Discuss the personal characteristics of effective leaders

Based on the interviews you completed in Assessment 2, write a report that describes your interview experiences, summarizes your findings, and analyzes your interviewees’ personal characteristics as they align with effective leadership.

Introduction

The purpose of this assessment is to consolidate your experience interviewing two leaders and to incorporate what you have learned thus far about the personal characteristics of effective leaders. Your assessment will reflect your insights about integrity, purpose, change, interpersonal skills, and keeping balance (resilience), and will embody a meaningful leadership story at different levels of an organization’s leadership.

The resources in this assessment address the implications of new science for leadership. Much of the traditional literature on organizations has been based in Newtonian images of the world as a mechanical operation where the manager’s task is to control outcomes, determine truth, and make sure things are right. New science has challenged many of these underlying assumptions, changing the thinking about organization and the role of leaders. More emphasis is given to the importance of identity and evolving assumptions, such as the recognition of interconnectedness. The importance of relationship in providing the patterns of order and integrity is being recognized. Living systems are chaotic and constantly adapting, but out of the chaos a new order is created.

Through dialogue, deep listening, and facilitating, leaders help followers create new knowledge and understanding of system patterns that allow a value-guided organization to let go of old patterns and reemerge adapted to a new reality. There is more recognition of the “boundary-less” nature of adaptive systems to their environments and the importance of values, mission, purpose, relationship, and accessibility of leaders to the survival of their systems. Living systems will naturally respond and adapt to their environments, making the leader’s job much more one of empowering, encouraging relationship, and facilitating the conversation about adaptation.

In Assessment 2, you prepared to interview two leaders in organizations of your choice. You will need to complete the interviews before you begin this assessment. You will use the findings from your interviews in this assessment as well as Assessment 4.

Using your notes from your completed interviews, write a report that addresses the following elements:

• Thoroughly describe your interview experiences. Write the story of what happened from beginning to middle to end. Integrate into the story the names of the people you interviewed, their leadership level, and the focus of your interviews.
• Recap your interview questions.
• Summarize your findings from each question including the best stories and quotes in each interviewee’s words and some themes that seemed to pervade both interviews.
• Analyze your interviewees’ personal characteristics and describe their alignment to effective leadership.
• Explain the significance of the leadership characteristics you identified and how they apply to your own career progression.

Remember to edit and spell check your work before submitting it.

Competencies Measured