Referencing Styles : Chicago Assignment 1: Reflective Leadership Journal. This assignment aims to help students distinguish between a technical and an adaptive challenge. This assignment seeks to help students help themselves as that grow into sound leaders. It strives to help participants chart their leadership journey and to assess their current capabilities. What areas do we do well and what areas of leadership need further attention? What realisations have I reached along the way and what do we need to be prepared to do to develop engagement within my organisation and help others grow? Deliverables: Reflection based on evidence (submitted via the LMS). Carroll (2009, p43) summarises reflection as “the ability to think about the past, in the present for the future”. People commonly assert that the future is unwritten meaning that no one knows what the future is going to look like. Rather than being a glib statement, this is a profound truism that tells us that, while we may not be masters of our destiny, we are not victims of the past if we are able to learn its lessons. The key to learning these lessons stems from being able to reflect upon our experiences. The goals of this reflection assignment are to allow you to gain an understanding of: - the assumptions that drive your thinking; - the extent to which these assumptions drive actions within and between contexts; o the extent to which you are currently practicing the capabilities of sensemaking, relating, visioning and inventing in order to build organisational resilience and/or to deal with adaptive challenges. To this end, you are required to write: • a Hero and Zero narrative/blog – no word limit but we recommend about 1,000 words • Journal entries (no grade but forms evidence for the Reflection assignment) • a final reflection (2,500 words) (30%). I want to emphasis a few things: 1. The Hero/Zero moments is about what you did or did not do, not what someone else did or did not do; 2. The blog is data for you to reflect upon; learning to be reflexive is a key skill to develop in the work place as people will be telling you things about yourself. You have to decide how true or untrue they are. Hero/Zero: Length: (1,000 words in total);. Step 1: Prepare 2 lists. The first list is your Hero list. This list describes your hero moments. These hero moments are events in your past, personal, volunteer or professional, that happened as a result of you either performing an action (saying or doing something) that you should not have, or not performing an action that you should have. For each Hero moment write down: - the reason why you made the decision to act or not. - What you learnt from the moment. Re-write this list in chronological order. The second list is your Zero list. Again, write down negative (Zero moment) outcomes as a result of you either performing an action (saying or doing something) that you should not have, or not performing an action that you should have. Again write down why, at the time of the decision, you decided to perform or not perform the action. If you find yourself making statements like ‘I should have …” or “If only …”, you are going off-track. This is not an exercise in identifying what happened, it is an exercise in why it happened. For each Zero moment write down: - the reason why you made the decision to act or not. - What you learnt from the moment. Re-write this list in chronological order For example, an important organisational/departmental/team goal was not achieved because you decided not to ‘rock the boat’ (an act of omission). Why did you decide keep quiet? Table 1 gives other examples. Table 1:Examples of outcomes due to acts of commission or omission. Step 2: Merge both lists into a time line. 1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 Step 3: Determine if there are any links between the Hero and Zero moments. For example,: - having achieved a Hero moment, an attempt was made to perform the same actions except this time the result was a Zero moment. - Having experienced a Zero moment, you learned a valuable lesson which you applied next time round, leading to a Hero moment. Step 3: In a series of blogs, use concepts that are introduced in the course, through activities and readings, and apply them to your Hero and Zero moments in order to explain how they came about. If you wish you can also relate them to other instances in your professional/personal lives. The objective of this stage is to capture the complex human and organisational factors behind both types of experience. The best way to describe what is expected of this section is articulating what went on in your head and around you leading up to, and at the moment of, the occurrence. As we traverse the course, apply each tool that we discuss in class to determine the extent, if at all, it impacted on your Hero and Zero moments. Perhaps you subconsciously applied the tool but did not know it; perhaps you recognise how not applying the tool led to the Zero moment. What is important is that you make regular blogs about the tools and consider how they may be relevant to your Hero/Zero moment, or other experiences in your personal or professional lives. Reflection (30 marks): (2,5000 words) Due Teaching Week 6; Submit in Word Compatible format; fully referenced. Reflect upon your Hero and Zero CV and your blog entries to enhance your understanding of yourself. The goal of a reflection is to gain insight to the lessons of your experiences. This is the most important part of this assignment. There are three components to the Reflection: analysis, interpretation and Action. Analysis: You are expected to look back retrospectively at your Hero and Zero entries, other blog entries you may have made and your analysis of them using course concepts to draw conclusions about your understanding of what leadership, what it means to be a leader, your assessment of your leadership capabilties and how you might go about developing leadership capability in yourself and in others. Here are some starter questions to focus your analysis and reflection. Please note that these are trigger questions only and are intended to aid your reflection. Do not use these trigger questions as headings, or structure your paragraphs around each of them. - Did you have difficulty identifying Hero moments? Why? What does that say about what you know about yourself? Similarly for Zero moments. - Are there patterns in your Hero and Zero moments? What is(are) the common element(s)? Note you can make comparisons between Hero and Hero moment, Zero and Zero moments as well as between Hero and Zero moments. - Why are they common? - Did you learn anything about why your Hero moments occurred? That is do you understand enough about them to reproduce them mindfully? - What are the key assumptions that drive your actions as a leader? Why do you hold these assumptions? - Do you have a default approach to problems? - Did this affect your Hero/Zero moments? - To what extent do you practice the capabilities of the DLM? o Are you a good Sensemaker? What evidence do you have? o Are you good at Relating? What evidence do you have? o Are you good at Visioning? What evidence do you have? o Are you good at relating? What evidence do you have? o Why do you rate yourself this way? Do you think your peers and subordinates would rate you the same way? o Did you treat an adaptive challenge as a technical challenge? Why? - Can you see patterns playing out in other parts of your professional or personal life? - How effective have you been? - How might you be more effective in your positions (or even in life)? Interpretation: Having analysed your Hero/Zero moments, ask yourself what does this mean? Essentially, you are sensemaking your analysis. This answers the question of what have you learnt about yourself? This is a big picture perspective. You find contradictions; you may find hidden strengths or unknown weaknesses. Link these insights back to the capabilities of the DLM i.e. the extent and quality to which you practice these capabilities. Action: The last part is to inform action. Having gained an insight to yourself, - What have you done well and should continue to do? - What should you stop doing? Why? - What should you start doing? Why? In this last section, it is more than just 3 sentences. You must relate these actions back to the capabilities of the DLM.