My Personal Leadership Strengths and Skills

There are two parts to this assignment – the personal reflection and the scholarly analysis.

Part 1 – Personal Reflection

While there are over 60 strengths (executing, influencing, relationship building, strategic thinking, cognitive, courage, humanity, and so on), there are fewer categories of skills:  administrative skills, interpersonal skills, conceptual skills, technical skills.  Review this week’s material and draw from your personal and professional experience to refresh your memory of the strengths and skills that you have as a leader. The summary should describe the strength/skill, and how you have demonstrated that attribute.  While we want to focus on your strengths, we also want you to create a plan for improving one select weakness.  In your reflection, explain which weakness you want to address and how you plan to make improvements. 

Save this assignment to aid you in completing Week 8’s Final Project.

Part 2 – Scholarly Analysis

After you have completed Part 1 – Personal Reflection, conduct scholarly research and analysis. 

Using EBSCOhost, explore the leadership literature regarding strengths and skills.  Find five current (published within the past five years) articles that pertain to leadership strengths and skills.  As a suggestion, try to find information regarding: positive psychology; the Gallup leadership strengths research; StrengthsFinder or StrengthsQuest; Values in Action (VIA) Institute and  Inventory of Strengths; Centre of Applied Positive Psychology (CAPP) and the R2 Strengths Profiler Assessment.

Your task is to prepare an annotated bibliography of these five articles.  An annotated bibliography consists of the APA style citation of the article, a brief overview of the authors’ credentials, a summary of the article, and your notes about how this article is useful to your own Strengths, Skills, and Weaknesses reflected in Part 1 – Personal Reflection.  (i.e. how you intend to apply the information you gleaned).  You might compare and contrast the different questionnaires/inventories that assess strengths, or address how you would use these inventories with your own team.  Remember that our underlying objective is for you to become familiar with the current literature of the field (as a professional must do to keep abreast of current trends), and to apply what you have learned.