A leadership development plan depends upon knowing who one is as a person and building on the strengths, innate talents and gifts, and ideals that one possesses. It also depends upon educating oneself as to the leadership styles, behaviors, ethics, and responsibilities. This leadership development plan will discuss my aims, intentions and steps that I will take to become the type of leader I want to be.
Leadership Behavior

There are many different leadership models and styles. The Transactional leadership model focuses on identifying the incentives that will motivate followers and then offering those in exchange for something from the followers (Barbuto, 2005). The Transformational leadership model focuses on the role of the leader as facilitator of change among followers: the leader communicates to them a vision of what they should be seeking to become or achieve. The leader uses logic and reason to convey why the followers should change their routines or habits to achieve this vision. The leader motivates, inspires and supports by using social and emotional intelligence to drive the followers to the vision (Barbuto, 2005). The servant leadership model focuses on the leader putting the needs of the follower first and foremost. The leader identifies what the follower requires to fulfill his potential and then sets about making sure the follower has the requirement met. Servant leadership is a way for the leader to empower the follower and provide him with the tools to become self-motivated and a leader in his own right (Parris & Peachey, 2013).

The key to being a good leader is to be able to develop strong relationships with people and that can happen using almost any leadership style. However, every person should identify the qualities and gifts that make his or her leadership style his own—and for me I can see that my gifts and skills best align with the transformational leadership style. None of the leadership styles described above is exclusive of the other. Each can be integrated with the others to provide a synthetic model of leadership that allows the leader to achieve the flexibility required for obtaining a diverse array of followers. Building a coalition of trusting followers depends upon having the tools that each of these models presents to the leader. Thus, it will be in the leader’s best interests to understand each and see how they can be applied in any given situation. My plan is to develop my transformational leadership skills so that I can facilitate change among my followers and within my organization—change that allows us all to pursue the identified objective and achieve the goal we all desire.

Transformational Leadership

Communication, vision, understanding of the environment, cultural competency, and social and emotional intelligence are some of the main strategic variables leaders must possess to be influential as a transformational leader (Northouse, 2016). Transformational leaders are about promoting change. They have to give followers a good reason to buy into the change, however. That means they must explain it in rational terms so that the change appears as logical. People are logical and have the ability to reason. If they can see that the change is needed, they are more likely to accept it. As a transformational leader, I want to help people become their best selves. My leadership plan is to transform my followers into achieving the goal of our organization. I want to break down all barriers of resistance. As Armstrong (2011) points out, part of overcoming resistance is the practice of building trust.

People will trust their leader and the leader will trust them if there is transparency and honesty about what is going on. If people feel included in the change management process, they will be more inclined to accept it and to take ownership of it. If change is just forced on them without their consent or without even their ability to give feedback and to feel that their voice matters, it is going to meet with more resistance. To overcome resistance, a leader should strive to prevent it. A transformational leader must be able to supply logical, rational grounds for why a change is needed. People respond to logic. They may be emotional at first, but in the end logic wins out. So the leader has to have a logical explanation that holds up. Then the leader should invite feedback and make everyone feel that their opinion is important. This lets the followers know that they do matter and that even though the change will be hard the leader does not want it to be hard on them. Having a strategy of empathy is important to managing change.

Ethical Leadership

The leader is always going to lead by example: whether one is a transformational leader, a servant leader, a charismatic leader or an authentic leader. Everything the leader does will be observed and followers will model their own behavior on what they see with their own eyes. This is why bad leaders think that all they have to do is talk the talk and not walk the walk. They imagine that so long as they are saying the right words, they are being good leaders and that their actions do not matter. Followers will listen to what a leader has to say, but whether they actually follow depends upon whether the leader himself believes in what he says and conforms his own actions to the ideals and vision that he communicates. This is the essence of ethical leadership: a leader who lives according to the ethical principles that he preaches.

Ethics refer to the principles that help to clarify what is right and wrong in terms of how people or organizations behave (Holmes, 2007). A good ethical system or framework is important for an organization to do well because if a bad ethical framework is used, the decision makers will find that they can justify their actions by giving bad reasons for why they are doing bad things, which is what happened at Enron. An Ethical Egoism framework,...…people from all different backgrounds and of all different ethnicities. As a leader in a global society, my role is to embrace diversity and inclusivity and to make sure that all followers are welcomed and respected. I cannot allow prejudice or bias to creep into my own perspective or to allow it to exist within the organizational culture. To ensure that everyone is accepted and respected, I must promote a culture of respect and tolerance and promote cultural competency among all my followers.

I must also set the tone and example of what it means to become culturally competent by learning about other cultures myself. The more culturally competent I can become, the more informed I will be about how individuals from other backgrounds, other nations, and other cultures view the world. I will be able to understand their beliefs, their values, their attitudes and the cultural dimensions that have shaped their outlooks. Using the Hofstede model of cultural dimensions at Hofstede Insights website is one way to achieve this in short order. I will recommend to my followers that they all visit the website and spend a week getting to know another culture and then do it again the next week, again and again until all the cultures of the world have been examined and understood. This will help build the right culture of acceptance and respect for diversity that is needed in a global society.

Prioritizing My List of Personal Action Steps

My list of personal action steps in light of my present understanding of God’s plan for my life consists of the following:

1. Continue to pray for guidance and enlightenment every day and night so that I can be the best version of myself that I can be.

2. Continue to lead followers by using servant leadership and transformational leadership styles.

3. Continue to develop my social and emotional intelligence skills by watching how people interact and by reading more literature on psychology, social psychology, and the humanities, which contain a great deal of insight on human nature in general.

4. Make sure my family is getting enough attention. I want feedback from my family to see whether they feel they are being ignored or slighted by me as I focus on leadership in the workplace. If they feel slighted, I need to adjust my schedule and make more time for them because they need to come first.

5. I need to make sure my workplace culture is one that is culturally sensitive and open to diversity. I need to recommend that my followers focus on developing their own cultural competence.

6. Continue to focus on crossing all my “t’s” and dotting all my “I’s” as a leader and God will continue to show me the way forward. It is through His grace that I am in a position to lead and to empower others. Thus, so long as I stay true to Him, He will stay true to me.

References

Armstrong, A. (2011). 4 key strategies…