates and assignments, and who return their graded essay assignments on time. Students will know that their hard work is recognized and appreciated, and that it will also pay off. With organizational skills, I can motivate students to meet deadlines, which is an important life skill.

Strengths in Motivation: Task-Orientation

One of the best ways of motivating others has been to remain focused on tasks. When working in groups, I am skilled at breaking down large or complicated tasks into smaller and more manageable projects. This has helped our team collaborate together efficiently, as each person will focus on one area in an organized fashion. Thus, task-orientation is a skill linked to organizational skills in general. Taken together, these motivational skills provide the best means by which to keep teams on topic. I intend to continue improving my ability to remain focused on the task at hand, while also considering big-picture issues.

Task-orientation implies my ability to remain focused on the job at hand, minimizing distractions and staying within both budgets and deadlines. This does not, however, imply sacrificing values, ethics, or principles. In fact, task-orientation requires a high level of critical thinking that is applied to every project.

At the jobs I have had, my task-orientation has served my coworkers as well as me. I do understand the importance of principles and theories, but my strongly pragmatic side also recognizes the relevance of details to achieving success. I believe that being task-oriented in my profession will help me apply my knowledge in the public health sector to policy recommendations.

Weaknesses in Motivation: Perfectionism

I can be incredibly hard on myself, which is a sign of perfectionism. While it is important to have high standards, those standards must also be realistic and achievable. Perfection is almost never realistic. Because of the impossibility of perfection, a mindset of perfectionism can be discouraging. Motivating others requires a strong sense of how to encourage people, not discourage them. Starting with myself, I aim to be less perfectionistic without sacrificing my principles or standards. Applying this same balanced approach to my work, I can learn how to motivate others. Motivation requires a deft balance between acknowledging weakness and inspiring others toward reaching a goal.

Reducing perfectionism is not as easy as it sounds. Once perfectionism becomes a mental habit, it can be hard to release it. Daily reminders of the importance of reducing perfectionism will be necessary for me at first. I will need to actively challenge my thoughts (Doheney, n.d.). Developing greater self-awareness, I can recognize when I have unrealistic expectations and take a step back while also focusing on what really matters regarding the task at hand. Given my strength in task-orientation and organization, I should also set goals in advance and stick to a schedule. This way, I will get my work done on time without worrying about achieving some arbitrary type of perfection.

Weakness in Motivation: Self-Confidence

Self-confidence inspires confidence in others, which is why it is a cornerstone of motivation. By building my self-confidence, I can become a better leader and successful professional. Currently, I have confidence in some areas of my life but not others. I am confident in my overall ability to succeed, but sometimes get bogged down by the details. One of the reasons why I believe I am weak in public speaking is that I lack the confidence to deliver a message that other people will respond to. By going to college, and receiving a graduate level education in my chosen field, I will help build my confidence.

Therefore, the first step in improving self-confidence is improving mastery over my own skill set. The second step in improving self-confidence will be working with a mentor. Third, I will improve my self-confidence by gradually overcoming my fear of public speaking by scheduling opportunities for speaking and educating. By gradually increasing the level of difficulty in my public speaking engagements, I believe I can systematically train myself to have self-confidence. Using creative visualization is another way I can improve my self-confidence. I believe it is important to continually envision myself speaking in front of classrooms confidently, or in front of a group of my peers at a professional conference, or delivering a presentation on a public health issue. By applying my visualization exercises to the real world, I believe I will become a leader in my field.

Conclusion and Goals for the Future

Leadership and motivational skills development is an ongoing process. An honest self-appraisal can be a valuable learning tool that aids me throughout my career. I intend to update this self-assessment periodically, and keep a journal recording some of my progress over the next few years.

This self-assessment has revealed several important points about my strengths, weaknesses, and plans for self-improvement. For one, I learned that my core strengths are interrelated. Communication skills and honesty go hand-in-hand, as honesty is expressed through communication. As I embark on my graduate degree program or perhaps during my career growth, I may realize that my communications skills are put to the test and will need to re-evaluate my progress. I intend to remain honest with others and myself along the path to professional excellence. Using strong communication skills, I hope to reach out to students and colleagues and collaborate on meaningful projects. With ethical integrity and honesty, I hope to reduce cynicism in our leadership especially with regards to public health and safety.

Second, an evaluation of my weaknesses shows that self-confidence may be the key to improving my public speaking skills. I will naturally feel more confident when I receive a Master's degree and become a professor. However, I still need to practice public speaking to improve my delivery and by ability to connect with my audience or my students.

My career goals include teaching at the university level within the area of public health. Along with this goal, I envision myself as a leader in my field. Writing books, lecturing at professional conventions, and participating in policy development are some of my long-range plans. To achieve these goals, I will need to develop all my strengths and minimize my weaknesses. Going beyond my comfort zone in intervals will ensure success, which is why my ability to plan strategically and focus on the task at hand will help me in the future.

To go beyond my current skill set and station, I first need to focus on my education. A Master's Degree in public health will introduce me to core concepts, theories, and the big picture ideas I will need to become a critical and leading thinker in my field. Continuing education and professional development will always be a big part of my life, as I collaborate with other experts in related fields. As a leader, I will always be looking for new ideas I can apply to my work. I look forward to each new stage in my personal and professional development.